It’s still October and the relative low quantity of horror anime be damned, I’m doing all spooky shows for it this year! Well, we’ve seen ghosts, vampires, and… weird Victorian soot faeries, guess we might as well give werewolves a shot as well.
Okamikakushi is a show that kind of looks like a game of Werewolf: you’re in a town, there are wolves, and it seems like somebody gets murdered every night under the perpetually-full and always blood-red moon while by day we try to solve the mystery.
In some ways, though, the traditional pattern is placed in reverse.
We start with what’s obviously a flash-forward as a girl we don’t know confesses her love to a boy we don’t know. This is scary because there’s a red moon out, the boy seems to be terrified of the girl, and the girl gets glowing red eyes when she gets into explaining her feelings. Then, some shadowy monsters (with particularly tragic animation) and a scythe-wielding… um… being appear and end up chasing both the girl and the boy, with the scythe-wielder challenging the girl’s convictions and seemingly attacking her as we cut to the real start of the show.
That features the boy (our main character), Hiroshi, who is moving to the town of Jora with his father and wheelchair-bound little sister. Almost immediately, he runs into the girl, Isuzu, who chooses to greet him with a pouncing hug. So I guess we can cross off that big confession being a surprise.
We are five minutes in to the first episode and it is already very possible to tell what this show’s biggest problem is. It’s the directing. Or, specifically, how someone in the directorial and/or art staff was deeply in love with weird shots and especially blur or afterimage effects. Dutch angles are everywhere as well, with the majority of shots in this show being at some sort of slant. Typically, you use that kind of angle if a scene is supposed to be weird or unsettling, which in a horror setting would normally be frequently enough, but Okamikakushi is determined to tilt the world even in scenes that are otherwise normal and grounded. Story and character entirely aside, even leaving aside the general art quality, Okamikakushi is a show that provides at least some annoyance in the watching experience.
At school, it seems that Isuzu isn’t the only one who has gone crazy for Hiroshi, with much of the class seeming inordinately interested in him and having him around. Isuzu’s friend Kaname doesn’t seem affected (though she befriends Hiroshi all the same), and the aloof class president, Nemuru, seems to outright dislike him while being able to shut everyone else up and send them scurrying with a word.
The end of episode one also brings back the scythe-wielder and her shadowy monsters as late at night they hunt one of the students who was particularly overbearing towards Hiroshi (and who then has glowing red eyes and a slobbering, bestial manner) and cut him down. The next day, his desk is gone from the classroom and Nemuru gives the cover story that he “moved away” suddenly.
The show putters around for a little bit, introducing Isuzu’s big brother, cutting to some broody guy whose girlfriend was killed some time ago, showing that Scythe girl and her minions (who it’s hard to tell are or aren’t just people in cloaks because of the blurry cam) are killing people with some talk about “fallen wolves”, and much ado is made about the local specialty produce, the hassaku. For those not aware, hassakus are a real citrus fruit native to Japan that’s described as being like a grapefruit-sized orange with a flavor profile between grapefruit, orange, and lime or yuzu. In this show, however, they seem to be of some sort of mystical or at least plot-relevant importance.
He first hint of what they’re actually for and why a lean harvest might be an issue comes as Isuzu’s brother starts to get a little… scary regarding attachment to Hiroshi. Affectionate, but scary. A hassaku-scented air freshener getting broken and letting all its scent out seems to bring him back to his senses for the time being. Meanwhile, Nemuru and her uncle, a doctor, talk about Hiroshi being special and it being bad news that he’d come to town, especially with that previously mentioned lean harvest looming.
Finally, after a little more beating around the bush and slice of life, Hiroshi both meets broody guy and witnesses one of the scythe-murders, including the fact that it’s cleaned up very efficiently, since by the time he returns to the scene with broody guy in a couple of minutes there’s no evidence they manage to discover.
Shortly thereafter, Isuzu’s big brother loses what little sanity he had left despite attempts to preserve it with medication, attacks Hiroshi in the night, and is ultimately hunted down by scythe girl. Apparently, she and her mooks are part of a broader conspiracy including the neighborhood watch, Isuzu’s doctor uncle, and Nemuru and her family. Shortly thereafter Isuzu breaks the masquerade rules and lets slip that she’s so very broken up because her big brother didn’t “move away” and was, in fact, killed.
Soon enough, we catch up to that opening. Or rather, we see an alternate version of the scary confession from Isuzu and the approach of scythe girl, this time revealed to be Nemuru. They spar, Isuzu runs off with Hiroshi, but when he doesn’t respond to her confession she manages to control herself and is whisked away rather than being killed. Nemuru knocks Hiroshi out rather than explaining anything, maybe because of the oft-mentioned “commandments” and maybe because forces within the conspiracy are talking about going against said commandments to kill him rather than hunting down those his mere presence seems to drive mad.
Thus, Isuzu is disappeared to the med center. Kaname, being an occult maniac, puts together a theory of werewolf, but is abducted by the conspiracy. In prison, she learns more or less she was right from a fellow prisoner, including a reason why cross-species relations are so deeply frowned upon: A kiss can transform a human into a werewolf as well. For his part, Hiroshi ends up teaming up with Mr. Broody (who gives his name, Sakaki). All the while we still follow a side of the conspiracy hunting Hiroshi, Nemuru being weird but not hostile at him, and subplots about the hassaku harvest and little sister Mana’s violin teacher who looks just like Sakaki’s dead fiancee having some sort of degenerative condition.
Nemuru lets Kaname out of prison and tells her to just forget the whole werewolf thing please, and also protects Hiroshi from the goon squad since, you know, she has a moral compass. This gets her stripped of her post as the hunter and asked to stay under house arrest. Sakaki, playing both sides as he takes a job as the “fixer” for the conspiracy, lures her out with fake word of having captured Hiroshi and, after a much more difficult encounter than he was expecting, takes her prisoner. To then show Hiroshi “the truth” about the werewolves, he calls Hiroshi out and locks him in some kind of storage room with the tied-up Nemuru as the mad moon begins to rise.
She and Hiroshi spend the next episode (and day) locked up together. There are some brushes with madness, but Nemuru manages to hold on to herself very well. Meanwhile, the inter-wolf conspiracy starts with backstabbing. Ultimately, the doctor, fatally poisoned, calls on the family head to look for Hiroshi and Nemuru properly, with which he teams up with Nemuru’s dad and Kaname.
Along the way we get something resembling the full story: Kamibito are creatures both like and unlike humans, essentially the implied werewolves. They’re instinctively drawn to normal humans because of a scent humans produce that they call Nectar, and that Hiroshi’s, while perhaps not unheard of, is a scary potent one in a hundred thousand sort of affair. Now whether “attacking” normals means eating them or something more sexual is left up to interpretation. The Kamibito have extremely harsh rules for their own (as we’ve seen) in order to, according to Nemuru, avoid being wiped out as a threat to humanity. Sounds reasonable enough, honestly, though one also sees Hiroshi’s point about the constant killing probably being not a good thing.
The Hassaku Festival follows shortly after. Sakaki attacks it first by driving the girl from prison insane and unleashing her for a daylight masquerade break, and then, after doing things to start a riot, gloating and revealing his plan to destroy the local dam and flood the entire town, killing everyone. Naturally, the dying man he gloats to wasn’t quite dead enough, and the plot gets out. Nemuru, joined by her minions, a recovered Isuzu, and our pair of human kids, race to do something about it.
Sakaki manages to open the floodgates at the dam (getting his arm ripped open by a dam worker in the process) and cause a lot of damage, but Nemuru soon shows up to close the gates again and follow Sakaki. She and Isuzu confront him. Hiroshi then shows up, banks on Sakaki not wanting to attack a human, and tries to talk him down. It fails, but buys time for Nemuru to try to plead to be the only one killed, which in turn buys time for deus ex machina to arrive in the form of the only group even blurrier than Nemuru’s cloaked minions: the shrine maidens of the festival, led by that sick violin lady who looks just like Sakaki’s lost fiancee. She tries to talk him down and he starts to lose it, and when he tries to shoot Nemuru again (a former shot being foiled by Hiroshi), takes the bullet for her. She then gives Sakaki a big hug and pulls him with her right over the nearby cliff into the river valley below.
Who was she? How did she get there? What was her condition that she covered? Never explained! As far as the actual text is concerned she was just some stranger with a degenerative disease but I think the show wants you to believe she was Sakaki’s lost love returned somehow.
In the aftermath, tons of people move away from Joga for fear of werewolf, while Hiroshi and family remain and the Kamibito start to rethink their plans for living in peace with humans, away from “or death” commandments and towards medical solutions to their differences. The girls and Hiroshi stay friends and it seems like Isuzu and Kaname now kind of ship Hiroshi with Nemuru. All’s well that ends… yeah, no, there’s one more episode despite this seemingly perfectly like a climax and epilogue.
Yeah, this show isn’t quite content to let us go after a mere eleven episodes, and so at the end here it just sort of throws in a comedy anthology episode, taking place after the real ending and indulging in wacky hijinx. The first act has to do with Nemuru and Mana’s shared obsession with a cute mascot character, and Nemuru absolutely misunderstanding Mana’s ideas for a cute castle as being horrific… and then using black magic (it happens) to create the scene in weird illusion form when delivering a model castle for Mana. The second involves the gang at a cafe where a TV spot will be filmed, with Isuzu and Kaname forcing Hiro to dress in drag (which of course gets all the attention) while Nemuru fails to hide how much she wants to be on TV, ending with her dad coming out as the “phantom waiter” and pulling his back driving some thugs off, canceling the TV spot.
And that’s how we end, just two little bits of randomness tacked onto the show. Um… good for it?
So, Okamikakushi has some problems. The biggest is the directing. Just when you think you’re used to the dutch angles and weird blur effects, one will hit you in a time or place where it’s still distracting and annoying. The blur, especially, is a real problem. The slanted shots can almost be forgiven but the super shaky motion works maybe once, and really not even then. Most of the time it’s just utterly pointless.
That’s not it, though. The pacing is also a big issue. Namely, the pacing is glacial in a way that doesn’t really support its pretense towards the horror genre. We get some good scenes and moderate tension, but then we spend so much time puttering around that all the dutch angles in the world can’t maintain an oppressive or threatening atmosphere.
There are good things about the show. The core story is pretty nice, and most of the characters get enough time and effort to work. It’s just a shame that so much energy is spent on elements that matter less or distract from that core.
Because when you get down to it, the idea of Okamikakushi is this: you can’t trust anyone and yet have to. Like a game of Werewolf (or Mafia, as it’s also called), everyone seems like a danger somehow. The “normal” Kamibito can flip out and become aggressive, slobbering beasts. Nemuru and her hunting pack kill people, seemingly rather regularly. Sakaki is human, but he’s driven by bitterness and revenge. There should be a real question of who to trust and when. Do we the audience, and Hiroshi with us, trust Isuzu when she seems to be going insane? Do we trust Nemuru when she’s a confirmed killer, including killing people we knew and possibly even liked? Do we trust Sakaki, when he’s espousing hatred and clearly playing multiple sides? They’re all presented as friends to Hiroshi, at least at some point, and they’re all at odds at some point, forcing him to choose between mercy and judgment when choosing wrongly in either direction could lead to innocent people being hurt or killed.
But you need tension to really feel that, and tension is the one thing Okamikakushi seems pathologically incapable of building.
Speaking of tension, some credit where it’s due: Okamikakushi keeps the idea of the Kamibito and their attacks somewhat intimidating for most of the show when, as horror monsters, they kind of fail when you think about it too much. This is a “Fridge logic” issue, and as such isn’t a big one, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it. So, Kamibito have wolf spirits and can bug out and attack people. This attacking takes the form of snogging their target(s), which while distressing and not good to do to someone who doesn’t want you to, is kind of tame compared to the usual werewolf “rip and tear and devour” sort of attack. The consequence of said kiss is that the victim also becomes a Kamibito… which is pretty much the same thing as a human but with superhuman strength, speed, agility, and senses at the cost of potentially going a little nuts and kissing someone if you don’t get your daily dose of Hassaku – a drawback that medical science is actively working on negating with concentrated medication.
When you get down to it, it’s really not that scary a prospect, is it? Sure, the Kamibito have to live by Kamibito law which has a lot of “do this and you die” in it, but laws are human (or werewolf) made and are changing in the ending. I guess that means if Hiroshi wants to get frisky with one of his lupine love interests the results wouldn’t be terrible, but it does rather defang the theoretical “monsters”.
As shows go, I’ve seen worse. At least except for that final episode of nonsense the show does stay on theme, and while the scenes in the dark are somewhere between nothing to write home about and actively laughable, the character interactions are passing fair. I wouldn’t say it’s really worth watching, perhaps except for the fact that horror is an uncommon theme in Anime, but neither is it worth hating. It’s C- fare in the end, no more but no less.