That was much more like it. I found last week’s episode of Yomi no Tsugai to be a bit of a clunker, more in the “pretty good” category than this show’s usual standard. The intrigue, back-stabbing, and comedy are more appealing than the battles with YnT – even with Bones animating the latter. We get plenty of all those here, along with a healthy dose of exposition which filled in some of the missing puzzle pieces. Though by no means all of them, which makes sense as this is surely just the first of what will be multiple anime seasons
A major milestone opens the episode, as we get our first real look at the twins’ parents. It’s a flashback of their initial escape from the village, and while it’s a big deal to see them in the flesh, the reason it’s here is to show us Dad showing Asa how to use smoke signals. That will play a major role later in the episode. As for the parents, they’re more or less as you’d expect. Mine is clueless about the real world, Nagisa out of touch after 15 years absent. They fight off a couple of village thugs sent to bring them back but what happens to them after than is not revealed. Though we got a clue last week as to what their eventual fate might have been.
The other headline of the episode is that Asama is, in fact, not truly allied with Shingou. He’s playing a long con and his allegiance is with the Kagemori. There’s a complicated family history behind that involving his mother, but the bottom line is that it always seemed a little too obvious that Asama was what he said he was. So this doesn’t come as a total surprise. The endgame is to reveal the depth of Shingou’s transgressions against the family – which seem to be driven by material greed more than anything – so Gonzou has a pretext to eliminate him.
Dera knew this – because Jin clued him in before this clash in the warehouse district. When Dera and the bandit arrive to try and rescue Yuru – having overheard a Shingou minion being ordered to go check on him after Raijin fried his phone and used the bandits daemons to zombify him – Asama uses the chaos as a pretext to have Yozakura spirit Yuru away to a “safe place”. Yozakura can in fact speak, and has been pretending to be mute and witless as a means of lowering Shingou’s guard around him. It should also be noted that Yozakura and both the bandit’s tsugai are played by Murase Ayumu, who’s now voicing no less than 17 daemons (or pairs of daemons) in total.
Meanwhile, fake Asa has managed to reach out to her other half, fake Danji. Another seiyuu note – zashiki-warashi Danji is played by Tersawa Momoka, so we finally have our literal Mao connection as she’s also playing Ootoya (and Rei in Otouto-domo and Kaoru in Dara-san – she’s this season’s “it boya” for sure). Danji is with the pug and his daemons and they decide to ask Yuru for help – using smoke signals. He receives the message, but now Yuru has a choice. Ivan is strongly suspected of having killed his parents or at least knowing where they are. Do he and Dera (who’s left his bandit “partner” in the lurch) go after Ivan, or help fake-Asa and the other child hostage?
I assumed Yuru would choose the compassionate path, but the preview strongly hints that he chose to go after Ivan. In the meantime though the real Asa has also gotten the smoke message and she heads over to “rescue” the hostages herself. This is pretty complicated – we’ve already seen that Asa has no regard whatsoever for the lives of the villagers, and she certainly despises her imposter self for deceiving her beloved brother. Plus she’s kind of a psycho if we’re honest. Having Asa go really dark against Zashiki-Asa would be a shocking development (I don’t think even she would harm the village child), but I wouldn’t totally put it past her.
