The world has been saturated with Isekai for so long that it’s hard to remember sometimes that there are other genres that are or were nearly as overused. Some are up and coming like the Modern Dungeon setting with Video Game powers, which has had one of its core pillars adapted fairly recently. Others are old, and kind of fallen out of favor. I have a weird affection for the Battle School sort of genre even if they had a lot of copy-paste, but the Masquerade Supernatural Battler is also up there for action setups that have been around the block a few times. I’ve reviewed no few of them over the life of this blog, and Kemono Jihen… is another?
Kemono Jihen is a supernatural action show that takes place in a modern world where all sorts of ghouls and youkai (in this show generally called Kemono) live in secret. In it, we focus on Inugami, who is something of a paranormal detective as well as a tanuki, and the kids in his employ.
In particular, we tend to focus on one kid, the halfbreed Kabane, child of a human and an immortal demon, possessing much of the powers of the latter so that he can regenerate from basically anything. The first episode is dedicated to cutting him from his life in a small village where he’s the abused stepchild of an innkeeper (who actually hired Inugami to kill Kabane, thinking he was the cause of a supernatural incident).
The other two members of Inugami’s team are the prickly spider-boy Shiki (like Kabane, a halfbreed), and the incredibly girly Akira, whose nature isn’t outed for a little bit. They initially onboard Kabane dealing with a monster of the week, and then we get into more plot as we meet some other recurring characters: Yoko Inari, a kitsune who has the Tokyo police force in her supernatural thrall, and her henchgirl kitsune Kon, who frankly comes off as pretty abused and brainwashed.
They’re introduced when Yoko hatches a scheme to steal a relic Kabane’s parents left him, called a Life Stone. Kabane’s Life Stone enables him to live without turning into a monster or experiencing supernatural hunger, and Yoko wants it because she hopes to mass produce its like and free Kemono from having to live in measured symbiosis with humans. She makes a good attempt at stealing the stone and putting Kabane out of the picture, but she leaves delivering his severed head to Kon and she loses the head to the other two kids, letting them knock her down for the count and escape. It turns out Inugami was a step ahead too, as the stone that was stolen was a fake.
This leads to Kon stalking the team, obsessed with completing her mission to retrieve Kabane’s head (without a single thought as to why, because that’s just what a “good girl” for Yoko does), but seems pretty easily defused by pointing out that anything ill-mannered would disappoint Yoko. Essentially, she kind of ends up a floating extra team member, not really part of Inugami’s circle but present enough on the fringes to be a recurring character.
We get up to some monster of the week mischief, with Akira learning to overcome his fears to an extent and unleash power (He’s a once-in-a-hundred-years male Yuki-onna type. Well, once other than a missing twin brother) and Kon flitting in and out of the group with some actual tsundere chemistry with Kabane once the whole head thing gets called off and Kon seemingly replaced in a heartbeat. I guess it helps that they’re both utterly clueless.
We also introduce Mihai, a vampire associate of Inugami, who sets the kids to messing around with some very dangerous brain-sucking mosquito women. This is neither really here nor there but gives Shiki a little “overcoming his fears” moment and Kabane a bit of a power-up.
Once that monster of the week or two is finished, we launch into a sequence that’s all about Shiki. In it, we meet his uncle and find out that said uncle is a mad scientist who killed his father and used his kemono mother as a lab rat, making countless spider-monster abominations by forcibly impregnating her with various samples in an effort to re-create a local legend about a spider with miraculous golden silk.
While mad uncle and most of his hybrids have to be fought off, one of them is essentially just like Shiki rather than being a horrible twisted abomination. This little sister is Aya, who as a bonus has been keeping her and Shiki’s mother safe in a cocoon of healing silk (since she was the successful experiment). Once mad scientist uncle is dispatched (and ultimately cleaned up by Inari’s new henchman), Aya kind of joins the party. Like Kon she’s not technically in Inugami’s employ, but we’ll see plenty of her going forward.
This is at least in part because she decides to get a little precocious crush on Kabane, which causes Kon to experience jealousy before she even understands what that is.
The sequence here is followed up with one for Akira, where his long-lost brother comes to town! Except said twin isn’t exactly well, mentally speaking, and has obtained an artifact analogous to the Lifestone that grants him incredible fearsome powers, called the Nullstone.
It turns out that their backstory is that brother was the early bloomer of the two and was invested with the duties of the chief, which seemed to include both some normal behaviors and what would be expected of the only male per hundred years. To spare Akira a fate of being used and abused, brother struck a deal, which involved Akira being able to leave, but found later he was essentially betrayed, resulting in a fight with the village.
Akira’s brother takes charge of him, quite forcefully, being both doting and controlling to the point of locking Akira up. Naturally, the gang comes to the rescue, but that Nullstone makes things rough. Thus, the arc ends up taking up the remainder of the season, ultimately having bro fought into submission and the Nullstone and Lifestone fused into a new plot trinket
The season ends with a barrage of hooks going forward – a journey across Japan with Inugami, Kabane, and Kon (who has been tasked to basically seduce Kabane and convince him to give up the fused stone peacefully, a task she’s very conflicted over) to seek out the other stones of other Kemono groups and through their bearers information about Kabane’s parents.
But, all of that has yet to be filmed, if it ever will be. What do we have right now?
Honestly, Kemono Jihen is so bog-standard that it’s hard to determine what to say about it. The action is nice, the characters are fine for the most part but annoying at times, and it’s about half monster of the week with second half actual plots that are more “monster of 2-3 weeks” than anything related to a main quest.
The show does, I suppose, have a clear theme of family, and sells it with all of its core lines as well as some of its grace notes, but in terms of quality that doesn’t really distinct it. The world is forgettable, the setups are forgettable, the overpowered main character… is way better handled than it often is, I will give the show that. Kabane can’t die and will regenerate from any damage, but that doesn’t actually translate to success in his endeavors for free and usually means he has to end up in a bad state. Thanks to fighting alongside Inari’s flame-wielding minion against Akira’s brother, for instance, he ended the battle as a flaming skull.
But that alone is little more than a blip on the radar. I guess most of the elements are above standard. Inugami is a very basic guide who stays hands off enough to let the kid main characters have agency even when it doesn’t make sense, Shiki and Akira are Mr. Negative and Mr. Positive with just a little grating aspect to give them character, and while Kabane’s dense nature can be annoying to watch at times he also plays off Kon and Shiki really well.
In the end, Kemono Jihen is a C+ from me, but it’s also going right down the memory hole.