English Dub Review: Kakuriyo -Bed and Breakfast for Spirits-“The Nure-Onna Bath Caretaker and Her Shiranui Teacher.”

Unwelcome guests and unwelcome troubles.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Two guests from a rival inn called Orio-ya, Hatori, and Tokihiko, arrive to stay at the inn. The two share a past with the inn and its caretakers and aren’t exactly welcome guests to stay there.

Aoi soon finds out of the romantic tension between Tokihiko and Shizuna the bath maiden and tries to bring them together through good cooking. In the midst of this, Aoi messages Odanna, who is traveling abroad. Little is gained from their flirting, but their relationship advances a little further.

Eventually, through Aoi’s efforts, Tokihiki and Shizuna find themselves drawn to each other, curing Tokihiko’s ailing heart.

 

Our Take:

It was a difficult week for Kakuriyo this time around. This week’s showing is a jumbled mess of awkwardness and poor writing that defeats all its attempts at doing a romance plot with some genuine emotion in it.

The plot this week does have a little more substance than past weeks have had. Having a couple of difficult customers is a fitting trouble for a spirit inn to have, too. I also liked how their backstories were intertwined with the inn’s workers; a small addition that mixes things up, if only a little bit. Unfortunately, though, their voice acting isn’t where it needs to be to actually be threatening in a meaningful way. Unfortunately, some of the rushed lines hamstring the scenes that these two are in, making their scenes into a bit of a mess. This works in Tokihiko’s favor, though, who earned a couple chuckles from me for being suplexed into the ground by Shizuna.

This show has a lot of problems to make up for, and the…difficult voice acting doesn’t help. It’s the kind of flat and awkward that reminds me of those early 2000’s anime kids would watch on Saturday mornings. Shows that didn’t have a firm grasp on what a good dub could actually look like and are comical by today’s standards. Thankfully, there aren’t any absurd accents of eccentric character voices that grate at the ears, but there is a blandness that follows each of their voices. As if the characters themselves don’t believe what they’re saying.

It may be a silly criticism, given the subject matter of this show, but having home-made cooking be the Deus ex-machina cure-all for each episode is not a good way to write a story. Aoi never really has to do anything to solve her problems except make some good food. This might be a more interesting formula if it was done with some style like, say, “Shokugeki no Soma,” but Kakuriyo never really gets there. For that matter, too much of the episode’s dialogue is bogged down in pointless trivia about cooking food.

There is nothing particularly new to note here, except that it seems the production quality of Kakuriyo is getting a lot worse as time goes on. Little by little, things start to feel more and more unfinished as the series goes on. Regardless, this episode is mostly an unpolished mess, with a couple of decent moments between Tokihiko and Shizuna.