Yomi no Tsugai is one of those shows that’s just a 98 MPH fastball on the black. No trickery, nothing too avant-garde – just pure country hardball. It’s genuinely interesting, don’t get me wrong – smart and agile and edgy. You can’t win with just fastballs unless you have pinpoint control. But it’s like, Arakawa Hiromu and Andou Masahiro – and Bones – know how good they are. They know they don’t have to re-invent themselves in order to succeed, they just have to trust their stuff. And that gives them a huge margin for error every episode.

If helps that pretty much everything it does, Daemons of the Shadow Realm does well. We saw a lot of tonal variation this week and it all clicked. For starters it looked like it might be a breather episode, with Dera showing Yuru (and Right and Left) life in the big city. It was a good call by Dera for starters – he saw the lad was brooding over what happened at Casa Kagemori. And for someone like Yuru, Tokyo is obviously going to be an absolute wonderland. Trains, buses, boats, Skytree – it all builds to a visit to Joyful Honda (a real-life home center chain, so you know the check cleared).

I mean, Yuru could buy actual arrows if he really wanted – this is Tokyo. But I suppose it’s enough to teach him a few shortcuts in crafting them himself. There’s also the matter of underpants – sorry kid, Joyful Honda doesn’t sell fundoshi. And the clerk who could see Migi and Hidari (sometimes being sleep-deprived will do it, Dera says). And then the three people trailing them, which both man and boy detect without difficulty. There’s no panic here, even when they follow them towards Dera’s Tokyo safe house (and weapons den). He’s planning on abandoning it anyway, he says – but Dera has another reason not to be concerned.

Back at the (Kagemori) ranch, Asa is savoring her photo memories – and editing Dera out of them. This would prove rather nettlesome to the family, but she denies all knowledge of it. The interrogation of the surviving invaders continues, but shifts from torture to using the daemons belonging to Kuroya Fuyuki (Fujii Hayato). His “Blacklist” partners can extract information (and lots of it) on any daemon wielder by reading their daemons (or ex-daemons). The two zaku on the hot seat are confirmed to be just that, zaku. They have no knowledge of who was being the failed attack, so Gonzou spares them and offers them work, even agreeing to pay the medical expenses of the woman’s mother.

All this – again – feels very yakuza. Gonzou is no samaritan, he’s just not a sociopath. These two represent no threat and they could be marginally useful as cannon fodder, but make no mistake – he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill them (or anyone) if he saw an advantage in it. The most interesting information Fuyuki (incidentally, all of the Kagemori muscle seems to be named “Kuroya” – a branch family?) extracts is that the assailants entered the mansion via the West Gate. That’s interesting because the Kagemori compound has no West Gate.

So who were the three who followed Dera and Yuru? It’s possible Asuma sent them – we know he was keeping tabs. But it’s also possible that whoever is responsible for the raid on the villa sent them, or another party as yet completely unknown to us. Dera’s “house” is a run-down shack, but it’s very well-stocked when it comes to implements of destruction. It also has other uses, as we’re about to find out. The trio of tails isn’t planning on confronting Dera now that they’ve found his hideout but he doesn’t give them the choice. Two of them go down in the initial skirmish and eventually all three wind up in a misty world that’s clearly on a different plane than our own.

This “Lost House” is a very cool concept, in addition to being a useful defense mechanism. And Lost House has claimed its share of Kagemori spies already, it seems. The still-standing member of the trio is going to have no choice but to come clean about who sent them it seems, but then Tenaga-Ashinaga (“Long-arm and Long-leg”) arrive on the scene and make sure that doesn’t happen. They and Hidari-Migi know each other – and those two make it clear that the humans would have no chance against them in a fight. That makes Tenaga and Ashinaga pretty formidable – and certainly implies that whoever their master is, they’re a force to be reckoned with.