English Dub Season Review: Kakuriyo -Bed and Breakfast for Spirits- Season One

The anime industry is a strange beast sometimes. It’s a medium that thrives on experimentation and hot new property, picked from areas usually left untouched by popular media. New anime can come from anywhere: webcomics, manga, (Of course) and even light novels. Sometimes, this kind of creative excavation strikes gold, bringing to life some of the most unique and brilliant shows a viewer can find.

Kakuriyo is not that.

The poorly named Kakuriyo -Bed and Breakfast for Spirits- is not gold, but sewage. A show that fails most every expectation of a good anime time and time again.

The setup here is pretty simple. A young girl named “Aoi” feeds a wandering spirit known as an “Ayakashi” with her home cooking on her way home from school. The spirit, who is of some notable power, decides he likes her food so much that he decides to kidnap her to work in the inn he runs, “Tenjiin-ya”, and also be his bride. At first, she protests, but over time, finds that her cooking makes her much appreciated by the ayakashi who work at the inn. So, she decides to put her skills to good use by starting a bed and breakfast at the inn. Over time, she comes across and feeds all sorts of spirits, while being fawned over by an increasingly large harem of pretty boy ayakashi spirits.

On the surface, it sounds like a harmless fairy tale, save for the unfortunate implications of a kidnapped woman falling in love with her captor. (Yikes) Stockholm syndrome aside, it’s not a terrible concept. We’ve seen anime shows about hotels and the quirky characters that run them before. Not all of them are winners, but it’s a solid concept that a good creative team can pull off if they can keep the story interesting to keep audience interest. Yet, after enduring 26 weeks of this series, I don’t think Kakuriyo could possibly be any more boring.

The show quickly falls into a wash, rinse, repeat cycle that goes something like this: a new spirit shows to Tenjiin-Ya, they’re initially a tricky customer or have high expectations, Aoi cooks them her food from the human world and everything works out. The end. There’s some deviation from this along the way, but that’s the basics of what this show is, and believe me when I say it is an absolute bore. Cooking food is not an inherently interesting thing, neither is working in an inn, so it’s up to the directors, writers and animators to add to the pot enough spice to bring a little heat so we don’t end up just watching someone explain what they’re cooking to the audience time and time again. But this is exactly what happens. No effort is made to make these elongated sequences interesting. The writing is little more than exposition, delivered with voice acting so forced and stiff it would make plywood jealous. Worse still, the animation ranges from functional to barely even watchable. Characters facial features change in size from scene to scene, with almost every exchange of dialogue being accompanied by “Shot-Reverse Shot” of characters fish-lipping their lines at each other. To top it all of, there are entire sequences of animation reduced to slideshows, because they are quite simply unfinished.

The presentation of this anime is completely undercooked, and its no wonder then that the story is so weak as well. There is a wide cast of characters working at Tenjiin-ya, each with their own aesthetics, personalities, and duties at the inn. Yet, this collection of spirit weirdos is as wide as the ocean but as deep as a puddle. Each character basically gets one episode to develop them out a little bit, but then gets pushed to the side so the plot can introduce another half-baked character. The staff should have been a major part of this show, but instead, it feels like they’re just background characters. Instead, Kakuriyo focuses almost entirely on Aoi and her relationship with Ginji and The Master, the two handsome spirit boys she desires. Despite all the attention she gets, Aoi is little more than a Mary Sue. Her uncanny ability to solve every problem she has with cooking drains all tension from the story. There’s never a struggle, never a need for Aoi to grow, she just coasts throw the story one meal at a time. On the rare occasions where something happens which threatens Aoi’s state of complacency, they are quickly resolved and are thereafter forgotten, so we can go back to watching Aoi cook some other inane dish.

This just goes on and on, week after week, until the final episode which is less of a climax and more of a shrug and a shuffle off-stage. Without depth, without conflict, without any reason for this story to even exist, Kakuriyo fails to be anything more than a waste of time and another piece of animated garbage clogging the anime environment today. In yet another bid by shrewd anime production companies to dig up and sell any recognizable property, they have taken a light novel series that should have never been adapted to the screen and completely butchered it. It’s boring, it’s lazy, it’s repetitive; it’s just bad. Avoid at all costs, and pray that some producer doesn’t perk up at hearing the possibility of a season two.