Well, we’re at the end of October, and as much as I’d love to lead the armies of Halloween to reclaim calendar territory from the Christmas occupation forces no doubt already sighted all over the place, such an effort is quite beyond me. Thus, it’s best to wrap up the spooky season with a few more choice ghouls and ghosts. The ones seen in Mieruko-chan will do just fine.
Mieruko-chan is a show with a very simple premise. A girl, Miko Yotsuya, suddenly gains the ability to see ghosts. The things she sees are horrifying – they’re some of the most delightfully gribbly and twisted J-horror specters this side of a Junji Ito manga. Miko, however, finds that if the spooks think she can’t see them, they won’t come after her the same way they don’t make a habit of interfering with the bulk of the unseeing masses, and thus she comes up with a survival strategy: ignore the awfulness as much as she can.
This is complicated by several factors, but the first and most persistent of which is that Miko’s best friend, Hana, has a powerful spiritual aura that acts as a beacon for ye liveliest awfulness, and while many of the weaker horrors seem to be harmed by it, the strong ones could hurt Hana even without her awareness of their existence.. Thus, Miko has to work to keep an oblivious Hana out of spectral trouble without alerting the trouble that she’s aware of it.
This show is mostly a slice-of-life comedy, really. It looks like horror in the best ways, but it plays out like humor. This shows, somewhat, in the fact that the show largely adapts only the first three volumes of the manga. Three is a pretty small number of volumes for Manga to Anime transitioning, but they both keep all the vignettes (meaning there’s plenty of material) and don’t have a lot of page-burning active scenes that go by at seconds to the chapter. In that run time we do get a meaningful main arc, as well as character arcs, but it does mean that there’s only so deep into the material that the adaptation currently goes.
So, early on we have Miko, adapting to the constant terror that is her life now, and trying to deal with Hana and the things that are capable of haunting her, using a variety of little tricks to redirect her friend around unseen menaces and attempt to shake anything that seems to catch their scent.
One of these early vignettes gives me an opportunity to talk about something a lot of people do in reference to this anime: the fanservice. Hana is notably busty, and this gets a breast-obsessed ghost (looking like a noodle person with empty eyes, a corpse grimace, and a black aura around all their all-too-winding-and-grabby bits) to cling to her. It never speaks intelligibly (most of the ghosts utter a few stock phrases or else awful black speech, if anything) but for the viewer at least it seems to know what it’s squeezing onto… especially when it jumps to the even better endowed school nurse.
This is the most direct case of something that is in the show to the tune of some complaints, the fanservice. And I’m just going to come out and say… I don’t think it’s that bad. Maybe it’s because I’ve watched a lot of anime, and seen shows, even shows that don’t really have the typical themes for it, go with much heavier ecchi and get away with it. Maybe it’s because this time at least I’m familiar with the manga, and feel like the level of fanservice that’s actually in most of the show (the groper ghost being a major outlier) serves the material well, including the fact that this is a comedy as much as it is a horror piece and thus shouldn’t mind soaking up the occasional boob joke when it’s well executed.
In the show as a whole, there are a few setups regarding Hana’s breasts. No others as overbearing as the groping ghost, but they’re there: Hana eats a ton (more meals than a Hobbit, I’d say) and it goes two places: her chest and her spirit aura, which is drained by malign assaults and refills when Hana stuffs her face. Basic humor tied in to a fair aspect of the setting and character. There are also occasionally shots where the camera seems to have a thirst for one of the girls, most particularly Miko. It’s true that we probably don’t need quite this many low angle looks at her legs, but… have you see fellow horror-ish comedy-ish school-ish show Rosario + Vampire? Comparing the constant barrage of panties with the occasional appreciation of Miko’s thighs is comparing lightning to a lightning bug. You don’t even have to go that far: Dusk Maiden of Amnesia has a similar genre makeup, if with a heavy romance side that Mieruko-chan lacks, and goes a lot harder while still being a quite excellent show.
Which in turn gives me a segue that if the fanservice were heavier (it’s not) I don’t think that would necessarily ruin or even be ill-fit for Mieruko-chan if it were executed well. Fear, Humor, and Arousal are all sort of interrelated on a deep level. They’re not the same, but there’s more overlap than you would think, and the fear is in the middle of the chain. All three are “hot” or “active” emotions, representing states of activity and agitation. Humor and Horror both depend strongly on timing (and romance has time, place, and mood to mind in its own ways as well), while fear and arousal have very similar responses from the human body. Pay attention, get the blood pumping, release the snap decision hormones. Because of this, blends of these three seemingly disparate genres can work incredibly well if you know how to manage the overlap or how and when to shift gears.
Anyway, pretentious genre babble done with, summary of the show continuing.
At one point, trying to throw off a particularly nasty looking spirit that’s following her and Hana, Miko stops at the shop of an old psychic conwoman known as the Godmother, hoping to buy some effective prayer beads. The Godmother may make her money by cheating rubes, but she’s the real deal, and while her sight isn’t quite on Miko’s level, she can still tell what the two girls are like and that something is really there to bother them. After a first set of prayer beads breaks from the mystical strain, she pulls out a secret weapon set loaded with real power… which also snaps apart as it comes into conflict with the evil presence (which eventually gives up and leaves the girls alone). The experience convinces the Godmother to want to go straight, and also to retire.
This is important because a classmate of Miko and Hana, Yulia, has a viable sixth sense and regarded herself as the Godmother’s apprentice. The way she hears the story, she comes to believe that Miko is an unbelievably powerful spiritualist, seeing her as either a potential mentor, a potential rival, or a little of both. However, while Yulia can see her share of spooks and specters, the larger and more terrible ones she’s as blind to as anyone else, which causes a couple disturbances as she tries to test Miko’s power and has no idea about the bigger fish that’s been drawn in.
There is also a vignette wherein Miko and Hana find a stray cat and try to find a good home for it. A handsome young man and a very scary looking thug of a dude both approach the girls, but Miko can see more: the handsome man is swarmed with dark spirits of suffering animals (among others), while the guy who looks like a thug is attended by the only two really pure and beautiful spirits we see in this show, the loving ghosts of cats past. Thus, Miko uses her sight to make the choice on who should take in the little guy.
Later, however, the man with the entourage of evil spirits, Zen, becomes the substitute teacher for Miko and Hana’s class. But, more on that after resolving the other earlier incident that really kicks off the plot.
That bit begins when Hana rescues a lost dog from a haunted building on her own. Successful though she is, something truly evil follows her out… and it keeps following her, using Hana’s aura to cook lesser spirits and consuming them, draining Hana and growing ever more twisted and powerful in the process. Desperate to stop this before things get any worse, Miko looks up the way to a supposedly potent shrine where she and Hana can go, and prays for Hana’s safety.
Something answers. A pair of gribbly yet gold-aura bearing attendants of the shrine appear. They conflict with the monstrous spirit, and when it seems they aren’t a match for it as-is, something that could be guessed to be either the shrine’s god or a somehow related or pretending entity appears, a giant fox monster with the same gold aura as the attendents. It tears the evil spirit apart and devours it, and then says something to Miko: “Three times”
After that, the Shrine Attendants begin to appear when Miko is in real trouble. First, when one of Yulia’s tests earns the aggression of a particularly wicked spirit that takes the form of a cluster of arms emerging from a giant oil drum, the shrine spirits unexpectedly come and put it down. Before leaving, they hold up a sign of “one” to Miko. Later in the show, she’s resting in the park and waves to a child, only for the child to reveal it’s a deceptive evil spirit and rush Miko, attacking her. The Shrine spirits once again appear and strike down whatever would dare harm Miko, and this time show her “two”. She intuits that the three times means that she’ll be protected from evil like that three times, and that with two of those protections spent, she’d better be careful.
That groundwork done, we can address the arc with Zen-sensei and the ghosts that haunt him. With him in class, the spookiness is very thick, and this has the previously observed passively draining effect on Hana. Yulia, who can see auras as well as spirits (unlike Miko) can confirm the effects but that doesn’t let Miko know what to do about it. What’s more, the most terrible ghost attending Zen is a twisted feminine abomination whose litany of madness is “Don’t look at him!”, so doing things too directly might provoke the spirit.
Still, Miko ends up following Zen at one point. She discovers him approaching a stray cat in an alley and, fearing that he’s an animal abuser, she rushes in to save the poor thing. In disagreement that results, the cat gets free of Miko’s arms and runs into the street. Zen, acting quickly, dives to save it and gets into a traffic accident for his trouble. This forces Miko to reassess what she thought she knew about Zen, and while he’s in the hospital she gets some answers from a long-time friend of Zen.
It seem Zen’s mother was horrifically controlling and emotionally abusive, to the point where she once killed a cat he was trying to take care of in order to keep him on a shorter leash. The stories about her seem to put an identity to the large spirit haunting Zen. As to the tormented cat spirits, it seems there really is a serial animal abuser in the neighborhood, and Zen has been trying to take him down, but has only found dead and dying cats that might be clinging to him due to the general spiritual malaise. He’s evidently made a habit of rescuing cats before, even though he always has his friend re-home them as he feels that, while he loves them, he can’t take care of anything himself.
The truth known, that Zen is a victim rather than a culprit, Miko makes her decision. She has a good talk with her teacher… and then directly addresses the ghost of his mother, insisting she let him go. This predictably enrages the ghost, who pursues Miko as she flees the room. Also predictably, the Shrine spirits show up to perform their third save – the fact Miko was banking on to free Zen and protect Hana in one go. It seems to work, as the other tormented spirits leave Zen and he makes it out of the hospital in a better emotional place, able to tell off his weird neighbor, take in a cat of his own that he can care for… and hunt down and presumably murder the real cat killer, so maybe he’s still a little dark.
Well, on Miko’s side, she and Hana seem to be safe, or at least as safe as they were before Zen came to school, now. In our epilogue, Miko thinks about returning to the shrine to give thanks, but also has a horrifying dream about the spirits and their god, suggesting that they might not be nice. Meanwhile, the picture Hana took while the two were there is sent to the retired Godmother, which causes her to express shock and heralds the fact that she might be getting back into the story.
So, on the whole, how does Mieruko-chan hold up?
Normally, when I review a show for which I’m familiar with the manga, I try to keep the comparison out of it as much as I can, but in this case I think it highlights why you’d watch Mieruko-chan. These spook designs are amazing when they’re still and in black and white on a page. In moving color, they reach the next level creepy. All the scares in the horror side of this horror/slice of life/comedy affair are made much more pointed and powerful by the shift in medium, and when the adaptation is otherwise quite faithful, I think that if you’re already a fan who’s on the fence about picking up the show form, it’s an easy recommendation.
If, on the other hand, you know nothing of Mieruko-chan outside this review (and possibly others) I’d say it’s a visual treat for the horror fan in you, pasted over a core that’s perfectly serviceable. Mieruko-chan isn’t much “under the hood”. At least in the material that makes up the show there’s no really great underlying ideas or high-flying concepts. The characters are fine to spend time with, but aside from poor terrified Miko also have the comedy archetypes they like to stay in: Hana is the bubbly idiot, Yulia the rival who misunderstands things. That’s what they do. It’s part of the work’s odd genre blending. Horror-comedy affairs are common enough, but Mieruko-chan does the blend in a different way than normal. I think it’s well-represented by its intro: a bright, colorful piece set to an upbeat, pop-ish song… except the song’s about being scared and incorporates terrified screaming lyrics into the music while still somehow sounding more chipper than anything. Sounds weird? So too, to an extent, is the experience of Mieruko-chan
In the end, I give the show a B+. There are a few vignettes that are memorable and lean towards doing more than bouncing between gags and ghosts, placing it above the pleasant standard it normally hovers at. If you haven’t seen it yet (and aren’t just pretending), check it out.