Not enough time for a review? ZA WARUDO!
… For those of you who don’t speak meme, we’re going to be talking about a show centered around the supernatural power of stopping time. As the title indicates, this one is Kokkoku, sometimes with a subtitle as Kokkoku: Moment by Moment.
Kokkoku stars Juri Yukawa. 22 years old and failing to make a place for herself in the world, but doing a fair bit better than the rest of her messed-up down-on-their-luck family which consists of gaming addict elder brother Tsubasa, hard working single-mother sister Sanae, their mom who we never see, out-of-work father Takafumi, and the two members of the family who seem to have sense on Juri’s level: her nephew Makoto and her grandfather.
Another miserable day for the Yukawa household gets even worse when Tsubasa and Makoto are kidnapped as the former picks up the latter from school and held for an impossible ransom. With a short deadline and desperation prompting frantic action, Grandpa chooses this moment to reveal the family’s secret power, Stasis. Using a special ritual and a magic rock, Grandpa is able to stop time for all the world except himself, Juri, and Takafumi so that they can go rescue their kidnapped relations.
Now, more picky people than I have poked hole after hole in the very idea of “Time Stop”. The show briefly lampshades this with Takafumi asking about things like friction, breathing, and so on… but grandpa doesn’t know so just take the premise. It’s magic anyway, it’s not like there has to be a scientific explanation for magic. Rules here seem to be that the non-stopped can operate normally, including being able to move and modify stopped things, though those things will not operate under physics (stopped) again when the time stop user ceases to act upon them.
There are also more… esoteric rules, as a strange phantom seems to start to manifest when Juri considers gutting the kidnappers like fish, only to fade when a frantic grandpa talks her down from it. Before they can escape with their family members, though, some goons show up, moving in the same Stasis despite the fact that, to Grandpa’s knowledge, this should have been impossible. During the resulting scuffle, Grandpa shows off that he can short-range teleport while in Stasis, and one of the goons threatens the stopped Makoto with death.
This prompts that figure to manifest again, now very clear and solid to everyone but the goon doing the threatening. Known either as the Herald or the Handler, this tree-like eldritch abomination makes short work of the goon.
Grandpa’s knowledge of these beings is thus: they are the punishment that will come for those who transgress the rules of the Stasis. They protect people who have been stalled, but won’t do anything for those moving around. There are presumably other rules, but grandpa doesn’t know all of them, so the figure will be something of a constant threat.
In the end, Grandpa and Juri end up escaping the confrontation, while the rest of the Yukawas are left behind. Takafumi is taken by the baddies, but Makoto and Tsubasa are just abandoned, seeing as they’re stopped. Except Tsubasa isn’t – after the goon was killed, the spirit that was inside him (like those we saw enter the family when they invoked the ritual) invisibly entered Tsubasa, waking him up in the stasis. Thus, he takes the stopped Makoto without understanding what’s going on, to be a spanner in the works for everyone else.
Speaking of those baddies, they seem to be an odd mix. The bottom of the food chain seems to be a bunch of cultists from the dystopically named Genuine Love Society, which worships the Stasis power and the Herald. The cult leader, however, seems less dogmatic and more pragmatic and has made some sort of arrangement with organized crime to use the power for evil should they gain uncontested control of it. There’s also a woman named Shoko Majima, who seems to have special knowledge of Stasis, even having experienced it before, working with the cultists and criminals but seemingly unaligned.
After they flee, Grandpa and Juri hatch a plan to split up, get the ritual stone, and then work to get Takafumi back so they can unpause and repause, hopefully with no more bad guys. However, the bad guys are a step ahead (as grandpa realizes too late, inspecting the Genuine Love Society’s lair), and the thug contingent catches Juri after stalking her home. They try to murder her (with some of the goons getting real excited about rape prospects, so you know they’re the lowest scum) but choose strangling to avoid leaving too much evidence and it’s not actually that easy to get someone honest-to-Haruhi dead via manual choking.
The near death experience, however, causes Juri to gain or unlock a special power of her own, as she manifests the ability to literally punch the blue “you can move in Stasis” jellyfish ghosts out of people, turning them into Stalled. She does this to several of her assailants, at first in an extra scary mode with dead white eyes, and then steals the stone back and escapes them. Majima seems to recognize this power, and also gives the proper name of “Specter” for the time-stop ghosties
In response to this, the bad guys sacrifice another of their criminal “allies” to the Herald by telling him to execute one of the stalled for having messed up, just to observe that the tree demon appears to be shrinking each time it manifests, meaning that there are a limited number of times it can show up and execute them, and possibly even a limited amount of subjective time that it can exist for before giving them free rein.
However, once again the Specter from the slain individual escapes. It goes and finds Makoto, waking the kid up as well.
After going on a counter-offensive and stopping several goons, Juri and Grandpa discover that Tsubasa at least has become active, thanks to the whole death-in-stasis aspect. Also, it’s revealed that Juri has been in Stasis before, as a child when Grandpa tried to convince her to let go of her dying pet dog by giving her some alone-time without time. In that Stasis, she first exhibited her Specter expelling ability (almost knocking out Grandpa), and apparently also met some other girl strongly implied to be Majima.
Meanwhile, the cult baddie group spends some time raking Takafumi across the coals with a good-cop bad-cop routine seemingly intended to get him on their side in order to have the spell and stone offered up. Eventually, Juri and Grandpa reach and rescue him, though he’s not exactly happy about the “save”
The group of baddies including Majima have one of their number have a total meltdown and get axed by the Herald because of it, but this time the Herald also collapses, seemingly dead. As its body crumbles to dust, a wizened human mummy (or at least the head and core organs) is found at its core, suggesting that the thing was, or things are, formerly human. Majima, seeming to know a lot about this, insists it’s the fate of those who give themselves over to remain in Stasis forever, a fate that Grandpa suggested in episode 1 eventually befalls many users and that Majima said happened to her family right before her eyes.
We launch fully into Majima’s backstory. Due to having a “cool rock” suspiciously similar to the ritual stones, her family was caught in the Stasis that Grandpa cast for Juri and her dog. The father of the family quickly decided that this was the afterlife and resigned himself to it, sparking his transformation. The mother followed, too mentally weak to withstand this weirdness, and the little brother in deep grief as he lost his mom. Majima alone seemed to have some mental fortitude, though by the time she ran into Juri (who freaked out and saved her accidentally by knocking the Specter out of her) she was fading fast. Thus, in the present, she wants Juri to save her heraldized family by knocking them back out of Stasis, if such a thing is possible. For this, she gets the loyalty of one of the hired goons who sees her as the saner answer than the cult. It might have something to do with the cultists getting even more of their own killed testing now how many Heralds are lurking about.
At least for those on the verge, it seems to be. After offing a stalking cultist who tried to kill him Tsubasa gets… out of sorts, and is found by Juri and company. As he starts to fully transform, Juri knocks the specter out of him, returning him to Stalled status and also cancelling his transformation into one of the Heralds.
That just leaves Makoto, out on his own after Tsubasa got him to run from the earlier mentioned assailant. He’s found by Majima and her henchman, the latter of which is still not the nicest sort even if Majima and Juri each do want to talk to the other. Thus, Majima decides to go the thug route to extort Juri’s compliance. They work together pretty easily despite this, with Juri agreeing to try to save what’s left of Majima’s family. However, she finds that she can’t summon the Handlers easily, since she doesn’t actually want to kill an innocent person. However, one does arrive when Takafumi starts acting like a greedy ass and talking about how he’d like to know the rules to better abuse Stasis in the future.
Juri gives it what for to save her horrible dad.
It takes quite some doing, but the monster is brought down and the withered remains of Majima’s family are retrieved from the ashes.
So, this should be it, right? All Yukawa family members are accounted for, the fallen members of the Majima family have been put to rest, with the brother actually emerging alive, and the Yukawas have the stone tucked away safe, so they should be able to just cancel Stasis and abandon the remaining cultists to their fate, right?
This was the halfway point. As the hired goon who turned to help Majima explains, there are seven cult-aligned individuals left: four cultists, another generic hired thug, the spy/wiretapper who set up surveillance on the Yukawas, and the dangerously shrewd and Stasis-obsessed cult leader, Sagawa.
Thus we get the pitch for the next arc: Juri intends to kick all the seven remaining enemies out of Stasis (one is dealt with very quickly), then cancel the spell, and finally shatter the Master Stone to prevent Stasis from ever being used again. This might be exceptionally important as if Majima’s family was the last to turn, there might be no more Handlers to protect the stalled.
Sagawa, meanwhile, wants to be an observer of the stalled world for eternity, or at least a few thousand subjective human lifetimes, appointing the wiretapper to take over the cult and close the door behind him. One of the cultists overhears this plan, however, and of course they see personal use of Stasis as an affront to their religion.
One of the baddies even manages to find where the Yukawas hid the stone, so that will at least be a rub in the plan. Sagawa explains more about how the cult founder seems to have used the time powers to live for over five centuries, likely becoming some sort of esoteric being, and how he means to do much the same. He quickly has to explain as much to his disappointed cult, who call him on it and initially decline to hand over the stone, and in fact seems to begin his metamorphosis right in front of them.
He offs most of his remaining minions in order to test his new powers, leaving only the wiretapper alive. He then goes about his business, intending to draw out and defeat the Yukawas to have sole control of Stasis. He also kind of transforms into the Hulk.
In this new state he has strength and senses far beyond those of normals. As one engagement against him fails, he and his minion manage to get a cut on grandpa and harvest some of his blood, intending to use it to forcibly evict him from Stasis in order to take teleportation out of the equation.
Against this threat. Juri rushes to the stone, and unable to see another way, ends up smashing it and destroying its core, turning herself into the only way out of Stasis. Meanwhile, one of the goons who was left for dead has an existential crisis, prompting his transformation into a Herald. This Herald ends up going after Takafumi, which causes Makoto to sprout an ability of his own: Commanding Heralds! When the two of them meet Juri and gang (with the addition of Sagawa’s last minion, who switched sides), Takafumi claims that the ability is his, and Makoto plays along. This gives them a new weapon to possibly deploy against Sagawa.
They do, and while the ruse is up with regards to who has the control ability, the put the hurt on Sagawa. He fights back, and both Handler and Superhuman are reduced to zombie-like states. Juri pursues Sagawa. He tries to tempt her to his side with the sob story of his life and promises that he and he alone can teach her how to master Specter power and exit Stasis, but Juri has none of it. She hits him a couple times with expel attempts, which don’t get him in one but do weaken him. As both she and grandpa hesitate to go for the kill with a box cutter, Takafumi does something right for the first and last time and charges in with a sword to do the deed. Not that it makes him more sane or a better person for it, but at least there was an attempt.
Sagawa reduces himself to a flying brain and cloud of dust to escape, and becomes a chrysalis in the streets, with nearly invisible threads spreading from him that are razor-sharp (costing Takafumi his fingers, for which he’s stalled and manually hauled to the hospital). The gang tries to navigate around this for a bit before realizing the threads are spirit energy, and leeching nutrients from the surroundings with which Sagawa is trying to regenerate. Juri finds she can bust the threads with her power, and gets up to Sagawa’s core to put him out, again. She blasts the cocoon despite an attempt to project past regrets and make her think they’re the same (which she admits they are).
But another form drops out… Sagawa reduced to a seemingly normal baby. With a decision to show the infant in a state off birth mercy, with the reasoning that the Specter probably only kept Sagawa alive based on his genetic information so his memories should be gone, that seems to be the end of the threat… but Juri still has no return ticket.
We say goodbye to the extras as Grandpa and Juri stay behind to raise Sagawa until he’s developed enough to probably not be badly hurt by the shock Juri’s specter expulsion causes. After a bit, Juri sends Grandpa on his way, and continues the task of motherhood alone, living in the stalled world and caring for this infant that grows on her ever more, until she finally realizes that it’s time to say good-bye there too, while she still has the mental fortitude to do it.
Around forty (subjective) days later, she starts to break. Ennui, boredom, and depression sink in as she tries to avail herself of “her” stopped world
Rage follows. She decides to go on a long trip, and see lively places, but she can’t quite shake her depression… at least until she sees something that isn’t stopped, the phantasmal image of some azure being. If the Specters are like jellyfish, this is,, more fully formed, like an eel or an oarfish. Shortly thereafter, he own metamorphosis begins. But it’s neither quite like the standard Handler shift (at least after a brief interruption) or Sagawa’s, as she becomes a sort of dusty wraith, seeking a light she can see in the distance, that she hopes to reach before melting away entirely.
This takes to a moment we saw at the very start of the show, far away from where anything else took place, where a blonde woman seemed to glimpse Stasis. Only now we see Juri’s remnant reaching out to that stalled woman, and touching her with the glare of blue that’s used for supernatural effects. This restores Juri to her human body… and pulls the blonde woman into Stasis, where she seems to know all about it.
This woman, it turns out, is a strange immortal, and the true founder of Stasis, while the founder of the cult and creator of the stones was her husband, who lived alongside her for those ages seeking a way to be like her until his will wavered and little by little he couldn’t hold on to time. For her, control over Stasis is “as easy as breathing” so she sends Juri back to the mortal world after they talk for a bit, with contact info so they can meet up in real time.
With no phone or money, Juri has a long walk back home, at the end of which she finds her family waiting for her return. Thus the show ends, with the credits showing us that everybody who made it seemed to come out better for it, the family looking happy (and perhaps a bit better off; blondie did mention that one could profit off of the use of Stasis, so maybe she helped out a bit) and the Sagawa-child happily adopted with Juri as “mom”.
So, thoughts on Kokkoku.
This is a show that could have gone wrong in about a zillion ways and about a zillion places, and to an extent almost does. It feels like twelve episodes is a bit long for its story, like maybe it would have been more comfortable in ten. But then at times it’s so loaded with plot details that I’m not sure it isn’t rushing, so I’ll let it go on the macro pace.
In terms of smaller-level pacing, I think there’s a bit too much time where the show tries to sustain showing us very little other than what amounts to harsh gang violence. It’s sort of first half nothing but action, second half nothing but talking. Neither of those are hard-line, but that’s the perception it creates. A show that begins with tense hostage situations, bloody fights, and a tree monster squashing a guy’s head ends with long shots of a lonely girl in a world where nothing moves, slowly losing her mind while being confronted with the esoteric and existential problems of her existence. If it were more woven, like maybe Grandpa had and could deploy a couple more answers early on or if Sagawa had revealed some of his philosophy to the audience earlier, either way to get the thinky part of the brain triggered early, the show would have come off a little better.
The show’s single biggest “sin” is probably in the ending, and I mean the very end where Juri returns home and everything is happy after finding a minimally presaged blonde lady. We only had a meaningless few seconds at the very start of episode one to claim that this deus ex machina was “set up”. There were no clues nor a situation that would lead you to believe that anything like what transpires in the last few minutes was possible in this world.
Not every story needs to have a happy ending, and with the tone Kokkoku set up where things were… pretty harsh, legitimate humor was scarce (they brought out the “silly” music whenever Takafumi wanted to be a badass head of household, but he was more a reprehensible clown than a funny clown), and we’d gotten a whole lot of philosophical talk in the Sagawa arc… with all that, I would have accepted it if Juri had lost her humanity, becoming some sort of Herald or Time Lord (maybe leave it ambiguous how much of “her” is left) with a final montage of the moving world moving on without her. Maybe imply she’s still watching over them somehow. We’d still saved a lot of people who meant a lot to people we care about, including unexpected wins like Majima’s brother and the Sagawa baby, we could have lost Juri and still come off as bittersweet like Ergo Proxy rather than pure bitter like Texhnolyze.
At the same time, she is the main character, and more than that she’s a character I came to really understand and like over the run of Kokkoku, so I guess it’s probably better off not leaving her for esoteric dead, even if it did take an almost fully classical deus ex machina to do it.
Speaking of Juri as a character, this show did essentially belong entirely to her. Majima, Sagawa, and Grandpa had their moments, but almost all the focus is on Juri. And as I mentioned just before, I like Juri. It’s a nice note that she has this ruthless edge to her. She’s still a good person, and wants to take better paths where she can, but she also has the determination to do bad things if that’s what it takes to achieve a greater good. She clearly doesn’t want to kill, but in our first glimpse of a Herald it nearly comes for her because, hey, these are punks who tortured and threatened to kill her brother and nephew. She’s not swayed by Sagawa’s sob story or “Join me” speech and still expels him hard, even following up when the first hit doesn’t do it in an almost automatic way, because she knows that as long as Sagawa still exists (at least as Sagawa) he’s the same kind of person and he won’t just let her and her family go. She has a deep distaste for stealing, but she gets herself used to it when that’s all she can do to survive. But at the same time, she is a caring person. Her power returns people to the real world, it doesn’t kill them (usually), she empathizes deeply with Majima, and she ultimately cares for and even adopts Sagawa when he’s reduced to an infant with his memories and enmity destroyed. She’s a good person with powerful conviction that she puts into action rather than moralizing and whining on the moral high-ground high-horse, and that’s really satisfying and rare to see.
If the other characters could carry even a fraction of the weight Juri does, and the exposition and action were better woven, this show easily could have been one of the greats.
As it is, I still enjoyed Kokkoku. It’s a flawed product, and I can see why it’s not really heavily talked about given that it doesn’t look like all that much special and puts a very generic foot forward of harsh action scene after harsh action scene, but all the same it is absolutely worth your time. There’s an oft-quoted rule that if you’re delving into a totally unknown show as a fresh watcher and you’re uncertain, you should give it three episodes to show its colors. Sadly, that would be rather harsh on Kokkoku as it didn’t really seem to be doing much with its ideas or visuals in three episodes only to really bloom later on.
I’m glad I stuck with it, and for that it gets a B out of me.