English Dub Review: Kakuriyo -Bed and Breakfast for Spirits- “Shopping with the Nine-Tailed Young Master”

An episode with all the thrills and chills of going to the supermarket.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Aoi is tasked by Byakuya with making a nice dinner to a lordly Ayakashi and his wife from the Material Realm. To better her shot at impressing her new guests, she does a little fact-finding and gets a tip from her coworkers at the bed and breakfast about a foreign delicacies market where she can get special items for her dinner from.

She requires the permission of the master to leave, of course, so she negotiates with him to let her go out on her own. When a thunderstorm strikes, Aoi suffers flashbacks to her childhood and trembles in her fear of the storm. This moment gives her a chance to bond with the master, furthering their relationship.

The next day at the foreign delicacies market, Aoi and Ginji have a splendid time shopping for different ingredients. All is well until Aoi gets lured away by a luminous spirit in the market crowd, and falls unconscious. When she wakes, she finds herself locked in some kind of storeroom with no way out and no one to help her.

Our Take:

This week on Kakuriyo, it is a lot more of the same, with some minor improvements that give this series a bit more life than its typical fare. While I wouldn’t go so far to say that these improvements bring it up to “code”, as it were, for what an anime should be, I’ll recognize what’s brought before me. Analysis is analysis, after all.

So as the show goes on and as more and characters start to populate Aoi’s circle of friends, I am starting to see what is probably the main appeal of this anime: its harem. Subtly, little by little, Aoi has found herself surrounded by a whole host of handsome suitors that all seem to carry some affection for her in one way or another. The most dominant relationship here is still romantic tension with the master, which is still creepy, but the presence of all the other cute spirit boys makes me start to see this show for what it really is.

Of course, that realization doesn’t add any significant addition to this show. No, that comes in the presence of the two scenes that express an actual demonstrable conflict in this otherwise idyllic story. Though clumsily executed, Aoi’s fear of thunderstorms does humanize her in a way the story has failed to do yet so far. Having her get kidnapped at the end of the episode is a nice callback to that as well, and a way of actually attracting my attention to see what will happen next.

Other than those two scenes, though, I would consider the rest of this episode to be 90% filler. The back and forth between Aoi and Ginji reads more like a shopping list than an actual conversation, as Aoi slowly explains the mundane ins and outs of buying cooking ingredients for her dinner. An explanation that has basically no bearing on the story, serves no purpose, and bores the ever-living crap out of me as she goes on and on; her dead, unblinking eyes staring ahead all the while.

There are a couple of lighthearted scenes that make an attempt at humor but lack the kind of characterization needed to make me care. Yes, I get that Byakuya likes cats and is embarrassed about it, but no, that isn’t particularly funny or interesting. I don’t think anyone would find this episode particularly enjoyable unless you’re a die-hard fan of the show so far or really need to get your cute fox boy fix. Final verdict: this episode is a real snoozer.