So, I think Tsukumogami are a sort of interesting subject. Surprising probably no one, in addition to anime itself I kind of have an interest in the culture and folklore of various regions, including Japan. For those who might not be aware, a Tsukumogami is a sort of supernatural being (usually a sort termed a Yokai, but not always) that is, in essence, the spirit of an artificial item.
There are a few stories traditionally related to their creation, such as items that are well cared for over the course of many years becoming benevolent household spirits; items that are thrown away or treated unfairly animating with a grudge; or simply in some cases possibly just creature/item hybrids that the artist behind some period picture scroll thought were entertaining. In any case, the culture behind them is something deeply pervasive and foreign to most westerners… but not alien. The idea of holding a little ceremony to ease the pain of a once-reliable piece of kit that broke or wore out is not something that would occur to most Americans, but at the same time many would tend to feel a twinge of guilt disposing of that thing, even if the new one is much better, so perhaps the underlying emotions aren’t so different.
In any case, the core concept of Tsukumogami is simple: they’re supernatural beings that are also man-made objects and were in fact the objects first. It’s a broad and varied category that clearly allows a lot of opportunity for creativity, given again the old picture scrolls that would parade countless household objects as critters.
But I’m not doing a folklore panel today. As the title indicates, I’m reviewing Tsugumomo, a supernatural action ecchi harem affair (a rather common mouthful of traits) where the supernatural element is an interpretation of the Tsukumogami myth. On with the show!
Tsugumomo stars Kazuya Kagami, introduced as your typical generic middle-school boy. He takes good care of his late mother’s Obi (kimono sash) and keeps it with him because it makes him feel safe. This turns out to be more literal than he would have thought, as when he gets attacked by an evil animate wig (and then the wig’s host, under its control), the Obi reveals its humanoid Tsukumogami form, a sharp-tongued little lady who goes by Kiriha.
Kiriha, while annoyed that Kazuya doesn’t remember her (though he does seem to see her in dreams that strongly imply their past), does protect him from the evil wig, showing off her various strip-of-cloth themed supernatural powers and fighting moves. She also explains that in this setting there is a type of Tsukumogami called an amasogi, which is animated by intemperate or negative feelings rather than years of care and refinement, and is pretty much a hostile entity that, along with the human whose feelings spawned it, will do bad things with this supernatural power, driven by their wish in blind madness. This is basically our setup for standard foes, so it’s best to introduce it right away. The titular Tsugumomo, by contrast, are the traditional “Many years pass and an object gains a soul” type.
Kiriha sticks around in a manifested sense, pretty much acting as the new and self-important self-invited guest in Kazuya’s home, where thankfully he only has to deal with his rather weird and thus easily misled big sister. This mostly leads to the comedy side of the show, with her making various demands or interacting in miscellaneous domestic situations, like the classic “Walked in on in the bath” (she takes it well. I guess we got our required slapstick in the first minute after the OP when we had an accidental boob grab, panty shot, and subsequent brutal smackdown), the classic coveted pudding, or the slightly less classic “It’s okay to share a bed because we did it all the time when I was in sash form”.
On the whole, the comedy in this show goes blue a little more than average, but a lot of it is otherwise going to be very familiar.
Speaking of familiar, I mentioned the opening ecchi comedy salvo? The victim/abuser in that was Chisato Chikaishi. She’s the class rep, with all the stern seriousness about schoolwork, glasses, and braids that implies. She’s also the childhood friend archetype, doing double duty. She and Kazuya get trapped in the library for the monster of the week, with Kiriha showing up despite Kazuya’s best efforts to leave the volatile loon at home in order to help what turns out to be the library itself animating to ship the two humans involved, per Chisato’s not very well hidden desire. We also get our longer running plot thread as we’re told about malison, energy that’s omnipresent but in high densities causes supernatural mayhem. And the local density is all out of whack, giving rise to various Amasogi.
They then end up meeting the local god, Kukuri, by way of her busty crow shrine maiden Kokuyou. Said deity can’t control the malison normally, but it is noted that Kazuya seems to be a beacon for it, so he’s asked to take up the call and fight the monsters it produces until the situation can be solved, which infuriates and frightens Kiriha so much she’d rather fight a god than accept the quest. As they’re getting beat hard, Kazuya has a vision of a mysterious lady (aka his dead mom) who tells him how to handle things, insisting both that he get strong so Kiriha won’t have to protect him as much, and that there’s an out to win against Kukuri.
It goes pretty well, getting the better of Kukuri by having Kazuya wield Kiriha and unite their power, but plot hooks aren’t dodged so easily so they’re forced into surrender in the end. Despite these impressive moves, once Kiriha starts training Kazuya in earnest, he has to start from rank amateur.
We then move into monster of the week territory. An amasogi sketchbook lets the TTRPG club summon real monsters. A Gal Game amasogi makes reality play by its rules, turning school into a literal dating sim. That one actually ends with it strongly implied that Kazuya earning Chisato’s ending to keep her out of the clutches of the sleazeball of the episode may have gotten him an h-scene, including it going… a little dark. Kukuri, her fortunes rather down after her shrine got wrecked fighting Kiriha, has to borrow money from a weird lolicon goddess. It’s… uncomfortable, victimizing Kukuri and Kiriha who are stuck in grade-school-esque forms thanks to being low on power.
This is followed by an episode where the first half is actually fairly clever slice of life humor, done in a style that emphasizes the childishness of the child-like characters and relies on largely nonverbal communication. The second half has the class clown/perv become super-popular thanks to a cologne with amasogi powers, which ends up all over Kazuya, earning him the attentions of all the ladies in the house (which recall includes two in very young child forms and his sister, leaving the crow and class rep as sane) and an essentially directly implied happy ending that’s ended seconds short of being an implied H-scene again, since it is explicitly the case that the girls intended as much.
This show rides a very fine line. Oddly enough, the scenes that sound like they’re pretty intense on the ecchi, and the supremely uncomfortable ecchi, aren’t as uncomfortable to watch as you’d think. The camera has basically no thirst to it, making this sort of the opposite of Vividred Operation – there, nothing was technically uncomfortable in the goings on but the cinematography was trying to convince you of it. Here, things are technically getting pretty dang bad, but the cinematography is trying to convince you that’s not the case.
And then just when you think you have the show figured out, it turns around. First there’s an episode with an actually threatening Amasogi founded in the lingering regrets of a girl who committed suicide and her grieving little sister.
Then a redhead from out of town, Sunao, who looked up to Kazuya’s mom shows up and challenges him to a duel for the job, with her own tragic backstory and reasons why this is important to her. Her arrival leads to an actual emotional bonding scene between Kazuya and Kiriha (not that it doesn’t go blue in places), the restoration of Kiriha’s larger form (though not the adult form we see in flashbacks of mom), and a proper supernatural battle setup.
The battle gets fairly good, with tactics and magic on display, and even has a solid emotional grounding with Sunao wanting to prove herself and Kazuya taking umbrage at how she treats her Tsukumogami partner (rather harshly, as a tool). Kazuya, of course, manages to win and season 1 plays us out with the followup. In it, Kazuya is temporarily unable to move under his own power thanks to the drain of using an ultimate fusion technique. It is strongly implied that Kiriha takes advantage of this to have her way with him, a prospect which mom’s ghost more or less told him was okay but that he still offers at least some verbal resistance to. Take that as you will, but since the regard for her is all smiles in the end the emotions do more support the funny read.
And we then set up for next season, as it’s revealed that Sunao’s loss cost her more than she might have liked: with a defeat on her record from a duel that she herself initiated, she can’t inherit her family’s top position or swordplay school as she was meant to, and the only ways to rectify this are to kill Kazuya, which is discarded as an untenable solution under the circumstances… or she can marry him. This leads to a very funny fakeout where the class gets a new transfer student. The pervy friend speculates his wish that it be a cute girl with large tracts of land (which, while not relative to some characters, would fit Sunao), but instead of Sunao as you might expect, the transfer student is Kiriha.
The second season, Tsugu Tsugumomo, starts with Kiriha leading all the friends in the know (the pervy guy, a bespectacled manga club member, the girl whose sister committed suicide, Class Rep, and the Student Council President) to form the Troubleshooters’ Office as a school club, which they hope will help them track down Amasogi and hopefully resolve them without having to resort to punching them out, as is tested with a monster of the week (which has to be punched and then peacefully resolved, so we still get a starter fight)
Along with more info about mom (evidently she was possessed by an amasogi and Kiriha had to be the one to actually kill her – events that Kazuya’s memories regarding are slowly slipping back, strongly implied to be a very bad thing), Sunao does return, and she and Kazuya get forced into an over-the-top Nisekoi scenario by her psychotic overbearing mother, who tries to get them to consummate a future marriage on the first day she’s meeting Kazuya. She’s incredibly insistent to the point of violence, while meanwhile the kids actually have pretty good chemistry, with Sunao slipping into the tsundere role. For once, it’s not actually implied that Kazuya gets an H-scene: they fake it and get caught in the lie, much to the horror of both kids.
We follow this with a monster of the week episode involving a pair of girls from the track team. Except when all seems to be resolved, we see the presence of a mysterious dude and the Amasogi of the episode surges with power, forcing Kiriha and Kazuya to do a fusion (bad because it could unseal more sealed memories) to stop it.
After another monster of the week (the teacher’s pillow trapping people in dreams), we follow up somewhat on Sunao. Her partner has been repaired from damages inflicted in the end of season 1 duel, but isn’t waking up properly, drifting in a state near death. There’s a mystic spot where revival should be possible, but it’s dangerous for a normal human to go there, thus prompting the currently powerless Sunao to conscript her not-quite-fiancee for an escort quest. Sure enough, help is needed, as the sacred site draws out hostile manifestations of the fading Tsukumogami’s doubt, and Kazuya needs to fight them off until Sunao can reach the point of understanding and connecting enough to awaken her partner and dispatch their final boss.
The next episode introduces our plot for the remainder of the season. Recall the brief glimpses of someone manipulating the amasogi? That turns out to be a group of individuals, currently as students, associated with Mayoiga, the lost village – in practical terms, a village of masterless Tsukumogami, which in this setting would normally degenerate.
Now, as an aside, Mayoiga (also rendered in other ways, such as Mayohiga) is a little slice of Japanese folklore that shows up in a lot of media, possibly because its definition is fairly protean. What’s generally true is that it’s an abandoned village (at least abandoned by humans) or sometimes just a house or mansion, that has some sort of mystical properties. The most common version claims that good-hearted people who the place appears to, when lost, can or will attain some sort of fortunate trinket from their visit.
Aside through, what’s Team Mayoiga’s story? Well, after coming to the house/village in the wake of long abuses (It’s a village inside a house Tsukumogami in this) they find it’s the paradise for their kind. After staying there some time, they learn how it’s maintained – the tsukumogami that created and is Mayoiga killed the region’s god who refused to offer them aid and shelter as she was supposed to and took from that victory a “Shard”, said to be crystallized malison (which recall is power, not evil on its own) that provided the magical energy to maintain the place, as long as he kept himself in mummified meditation. But the shard is waning and Mayoiga will soon die if its residents don’t hunt down and kill another god for a fresh shard. Hence why these characters are wandering around outside their village and doing evil things. On the advice of a fairly mysterious outsider, a black Obi called Azami, they’re targeting Kukuri, working to weaken and eventually kill her.
The regular Mayoiga Tsukumogami then get drawn in with Kazuya and Kiriha, who they were supposed to avoid according to Azami, through a couple of comedy filler Amasogi. Their investigation the the situation is interrupted when an impatient kill-team from Mayoiga comes to take out Kukuri before the time is right.
That lot get slaughtered, the only survivor being a flute stuck in item form until and unless Kazuya can attune to her and restore her power, but their loss forces Mayoiga to reassess the situation. The founder awakens from his torpor, and promises to lead the final assault. Kukuri is able to take him, but to do so she has to remove a barrier she cast some time ago that was consuming much of her power. This allows Azami to attack. She goes for the Mayoiga founder, slaughtering him in a surprise attack and taking his shard to restore… Kazuya’s mom, implanting the shard into her body. Seeing her in the flesh also restores Kazuya’s memories, with a little help from Kukuri now that things are desperate. It turns out Azami is an asmasogi that Kazuya himself created, and that she (and thus he) is also responsible for his mother’s possession.
Thus, Kazuya has to destroy Azami and re-kill the undead husk of his mother. And he has to do it himself, because Azami’s goal is apparently his death and the backlash from someone else doing the killing would not only obliterate Kazuya but likely cause obscene collateral damage. Naturally, Kazuya doesn’t take that he’s got to kill his own mother (or at least her zombie) well.
At least others (including Sunao, helping with her unfinished business) can help the fight, even of Kazuya has to deal the finishing blow.
Well, in theory Kazuya has to deal the final blow, but that doesn’t get a chance to happen. Mom beats down most of the helpers, kills Kukuri (claiming her shard), and when Kazuya fights, Kiriha sacrifices herself and is cut to tatters, obliterated. Kazuya’s big sister, who had been a tiny comedy side piece until this point, comes in and esoterically sacrifices herself as well, promising to buy Kazuya a three-year deferment of this disaster, a chance to become strong enough to take said otherwise unbeatable boss (possible due to her unpresaged tsukumogami partner being an hourglass).
This is the last episode. There is no cheeky escape or final note reveal. Kukuri is stone dead. Kiriha is reduced to a pile of shredded cloth, a state that everything we’ve been told means she’s as dead as dead can be and isn’t coming back. Big sis is trapped in a time stop for the next three years, which is a countdown until Kazuya will have to face this again. He gets the full news explained to him, seeing as he passed out at the end there, with all deaths formally confirmed. His only hope is that he’s to be sent off to exorcist training school for the next three years in order to hopefully get him strong enough to deal with his god-killing zombie mother – a task he goes to with new resolve, mourning the lost and determined to see his mission through.
The end.
So, naturally, I have a few notes regarding Tsugumomo.
Let’s talk about violence and other forms of torment in comedy. There’s a saying that comedy is a factor of pain and distance: for something to be funny, someone has to be in pain, but at the same time you need to not relate to that pain overly much. There are other forms of comedy, like surrealist humor, but I do think that’s the most common formula, and it’s at its most transparent when it comes to slapstick.
The thing is, the distance is important. One thing about the dealers of slapstick damage is that you can’t count their acts too much against them, because the fundamental idea is that the damage isn’t real. Think of a classic western cartoon, like Tom & Jerry: characters get sliced, diced, mashed, and so on, but they’re always fine the next scene, so you can’t really read the characters doing it as blood-hungry psychopaths.
For example in Tsugumomo, there’s a joke in the episode where Kazuya meets Sunao’s family that her dad doesn’t approve, but every time he tries to interfere, Sunao’s mom butchers him. This often has quite a lot of blood and implications of a massively mangled body. But he’s always fine in the next scene when he’s trying to attack again, so clearly he’s not being killed, and I don’t think you can use this as evidence that the marriage in question is abusive. It’s not real. Similarly, when Sunao’s mom confirms that her daughter is lying about how far she’s going with Kazuya, the two are shown to a torture chamber with many horrific tools, and it’s strongly implied they’ll be subjected to at least some of those. In the next scene they seem… tired, at worst. It’s not fully real.
And this is also critical in the case of Kiriha’s behavior. Kiriha hits Kazuya. A lot. She usually goes for the crotch, too. I’m pretty sure Kazuya wouldn’t be able to have his implied H-scenes throughout the show if she were really delivering forceful blows to the family jewels as she is literally depicted doing. It’s not real. It’s slapstick humor.
And some people, I am aware, are not going to be okay with slapstick humor. They’ll take the events depicted seriously and regard the characters as abusive or psychotic. Different folks have different lines on this. For my part, I’m inclined to take it as the exaggeration for laughs that I believe it was meant as. I read Kiriha’s outbursts as “She has a temper” not “She is literally delivering what should be debilitating blows on a regular basis” and this lines up with the reactions we see in more serious scenes where they clearly have a strong bond with a positive regard.
I mention this because I feel like it’s important to know what lens the material is being viewed through. If you are particularly sensitive, Tsugumomo isn’t going to be for you, because you will quickly despise one of the leading characters and her relationships, not to mention a whole lot of other moments.
For my part, though… I kind of like Kiriha? She has some personality difference in the awkward middle of season 1 when she’s in kid form. Not a lot, but she does act more childish there… which oddly makes her other facets harder to stomach. When she’s in her normal form, she and Kazuya have a real dynamism to them. If you want to take everything seriously, there are a lot of questions and probably a lot of problems, but if you look at the emotions they express rather than the literal deeds it paints a charming if still somewhat dysfunctional picture. Kazuya likes Kiriha. She makes him feel safe, and he has a bond of affection towards her. However, he as trouble dealing with the fact that she’s forceful and prone to acting out. Kiriha likes Kazuya. Even leaving aside her pervy, teasing aspect and the concept of lust, she’s quite protective of him and has a deep-seated duty, one that she was explicitly willing to gamble her life for. However, she hides her earnest emotions beneath a flippant visage and hair-trigger tempestuous temper. They play off each other rather well, even if a lot of it has Kazuya suffering. I think Sunao probably had the better romantic chemistry, but that’s another point and not germane to the review.
But this does sort of bring me around the the weirdest thing about Tsugumomo: the tone. A large chunk of this show is… very silly. Like, early acts of Omamori Himari ecchi bullcrud combined with rather unthreatening Amasogi. There are darker bits, like the opening and the bit with the girl who committed suicide, but it still felt very safe. And then once Mayoiga is on scene, the show catapults itself into an abyss of loss and suffering worthy of the last episodes of Ga-Rei-Zero without the bittersweet resolution. It’s jarring, but not necessarily in a bad way. Sure this goes from goofing around with a horny scarf and bizarre monsters for petty schoolkid wishes to mayhem and murder courtesy of zombie mom, but it always did have the undercurrent that allows it to turn into this tale of supernatural corruption and bitter magical warfare.
Similarly, while this series has a lot of fanservice setups and a deep and abiding willingness to go blue in its humor as well as going for slapstick (see the number of implied H-scenes I mentioned, and remember there are more than that), the series is actually bizarrely clean in a lot of senses. The camera and framing tends to have almost no spice to it, reinforcing that those scenes are being played for comedy rather than truly for titillation. As much as characters, even good-looking ones like Sunao, end up naked in this show, there’s a palpable undercurrent that it’s because somebody finds humor in people being naked. This makes the physical apparent age of Kukuri for the majority of the show and Kiriha for the middle passage of season 1 easier to swallow. There are, legitimately, a lot of sex jokes in this show involving characters that range from kinda young to troublingly youthful, but I’ve felt way worse about shows that technically commit far less. Like the main tone, the fanservice tone can seem schizophrenic when described like that, but is actually surprisingly smooth.
The one place where I feel like I can unilaterally praise Tsugumomo rather than just explaining it is the superpower action. The animation looks good enough to sell it and the choreography is excellent, certainly far better than shows like Omamori Himari, Venus Versus Virus, or even Isuca. I don’t know if this got a weirdly high budget or if the source material was somehow better quality when it comes to fighting, but it at least stands above its most obvious peers… even if its obvious peers are shows I’ve kind of picked on and thus maybe not the highest metric. Point being, the action is good.
Other elements I can be less one-sided about. I’ve already talked in abstract regarding the comedy, and suffice to say it’s hit or miss. The dramatic arcs, like Sunao’s introduction or the final arc with the Mayoiga crew, have a surprisingly strong control of their emotional beats, but still have an uphill battle establishing themselves because they have to course-change quickly.
The characters are probably the weakest part. I liked Kiriha and Sunao. Kukuri was okay and Kazuya was fair as protagonists go, nothing special. Everybody else had only a single note or didn’t get enough time to really spread their wings and leave an impact, because they’re side characters. I actually think the pervy friend might have gotten the best study thanks to one episode where he gets a girl accepting his confession that was meant for someone else, and he swallows his desire and clears up the misunderstanding even though he really wanted a girlfriend, because he didn’t want things to be founded on lies. It’s a surprisingly earnest and sweet little scene out of a character who is mostly there for one joke.
On the whole, Tsugumomo is a show I’m torn on. It does some things right, and the things it does wrong it covers for pretty well. At the same time, it does have plenty of faults and I think if I were a casual viewer I would have tapped out in the comedy arc in the middle of the first season rather than getting to the cooler stuff.
In the end, I’ll give Tsugumomo a C. Provided you’re willing to give it its whole run, it is worth watching… but I won’t be recommending it terribly strongly.