English Dub Review: Tsugumomo “Letter”

Letter to you.

Let’s start with a mysterious flashback: a person staring at a pair of shoes with a note, and this week’s vocab lesson: Kamioni – born from regrets that reside in the hair of the departed, an incredibly powerful amasogi that can manipulate its hair at will.

As non-threatening as style-able hair sounds, it looks like Tsugumomo is finally going dark again. Just after this super fun and upbeat theme song.

Kukuri and Kazuya are practicing battling, and while Kazuya is doing okay, he gets his obi Kiriha a little tangled up. At school, he’s exhausted. He’s called into the student council office with Osamu and Chisato, which most likely means an amasogi on the loose. But the student council president first accidentally shows off a shiny new scalp, which Kiriha explains as malison atonement.

With that out of the way, he describes a scary scene of flowing water and a girl quietly screaming. Apparently, that means that a strange girl is appearing to students and demanding something from them. Kiriha thinks that’s as boring as I do until he mentions that the girl died two years ago. He definitely saved that info to be dramatic but he should have started with that

As the team interviews other students, they find out that the mysterious girl was cheerful but then jumped off of a roof, leaving her shoes behind but no note. They decide to investigate all her clubs and activities when they run into the ghost-amasogi herself. She walks right up to Kazuya and whispers in his face, Where is the note? He tries to fight her but he’s too slow.

Kiriha explains that this is a kamioni (hair amasogi) and that it must be attached to a living person somehow. The girl shows up to fight and interrogate another, so the team shows up. The most recent victim admits to being the girl’s sister and she and another girl spin out a complicated tale of relational aggression and bullying that could have made the girl jump, but apparently wasn’t’ the only reason. It’s a lot of explanation in a little bit of time. The takeaway here is that the note still exists and one girl still has it, although she’s never read it.

What no one was expecting was that the girl actually had a big, scary, purple human face growing bigger and bigger on her chest, and she was terrified. The growth would start saying out loud how she really felt on the inside. And it just wouldn’t stop — until she killed her little sister.

Hey, remember when everyone in Tsugumomo was in a dating sim? Or last week, when Kazuya accidentally used a cologne that causes all the females he knows to join him in the bathtub, and Kiriha sang a song about pudding? This episode’s not like that.

So she jumped. Her sister now can’t take the fact that she was supposed to be the one who dies. That unlocks the full power of the hair amasogi, because apparently, that’s what it wanted the whole time. It’s a kamioni that was always after the death of both of them, although still, not sure why. Kazuya says it’s only because malison is drawn to him, and he decides to vigorously fight back. He’s in a fight with a terrifying, muscly hair monster. A spiral weave takes it down.

Unfortunately, one girl is still dead because of the growth. Kiriha explains that even though this amasogi was grown from her dark feelings, she ultimately ended her life to restrain them. That’s not a good metaphor for the real world, but here it checks out. It’s still incredibly sad.

Tsugumomo continues to prove it can do it all, and that its success in variety hasn’t been just a fluke. Kazuya is growing his skills at a steady pace to keep up interest but not reach the finish line too soon. It seamlessly combines the storyline of the week with an overall arc. Who knows what kind of story we’ll get next week? I don’t! But I know it’s going to be good!