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Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-San Episode 12 Review

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Well, we already knew Honda-san didn’t deal well with customers and Christmas is always an interesting time for those who work in retail. It seems fitting that this final episode deals with Christmas and potential New Year sales given when the episode aired and it does just bring an air of finality to what has been essentially an episodic affair. After the lame episode 11 I was worried that this anime was dead in the water but it managed to return to its strengths and deliver an amusing enough final episode.

Skull-face Bookseller Honda-San Episode 12 Honda in Christmas Hat

Still, the humour is all of the to-be-expected kind at this point. Honda asked to wear a Christmas hat and the horror of potentially being banished to the children’s section to wrap books. It is all over the top silliness that anyone who has ever worked retail can relate to despite the exaggeration these are all situations people will have experienced.

Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-San Episode 12 - Define Christmas

The final story really does bring things nicely to a close with Honda working the night-shift and helping to close the store. It is a simple device and yet the store closing feels like a solid ending to a series that really didn’t have an ongoing narrative.

Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-San Episode 12 Honda

While I haven’t been thrilled by this one it has entertained enough this season and some moments have been pretty funny. I’ll get to a full series review soon.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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Skull-Face Bookseller Honda San Episode 11 Review

Skull-face Bookseller Honda-San takes its viewers to an alternate setting this week for the first story where we see them selling books to yokai. Honestly, other than pushing the scenario to the extreme with one of them losing an arm to an angry customer, nothing seemed all that different to their normal day to day.

All of this made me wonder why we were bothering, and then I realised this anime doesn’t really have anything left to say. From the start it has just been about the day-to-day of working in a book shop and the different scenarios faced by the workers as they do their jobs and interact with customers, and what became fairly obvious by the sequence in the yokai world was that any point that was to be made through this has already been made.

That lack of new material became even more apparent in the second story where we did return to the normal book shop but we see Honda getting abused on the phone by an irate customer and then meeting a calming and healing customer who loves books and thanks him. Again, there’s no new material here and nothing more to be said.

With one episode left to go I’m actually glad this one has come to the end of its run as I’m fairly certain I don’t have much investment left in it. That said, in small bits and pieces this show has been fun, it is just that I’m not sure it ever had enough to carry a full anime season even as a short anime.