For the record, I was going to make this a “Season Finale” post whether we got an announcement or not. I’m glad we did, but it was a formality – Yomi no Tsugai is a near-kaijuu and will almost certainly receive a full adaptation. Eventually. A S2 announcement tells us nothing about timing of course, and it’s going to be a while. The anime used 31 of the manga’s current 57 chapters, but Arakawa-sensei is pretty reliable about the monthly releases. In theory they could go into production as soon as next year but given how far this story seems to be from anything resembling a conclusion arc, I suspect they’ll wait a good while longer.
This is a very good series, make no mistake about it. Arakawa Hiromu is a master storyteller and Bones is the cream of the crop in terms of production. Not to mention Andou Masahiro has a resume which speaks for itself. But I do have issues with it, and with the finale as well. They mainly involve the Kagemori and those working for them. They’re problematic for me, Gabu especially but even as a concept. Not that they exist, but in the way they’re treated by the writing.
Hikaru (real name) is probably the most interesting among that group. Certainly the most decent among that family. But he’s derided and belittled for that decency, and you get the feeling Arakawa agrees with that. Which is, you know, kind of disturbing. He comes off as naive, maybe, but only because he was born into a family of gangsters. This is a common trope in fiction and in life, where people who live the way the Kagemori do use their own immorality as a self-fulfilling justification for further immorality. If they have no choice about being sociopaths, it’s because they’ve chosen to live as sociopaths.
Gabu is the most obvious example in some ways, but far from unique. She behaves as though her supposed self-awareness of being scum makes it OK for her to be scum. She’s a discordant, disruptive character and not in a good way. “Reality sucks”? OK, a lot of the time. So that means being a serial murderer is OK? The biggest problem I had with this episode – and it’s a big one – is the false equivalency Arawaka created between the Kagemori and the Tadera team. These two are not equivalent in any way, sorry. Dera and Hana are not like the Kagemori. They’re choosing to defy their own “side” out of respect for a greater principle they both (correctly) believe in.
What really grates is how blatantly this equivalency was the aim of the episode, right down to mirrored dialogue. And how Gabu’s laughable soliloquy was set up as something profound. There’s no equivalency between Yoru and Asa either, neither as people or characters. She’s just annoying as hell even when she’s not broconning, and has none of Yoru’s moral compass or inherent sense of perspective. Asa deserves better than the cards she’s been dealt in life, no question. But twins though they may be, peas in a pod these two are not.
Against this backdrop I think Arakawa’s major theme of betrayal – and how it relates to children, adults, and daemons – is spot-on. Bun-Bun might well ask “Why do humans betray each other?” because it’s what drives most of what happens in the story. Mostly, they do it for power – something the children and the tsugai generally care about far less than the adult humans. If Hana and Dera are trustworthy – and I had my doubts about Hikaru for a while, but I’m pretty convinced he is too – it’s because they don’t care about power. They aren’t saints by any stretch – they’re flawed people. But by the main metric Daemons of the Shadow Realm uses to measure someone, they pass muster.
Let’s be clear, too, about Aki and what his arc says about the Kagemori. The reason his “family” is so aghast is not that he killed people – including innocent bystanders. It’s that he betrayed their sense of loyalty. That tracks very much with the crime family motif. Everyone crying crocodile tears about Aki now is perfectly fine with ripping parents in half in front of their children and kidnapping and murdering people of the streets. Why? Because they’re “them”, not “us”. My main worry here as a critic is that I’m not sure at this point the series has a problem with that.
At this point Nishi Village is being set up as the big bad. Gonzou notes that their village should have been destroyed, submerged by a reservoir. Whether the Higashi people know they’re still active is unclear – a new figure referred to as “President” (Urayama Jin) is moving to consolidate power among that group, who are increasingly convinced (correctly) Dera has betrayed them. But honestly, my attitude is fuck the lot of them. Nishi Village, cultists, mafioso – they’re all dirtbags. They’re effectively all the same, it’s only a matter of degree.
Uncertainty over just what the writer thinks about all this is certainly interesting, and some positions she seems to take in this closing arc of S1 are mutually exclusive. Arakawa is good enough that even when she loses me she’s still interesting, and for long chunks of this series she doesn’t lose me. The premise here remains highly compelling and brilliantly realized. What Yomi no Tsugai does well it does very well, and there’s a lot of it. I’m very much looking forward to the second season whenever it happens.
Andy L.
September 20, 2026 at 12:28 pmTheir shedding tears over the gardener Akio killed had echoes of the phantom troupe for me.
Arakawa has such immense talent for humanizing nearly every character who isn’t strictly a brownshirt(and even some who seem like they are) and the way they can rankle w their contraditions and hypocrisy makes the work more challenging in an interesting way, these sprawling cabals of weirdos w…let’s say unconventional morality that the series and anime in particular take such care and time to let us spend time with. Takes me right back to ole’ 03 FMA; it wouldn’t work so well if we didn’t get to see so much of these characters’ caring for and just hanging together in between all the messy stuff and establishing everything just so. Yomi no Tsugai ftmfw.
I think Yuru correctly deciding he can’t fuck w the Kagemori and gabu in particular is a good sign.
Guardian Enzo
September 20, 2026 at 12:50 pmIn some ways I get the Phantom Troupe comparison. But there’s very much a distinction as to how the Kagemori and the Spiders are presented by the author. Togashi absolutely realizes he’s created something very cool here, and he relishes that. But he makes it clear where they stand on the moral spectrum of the story, even in a story full of curiously amoral characters.
Sonicsenryaku
September 20, 2026 at 4:56 pmOnce the Yakuza parallel became clear with the Kagemoris, I guess it shouldn’t have been be all that surprising that the story could potentially stumble into making the false equivalency of the Kagemoris morality with more amoral/morally ambiguous factions, especially given the historical trend of Japanese media to sometimes portraying Yakuza as being sympathetic, morally gray/misunderstood groups, a behavior that is perhaps due to their economic and political relevance within the country’s history. But hey, maybe that’s not what Arakawa was actually doing here; perhaps her point was simply that the Kagemoris BELIEVE that their violence is just, in a similar way that the Tadera clan believed that that certain virtues where worth obtaining at the cost of doing some uncomfortable things. While Dera and Hana no longer agree with making those compromises to push their virtues, the Tadera clan as a whole still do, which was perhaps the point of the equivocation
Now I actually haven’t watched this finale myself, but if the context for my devil’s advocation doesn’t exist and your read, Enzo, is accurately tapping into the implications of the writing, then that’s a bit disappointing, as I did truly feel for some time, even with how, let’s say, challenging, the writing was around characters like Gabby, that at the very least the storytelling was doing a solid job not trying to equivocate the violence and moral shortcomings of the Kagemoris to that of those who demonstrate actual respectable worldview despite their past.
While I don’t think it’s a writing failure to portray a group as believing they’re morally correct in enacting harsh justice, even though they’re not any better; even though I think it’s fine for a story (and author) to be ambiguous as to what its moral stance is on certain subject matter, the logical and philosophical foundations for the actions its characters take need to at least be somewhat congruent with reality for this to be pulled off properly, and up until this false equivalency (if it is indeed the case that’s what Arakawa is doing), Tsugai was threading this needle fairly okay, even with some of its contentious moments.
I guess I just need to watch this finale myself and determine the best I can whether Arakawa is fumbling the bag, or if she’s just trying portray a violent world that just IS: one were the factions trying to navigate it are simply pursuing what they think is right and are willing to compromises whatever they think is necessary to achieve it. Yuru then, serves as the antithesis to that outlook, one that screams: “Fuck that self-aggrandizing nonsense, you all can go to hell.”
Guardian Enzo
September 20, 2026 at 5:01 pmYou said it yourself – you need to watch the finale and make up your mind on it then. I’ll be very curious to hear what you think. I can say that my view of what Arakawa was trying to say with the Kagemori changed with this episode, and not for the better (my view, not her statement).