The Morose Mononokean

Episode 6

This week's episode of The Morose Mononokean is a little strange. It's taken up with a pretty mundane task—return an old lady's wedding ring—without much connection to the supernatural except that a yokai asked them to do it. It might be one of the cutest yokai yet (other than Fluffy, of course). It's just an eel with a really cute face, as Ashiya himself says. Still, it's a little puzzling how this really connects to Ashiya and Abeno's job until the very end of the episode, after two episodes full of worldbuilding.

One thing I liked immediately about this episode was how it brought us back into the pattern of beginning with Ashiya and Abeno's school life. Abeno told Ashiya early in the episode that they had to meet the yokai client at 3:30, but we can see on the clock (and from Ashiya's complaining) that they're already late due to a boring homeroom teacher who can't stop droning on about his daughters. Another student notices Ashiya's worry and Abeno's anger, so he reminds the teacher that their class time is over and everyone needs to get somewhere. He has to throw himself under the bus for it, acting like a jerk by saying what everyone is secretly thinking, and he gets an angry rebuke from the teacher for it, but the ploy works. Then Abeno and Ashiya zip out of there before this student can invite Ashiya to go to the store with him. It's yet another reminder of what Ashiya's high school life could have been if not for his yokai job. At least Ashiya doesn't seem that broken up about these missed opportunities anymore.

How could you, when you get to interact with such adorable yokai as Fuzzy and Manjiro? Manjiro is this week's focus character, the blue eel who is every bit as adorable as he is grumpy. He demands that Ashiya and Abeno find an old woman's wedding ring for him that she lost near a fast-moving river. It seems hopeless, but Ashiya manages to find it within the first half of the episode. So how do we fill the rest of the time? Let's start with agonizing over how Ashiya and Abeno will return the ring without looking suspicious for the next few minutes.

Look, there is a valid question here about Manjiro's connection to this old woman and why he's so frantic about her losing this ring. Abeno partially answers these concerns earlier by suggesting that Manjiro had a connection to the ring, but never fully addresses them. Still, it felt like this episode spent a lot of time stalling to stretch a plot into a full episode length that doesn't really fit. "The Ring" could have easily been the first half of an episode, rather than an entire one, for all the time they spent running up the minutes with pointless circular conversations. Additionally, "The Ring" doesn't have the sort of emotional payoff at the end to make this thin plot count the way that previous episodes have.

Eventually, after lots of arguing, they get the ring to the old woman when she intercepts them during an attempt to drop it in her mailbox. When they said they were ordered to deliver it by someone named "Manjiro," she laughs, saying that maybe "his ghost" had tricked them. Manjiro was the name of the woman's late husband, whose wedding ring she wears along with her own. The suggestion is that maybe this eel yokai Manjiro is in some way the reincarnation of the woman's husband; the new Manjiro certainly seems to consider that possibility with his joyful expression. This has interesting implications for yokai and their connections to humans: might all of them be connected to humans or other creatures from our world?

This climactic scene has other more concerning implications to it though. Ashiya also slips and reveals to Yokai Manjiro that he and Abeno are human, after Abeno tries to play it cool. When everything turns out fine in the end, it leads Abeno to wonder if the strict separation between human and yokai is really so necessary, but that leads to a strange, scary voice calling out behind him, possibly threatening him. He thinks he's just hearing things when Ashiya doesn't notice it, but the creature leaves behind tracks that then blow away. I'm not sure if this is set-up for the next episode, or if it's building to something larger in the story to come, but either way it's a very creepy and intriguing cliffhanger.

So "The Ring" begins and ends strong but loses its way somewhere in the middle. It just doesn't have a strong enough story to fill its full runtime, and it shows. The conclusion isn't as emotionally satisfying, involving a character (the old woman) who we haven't spent the whole episode getting to know, which reduces its ability to grab at the heartstrings the way the first three episodes did. The Morose Mononokean feels like it's fallen into a slump, unsure how to pull itself out after the narrative shake-up of episodes 4 and 5. Still, there's a lot of potential to suggest it can recover.

Rating: B-

The Morose Mononokean is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rose is a music Ph.D. student who loves overanalyzing anime soundtracks. Follow her on her media blog Rose's Turn, and on Twitter.