English Dub Review: Kakuriyo-Bed And Breakfast For Spirits- “I’m Opening up an Eatery in an Ayakashi Inn.”

Ogres are like onions. They have layers. And Business Degrees.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Aoi and the Ayakashi wrap up getting the restaurant ready for opening, including debuting its official name suggested by Master Matsuba: Moonflower. Ogre God stops by to see the place and try the food, but trouble lurks in the distance! Later that night, Aoi finds a trail of Chekov’s banana peels strewn about the place and catches the culprits, chefs from the main kitchen who want her to fail.

Cleaning them up is hard enough, but is soon followed up by an attack by a masked assailant. Luckily, this is blocked by slightly less masked ninja boy. The fight is rough, but brief, ended by Aoi slipping on a peel and knocking the two on their buts by the fan, though the good ninja is slightly injured. He identifies himself as Sasuke, a Kamaitachi (basically weasels with sickles) who works for the security family. As thanks, she patches him up and allows him to sample a new dish. Though to her surprise, he’s actually about as old as Shiro. And so we go through the whole “remembering Shiro was awesome, then remarking how much Aoi resembles him” schtick. Curse you, Sasuke’s redundant scene. I’ll get you back. Somehoooooow.

The next day, Ogre God invites Aoi out to town with Ginji to take a break before the Tengu party. Not soon after, people start recognizing her from the incident a few episodes ago all the rumors about the “Ogre Bride”. Later, they visit a mask shop where Aoi looks for the mask of the Ayakashi that fed her, but then notices someone with a similar mask and follows them out into the street. Unfortunately, it’s not the person she thought, but rubber necked Master Rokusuke from a farm the inn buys its produce from. He remarks that there’s apparently spiritual power in her cucumbers and…well, I guess that’s scenes over!

At lunch, Ogre God chastises her for going off on her own. The group then goes to visit a temple that’s supposedly good for strengthening business relationships, at which he also drops some wisdom regarding how business is about strengthening client relationships through every experience. That night, the opening night party with the Tengus goes off without a hitch, but a week soon passes without any customers. Even worse, Ginji rushes in to tell Aoi they’ve been summoned by the head of the accounting office, Byakuya.

OUR TAKE

This certainly felt less meaty than the last few episodes (which are already not that substantive on their own), but the last scene seems to be pointing to this being the beginning of a new arc or at least a two-parter. That doesn’t seem too strange at the sixth episode, but having binged the previous five, I’ve become used to these stories being focused enough to stand on their own, and this one didn’t. The first segment with Sasuke seemed like a more rushed version of the second episode’s meeting with Matsuba: meet a really old Ayakashi, they have a problem, Aoi helps or uses her gumption to get them to change their mind about something, then they remark about Shiro and how much Aoi is like him. This is the fifth of six episodes where this has happened in an episode, but the previous times seemed to be about painting a kind but the complicated picture of Shiro as a person, while this…just says he was good enough to be a ninja and also a pervert. And unlike previous Ayakashi encounters, Sasuke didn’t really have a problem to deal with besides fighting that another ninja, who I don’t think was connected to those banana guys (otherwise THEY’D probably be trying to kill her too). Though the fact that the assassin went unexplained and Sasuke’s ordered guarding by Ogre was apparently a secret leads me to believe that this is laying the groundwork for other things, but I have to judge this episode based on what it’s given me here.

The other half in town also has that vibe of setting things up, but is also both laid back and focused on its design. There’s a brief bit of focus on Aoi trying to find whoever fed her when she was a child, which seems like it’ll be sprinkled around the plot until we reach a major story point, and Ogre offering business advice regarding Moonflower’s opening, which I suppose he would know about since he’s managed to run an inn all this time. His advice about being good to clients and making professional relationships stronger is applicable in a lot of aspects of life, so I’d definitely say it’s the highlight of the episode, though it seems like something didn’t stick if Aoi somehow got NO costumes in the week since the opening.

I was actually kinda worried about placing the opening of Moonflower this late in the story…though this was when I thought this was a twelve or thirteen episode series. Since we’re going for 26, about the end of the first quarter seems like a good place to establish the protagonist as taking their first big step in completing their big goal, and thus moving us onto the next stage of the story. We’ll see how that goes next week, where we move on from incidental characters with Naruto names to slightly more important ones with BLEACH names! And probably a janitor named Sanji if we’re lucky.