Anime Review: In/Spectre
Kotoko Iwanaga is the Goddess of Wisdom. She’s not literally a god, that’s just the title the youkai gave her when she agreed to be their mediator to settle disputes between Japanese spirits and monsters. Iwanaga (she doesn’t like her personal name) gained certain abilities in exchange for her right eye and left leg. That happened when she was eleven, six years ago.
During that time, she’s made frequent trips to the hospital to make sure her prosthetic leg and artificial eye are doing okay. Iwanaga finds an interest in a young man who also visits frequently. Kurou Sakuragawa, who’s visiting his cousin who has been in the hospital for several years. Iwanaga decides he’s her type, but is disappointed to learn he’s already got a girlfriend. (HIPAA prevents the nurses from telling Iwanaga anything about the cousin, but they’re free to gossip about visitors.)
Except that now, the word is that Kurou broke up with his fiancee Saki, giving Iwanaga the chance to set her own beret for him! She reintroduces herself and suggests the two go out with an eye to marriage. Kurou is not enthused. But it turns out he’s hiding a secret or two himself, and youkai are freaked out by Kurou’s very existence. He reluctantly helps Iwanaga out on a mission, and they turn out to make a good team.
After a short case involving a serpentine guardian spirit, the story jumps ahead a couple of years to the main plotline.
This horror-tinged thriller anime series is based on the manga Kyokou Suiri written by Kyo Shirodaira with art by Chashiba Katase, which in turn was based on a novel of the same name by Shirodaira.
Iwanaga and Kurou separately make their way to a small city that’s being haunted by “Steel Lady Nanase”, allegedly the vengeful ghost of a fallen idol that was crushed to death by steel girders on a construction site. There’s some suspicious circumstances surrounding that death. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder, perhaps? And is the ghost real, a clever fake…or something else?
A new complication enters the picture in the form of Saki Yumihara, Kurou’s ex. Turns out this is where she went after breaking the engagement and became a police officer. A police detective realizes she knows more about the supernatural than most people, and asks Saki to look over some reports of Steel Lady Nanase to see if there’s anything she can spot. Saki quickly runs into Nanase herself, as well as Iwanaga and then Kurou.
This sparks Iwanaga’s jealousy and some awkward moments between the former couple. But they’re forced to work together to stop Steel Lady Nanase before she kills again.
Iwanaga has some minor supernatural abilities, but her most important skillset is coming up with explanations for events that will satisfy or deliberately dissatisfy the listener; she’s an excellent story spinner. (But not so good at personally lying.) Her status as an amputee is played fairly realistically. Iwanaga’s obviously trained hard to be acrobatic, but every so often having only one leg works against her, and she can be blindsided due to having no vision in the right eye.
Unfortunately, Iwanaga is way too insistent on her relationship with Kurou, which he’s clearly not as enthusiastic about, and has fits of jealousy which make her grating.
Kurou is the victim/survivor of his family’s inhumane experiments to create immortal prophets that would lead the clan to wealth and power. It kind of worked, as he can’t die of violence and can influence the future. Due to the horrible things done to test his regenerative abilities, Kurou is indifferent to pain and has a low self-preservation drive. His flesh is poisonous and youkai see him as a horrific monster.
Saki didn’t realize at first what Kurou’s issues were, and became increasingly freaked out by his ability to heal almost instantly from wounds and his lack of avoiding situations where he’d have to. Discovering that creatures she perceived as monsters feared him was the last straw. Even now she can’t eat meat without being reminded and becoming nauseous.
And then there’s Steel Lady Nanase and the secret of her true nature.
The Nanase case takes up most of the season’s episodes, and the final fight drags on and on in roughly real time, so viewers who prefer cutting to the chase may find this series less watchable.
Content note: Kurou’s abilities lend themselves to gory violence. Suicide comes up multiple times, and abortion is discussed. Children are abused and murdered in the backstory. One character’s large breasts are a bit of an obsession with onlookers.
I liked this one better for the ideas than for the female lead, who is on screen more than half the time. If you find her personality less grating than I do, this series might please.
And now, a music video!
