mystery

The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window gives us its final two episodes and honestly there will be spoilers here though lets be honest, most of you aren’t watching this anime anyway. I’m also going to keep this short because there doesn’t seem much point in repeating past criticisms and there’s no episodes left to hope for miracles to occur.

So, they go for a power of love solves everything approach and the bad guy (Erika’s Sensei/Mikado’s father) is defeated and left fallen on the floor inside the house and everybody else gets out and then they go to eat meat because why not.

This was not the end we were looking for from The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window

When we toss in the fact that multiple characters just suddenly seem to pull new powers out of nowhere (and that the powers they had were already so vaguely explained they more or less just did whatever they wanted anyway) there’s little satisfaction to be found in the conclusion. Whether it is Erika suddenly sending bloody feet and handprints to ‘connect’ everyone or her yakuza bodyguard being able to reach through them and physically transport people where-ever they needed to be it just seemed far too convenient.

Also, none of them looked worse for wear when they finally got out of the house so The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window even missed an opportunity to make it feel more credible by at least exhausting them for their efforts.

Then we have Keita’s elaborate rock-climbing analogy having tethered Mikado before leaving him in the house with Hiyakawa. Throw in Hanzawa being a ‘pillar of righteousness’ whatever that means but the story more or less uses it to mean that he can anchor Erika in place while she holds on to the tether which theoretically was there to stop Mikado falling though the how and why of all of that just escaped me.

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Though perhaps the worst thing The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window does is more or less entirely rewrite Hiyakawa’s personality after the events. Sure, we get that he finally let go of the anger in the box or whatever but he’s literally a different person and not a particularly interesting one in the final half of the final episode. And his relationship with Mikado still makes very little sense.

At least Mikado finally tore up that awful and one sided contract and made it clear to Hiyakawa that he was his own person and wasn’t going to be locked in a box.

Now, I should point out that at least Mikado finally got to confront his father and point out what an awful thing it was to abandon his mother. The family relationship between Mikado, his mother and his father was perhaps the best part of these two episodes. Seeing his mother after everything was done and her finally being able to talk about the man who was a huge part of her life before he upped and left taking even his memory with him was actually kind of cathartic.

Also, these final episodes of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window did at least remember that Mikado and his mother were the best pair in the story. Wow, the power of love really did win out here.

Anyway, its done and the story, such as it was, has wrapped up. Now I just need to figure out how to write a full review about it because honestly the Night Beyond the Tricornered Window as a concept still intrigues me but the anime itself is just not particularly good.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Karandi James

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The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window has been a strange creature so far and I’ll admit I’m still where I was back in the beginning, which is largely intrigued by the possibilities of the story more so than the story itself. As we take yet another turn with Mikado now trying to return to Hiyakawa after he didn’t seek to protect him in episode 9, for reasons that actually make perfect sense, all the characters are here and things are coming together but it still feels like something is missing.

Can the Night Beyond the Tricornered Window bring all this together in two more episodes?

I guess we have to ask just how much we’re going to accept psychic hand-waving as they rush us through steps in order to get the confrontation between Mikado and his father and I assume we’re eventually going to see Mikado reunited with Hiyakawa and maybe they’ll finally have that long overdue heart to heart. Or maybe they’ll just slug each other. Who knows?

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But this week we have in The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window we have Mikado announce to the crew he can purify the weird net of negative energy that Sensei has been tapping into and then we learn that the body-guard guy is somehow immune to death because of the thing Erika did to him. And all of this just kind of leads them to the house where they go inside and the police guy pours a line of water around the house and I guess that’s meant to keep things in?

Throw in some corpse like shadows, and a Labyrinth style house where the rooms all kind of float and move about and you have serious confusion about what is actually meant to be going on here.

And other than saving Hiyakawa, Mikado’s goal, I’m not even sure what the rest hope to accomplish at this point.

Though, we do get a rare treat from The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window the night before where Mikado has a chat with his mother at the dining table. Mikado and his mother’s relationship is one of the best things this anime has given us and with so many appalling parents in anime having a caring mother, even if she is cursed and remembers nothing about your father, is kind of like winning the lottery.

Now if only Mikado could do something about his father/sensei.

You know before he gets cursed, brainwashed, flattened by a falling house or whatever else is actually about to happen.

Weirdly though, The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window has managed to make the Erika and Sakaki duo quite a workable supporting pair. You could actually see the two of them in their own story without all of Mikado and Hiyakawa’s baggage and it would probably work quite well. The Yakuza and the Psychic.

Anyway, those two are just breaking the ghosts powering the whole labyrinth house thing and Mikado is busy confronting his father so that just leaves Keita to have a sit down with Hiyakawa and honestly he’s not the right person for the job and even he seems to realise he’s just got to hold on long enough for Mikado to actually arrive. But it doesn’t look like The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window is going to give him enough time.

On that note… What is with the triangles? I was hoping that would be explained at some point but now even Mikado is just calling forth magic triangles and I don’t get it. Other than its in the title.

You can read the full season review here.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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From episode 1 of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, Hiyakawa has been a pretty sketchy guy. His blatant advances toward Mikado and possessive personality certainly put some viewers off before the story even got rolling and while other viewers tolerated his antics in the hope that he would grow over time, by episode 9 I’m now wondering if all along Hiyakawa has actually been the only character we should be wary of with Erika and Sensei just being red-herrings.

Though potentially everything here is just setting up an opportunity for Mikado to ‘save’ Hiyakawa from himself but really it is hard at this point to imagine Hiyakawa as anything other than a walking hazard.

The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window is really tipping the balance between character who needs redemption and character beyond redemption.

Episode 9 opens with Erika, her bodyguard Sakaki, and her mother being caught in the office by Sensei. Fortunately after they all kind of freeze in terror at the mere sight of Sensei, who has been built up over most of the series as some ultimate big-bad, Erika’s mother neutralises him with a taser allowing her and Erika to have a touching mother-daughter moment (even if it is all a bit too late) and for Erika and Sakaki to flee.

There’s a lot of undermining the image of Sensei in this episode. As I said, The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window had left him this mysterious and untouchable figure. Almost the equivalent of ‘he who should not be named’ prior to actually meeting him and what most of these sorts of characters have in common is that the less they appear and the less we know about them the more interesting and potentially threatening they are.

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Here Sensei is so easily thwarted with Erika simply leaving and the next we see him he’s just sitting on his stoop before he gets into a discussion with Hiyakawa. The arrival of Mikado sets off something and Sensei just kind of falls apart. Maybe he’s still got something left to give in this story but really he’s significantly less interesting after this episode.

Meanwhile, Erika tries to stand up all big and strong but then proceeds to do nothing for the rest of the episode.

Instead of capitalising on Erika’s newfound freedom, The Night Beyond The Tricornered Window spends a lot of the rest of the episode with Mikado trying to connect emotionally with Hiyakawa and Hiyakawa pushing him away. Quite literally pushing him away. Through a starry triangle window and into the house you can’t leave in point of fact.

While both Keita and Hanzawa appear for a brief online chat between the group they really serve no purpose. And with Mikado and Hiyakawa not effectively communicating it really leaves the episodes feeling disjointed.

I think what really makes this episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window not work is that it is hard to imagine what outcome the characters are actually hoping for from everything that is going on. Sensei’s character was never clarified, Mikado’s sudden attachment to Hiyakawa still makes little sense and so his devotion to helping him even when he’s clearly going the wrong way seems bizarre, Erika gets side-lined, Keita has no purpose in this grander story and barely appears, and that more or less leaves us with Hiyakawa who for whatever reason has convinced himself he needs to get something he left in his old house back.

The why never really comes in to it.

All and all, while I’m still kind of curious, The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window seems to be fizzling and what little potential the story had seems to be remaining unrealised as we slide into the final episodes. That said, I’m not upset I watched this as I’ve been kept intrigued enough. It’s just that without things really coming together for a strong finish it doesn’t seem like the kind of show you could recommend or rewatch.

Though, they are bringing all the plot threads together, it just isn’t really building to something better. It just kind of seems like a ball of confusing plot threads that someone is forcing to fit together in order to bring The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window to a close.

You can read the full season review here.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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In episode 7, The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window got all the psychics, plus Erika’s yakuza bodyguard, together to… Well not really sure what their end goal is other than Erika wants out of the society, Mikado wants to unravel the mystery that is Hiyakawa’s personality, and Keita’s there because Mikado asked him to be?

Motives aside, we have a gathering of characters who are combining their psychic powers plus phone technology to infiltrate the mysterious sensei’s house. Turns out it is built on top of the old research society building that Hiyakawa was raised in.

Again, it is a little unclear exactly what they are seeking (Sensei’s weakness is a little vague) and they more or less leave before accomplishing much of anything, but it did make me think how much better we could make this story if we kicked it off right now with the five of them working with the detective to solve crimes rather than whatever the actual plot-line currently is.

Yep, I’m rewriting the plot for The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window

It is usually a bad sign when I start rewriting plots while watching the story for the first time. Largely because it means that I’ve lost interest in the plot being presented. It is weird though, because The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window does continue to have elements that I am strongly interested in and I’d love to see these characters interacting against a most interesting plot.

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Actually, I still haven’t quite figured out what Keita was doing while the others were breaking in. They did throw in some dialogue explainers about him being the safety net and being able to pull Mikado and Hiyakawa back to their bodies if something went wrong but it mostly seemed like you could have removed him from the caper without noticeably having any different outcome.

Meanwhile, Mikado and Hiyakawa do some random spiritual stuff inside the Sensei’s house before they kind of flee at the sight of a creepy black ghost thing. Why it was more dangerous and why they didn’t continue really isn’t explained so the whole affair ends with us learning little or nothing.

However, while the characters seems to be spinning their wheels, the audience then gets to spend the last part of the episode watching the society’s Sensei as he completes a job killing a would-be politician.

Here’s the thing though: Sensei works as an unknown. The creepy behind the scenes guy doing evil things from the shadows. As a character, he comes across more unstable and kind of ditzy than intimidating and by the end of this episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window I didn’t really have much awe for this character, or really anything else other than hoping Erika or Mikado really sticks it to him before the end.

Definitely a case where less would be more.

Not to mention, the research society itself still has no clear goal or aim that the audience has been let in on. Sure, shady religious societies pop up a lot in supernatural stories and we don’t expect the most stable of motives or goals, but in this case there’s been no insight at all into what they are trying to accomplish (even if it is crazy).

Basically The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window hasn’t established why anything going on in this episode matters. If the society had some plot to overthrow the government or something and taking down sensei was the key to stopping it at least that would be something. Or maybe they are going to unleash some ancient evil force upon the world to cleanse the wicked? Something that at least gave us a reason to care about them at all from a plot point of view.

And Erika reiterates she can’t just leave but they haven’t established why not. Okay, maybe some curse will active or something. It’s all a bit nebulous.

Anyway, this week kind of marks the point where my interest in The Night Beyond The Tricornered Window waned a bit, largely because I kind of hoped we’d get more from these characters now that they’d all banded together and instead it was perhaps the weakest episode yet.

You can read the full season review here.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window continues not to be impressive but remains watchable with moments of intrigue and some potentially good ideas to be explored moving forward. Basically, of the 10 shows I’m doing episodic reviews for, this anime would be pretty much middle of the pack in terms of weekly enjoyment and so I can honestly say I was pretty happy this week largely due to reasonable expectations of what this anime can actually deliver.

Anyway, episode 7 addresses the issue of Erika having cursed Hanzawa’s wife at the end of episode 6 and in the process manages to bring Erika and her Yakuza bodyguard, Sakaki, together with Mikado. From there Hiyakawa is drawn in and finally Mikado brings Keita into the group at the end of the episode. Though given most of the group don’t seem to want to be there it will be interesting to see how long this little team manages to last.

The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window seems to be finding a focus.

There were a couple of points along the way in this episode that stood out to me.

The first was Mikado himself. Having been dragged along by Hiyakawa and more or less everyone else, episode 7 sees him making his own choices and for once dragging others along with his decisions and goals. This is a far more proactive Mikado than we’ve seen before and while he isn’t overflowing with confidence he is willing to stand by his decisions. Whether it was refusing to share information about Erika to Hanzawa, convincing Erika to undo what she had done to Hanzawa’s wife, or convincing Hiyakawa to work with the others at the end, Mikado was definitely getting his own way in this episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window.

You’ll notice in the image above that for once Mikado has grabbed onto Hiyakawa and though he is the shorter of the two he’s holding Hiyakawa’s gaze. While the sequence transitions to them having a more neutral holding of arms before it ends up with Hiyakawa holding onto Mikado’s hand, this is a step away from early episodes where all contact was one way from Hiyakawa toward Mikado.

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Still with Mikado, I don’t recall him wearing his glasses during this episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. They are always with him but unlike previous episodes where he would wear his glasses most of the time and only occasionally remove them, now in almost every scene he’s looking at the world without his glasses. That’s an interesting character transition.

We then have Erika who really is kind of stuck. The things she’s doing and has done are horrible. And not all of them were things she was forced to do. She admitted herself that the girl at school was just a bonus and there was little reason to inflict a curse on Hanzawa’s wife. Still, she’s sixteen years old and not being protected by her family. You can kind of understand why she’s a bit messed up.

And so The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window brings all the pieces together. With Erika now caught by the new leader of the research society that was once lead by Hiyakawa’s mother prior to the ‘mass suicide’. It is highly likely (though not confirmed) that the new leader is Mikado’s missing father. The Yakuza guy can’t let Erika go or he’ll be killed but he does want to help her so he’s all in. The only character who at this stage doesn’t seem to have a personal connection to the events is Keita but I’m sure there’s time for some convoluted explanation as to why he’s involved.

And so with five episodes remaining, I’m fairly sold on the current direction of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Though if I were to compare this episode with earlier ones, I would say that the tone of this show seems to have settled a bit. Whether that ends up making it feel a little bit flat will depend on the viewer but honestly I think its better with less of the cringe worthy dialogue. That first episode was a little intense.

You can read the full season review here.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window this week has Hanzawa’s perspective as he helps a woman who is clearly feeling a little unstable and as he reflects back on his first meeting, and subsequent time, with Hiyakawa.

It’s interesting that Hanzawa is actually on screen for a lot of this episode but I barely took a screen cap with him in it. Hanzawa is a steadfast non-believer and his appearance and mannerisms are very calm and orderly (or to put it another way, pretty boring to look at). It is what is going on around Hanzawa this episode that makes it interesting and also what we learn about Hiyakawa’s back-story.

On that note, a few people talking about The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window have expressed concerns that Hiyakawa will have some redemption arc and honestly with a back-story like this it kind of seems like the anime is trying to convince us not to be too harsh in our judgement. But while his back-story explains his warped personality, it certainly doesn’t excuse it.

Still, at least he’s understandable now even if I still want Mikado to give him a good talking to the next time he tries to take advantage. Either that or just leave him behind and go and live his own life. Though lets be honest, with the revelations about Mikado’s father in episode 5 it is unlikely Mikado is going to have an easy and complication free life regardless.

The one thing The Night Beyond The Tricornered Window has convinced me of is that being special causes more problems than it is worth.

Well, once again we can lay at least one anime character’s trauma at the feet of bad parenting. In this case Hiyakawa’s mother who ‘selflessly’ separates herself from her son so that he can be used as a tool of a cult. In this episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window we see Hiyakawa aging from child to teen and then as we see his interactions with Hanzawa after we see him become an adult. A really twisted one.

But who can really blame him when he was isolated from others in the basement of a very dodgy religious group and his only interactions were distorted ones. Admittedly, you have to wonder why he isn’t still receiving a lot of therapy because it really does seem like after the police attended the scene of the church where everyone except Hiyakawa was dead, there wasn’t a lot of probing into Hiyakawa or a lot of emotional support provided to deal with the trauma.

It all seems a bit weird actually. Hanzawa just kind of finds this boy eating rice inside the scene of a massacre, surrounded by bodies that had clearly in some cases been dead for weeks, and just leads him out. Sure he asks him if he was the perpetrator or victim, but what kind of question is that given the situation?

Basically, The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window really doesn’t want us probing the details of this back-story too closely. It just wants to paint this really quite weird back-story to provide some foundational reason for Hiyakawa’s overall weird personality.

And you know, when I don’t think too deeply about it, there’s kind of a logic here. As much as you get in most B Grade horror stories where some kid or person suffered some tragedy in their past and then just kind of becomes an unstoppable killing machine in the present and it is all just kind of justified because ‘back-story’.

Anyway, the final sequence this week in The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window brings Hanzawa face to face with Erika for the first time in the series and it doesn’t go great. Not sure what either character was really trying to accomplish but it didn’t end great for Hanzawa’s wife (at least I think she’s his wife).

If I had to say whether or not I enjoyed this episode, I’m just going to shrug. It does fill in some necessary gaps and it seems to connect two characters who so far hadn’t really come together, but there’s a lot of question marks around the plot here. That said, there apparently 12 episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window and we’re already at episode 6 so we are going to see how this plays out at this point.

You can read the full season review here.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window started with a sequence that almost made me cheer this week. While Mikado didn’t actually sever his connection with the manipulative and clearly sketchy Hiyakawa, they certainly make it clear that Mikado isn’t just going to ignore Hiyakawa’s comments from episode 4. If anything, Mikado is actually seriously re-considering their entire working relationship and it is about time.

While I definitely think they are setting up a redemption arc for Hiyakawa (and he probably doesn’t deserve it) at least this story doesn’t let him just keep walking all over Mikado and certainly doesn’t condone his prior actions.

The framing used in The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window as Mikado leaves the office and Hiyakawa is left alone at his desk and we pull away from him makes him look small and powerless and it is the first time he’s visually looked anything but in control of a situation. It is a massive step in changing the relationship between these characters.

Of course, rather than let that moment stand on its own as a triumph for Mikado, The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window feels the need to reinforce the basic idea by having Keita, the fortune teller from episode 2, randomly appear as Hiyakawa faces a spirit and gives Hiyakawa a bit of a dressing down.

It isn’t as though Hiyakawa doesn’t deserve it. It is more that it feels unnecessary within the same episode. This would have had more impact last week or maybe as a reinforcer in a future episode.

The Night Beyond The Tricornered Window remains about as subtle as a brick through a window.

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But while Mikado is helping Erika with her English homework (still not sure why that was necessary) the story this week takes a turn and we abruptly are in the past finding out how Mikado’s mother met his father and why he left.

It really was an abrupt turn for The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. We’re in a bus listening to two girls discuss a guy one of them met in the park and at first I was wondering where we were and who these characters were but then it kind of clicked together that this was Mikado’s mother so given the age and hair-style we were in the past. I’ve seen smoother transitions to flashback sequences.

Also, I’m not really clear what we gained from the flashback at this stage as it feels like there are potentially a few plot points that might be significant but really the only concrete facts we gained were that Mikado’s father could definitely see ghosts and got close to his mother because somehow she protected him, he left because with Mikado and his father together the mother couldn’t protect both of them, and now he’s the twisted crazy guy who uses Erika to curse people.

How we got from past to present is still a little bit inconclusive. Also, his whole cursing the people near him to forget his name and face is just really kind of creepy (which I guess it is supposed to be).

It isn’t just Mikado’s parents getting back-story in this episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window though. We also see some of Erika’s childhood and as you can imagine she’s a little twisted having been able to see ghosts for a long time and having invited many of them inside of her and living their deaths (yep, she’s definitely going to need some help).

On its own, this episode is a little piecemeal with a couple of key scenes that seem fairly sparsely connected. However, other than the detective character, all the other characters we’ve kind of encountered in this series appear, and each scene is building on or filling in something that has been missing form the overall picture. So while the episode itself wasn’t really structurally great, I kind of feel it was very worth watching because it is helping to fill some of those holes.

Overall, I’m curious about what direction The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window intends to take next and I’m very curious as to whether Hiyakawa will learn anything from Mikado’s anger or Keita’s demands that he learns a different way to do things.

You can read the full season review here.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Karandi James

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I’ve asked the question before as to whether it is okay to enjoy anime when the characters behave questionably and definitely came to the decision that it was just fine (though you would have to accept that some other anime fans probably won’t enjoy watching the context particularly if it deals with triggering content). The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window continues to be an anime presenting what is a pretty unhealthy relationship between two characters and if that were being played off as sweet or normal I’d probably be a little creeped out but instead I’m wondering just how long this will play out before Mikado takes some kind of action.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that things will end happily ever after. All things considered it would probably be best if Mikado just ran a mile from Hiyakawa but I get the distinct impression they are somehow going to attempt to redeem his character. Would love to be proved wrong on that. But in the meanwhile, I’m really loving the build up in this story.

The Night Beyond The Tricornered Window Isn’t Your Standard Ghost of the Week Supernatural Tale

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed so far about The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window is the supernatural aspect of the story. As much as Mikado gets dragged along to look into various supernatural phenomenon with either Hiyakawa or in episode 2 with Keita, it isn’t a formulaic one mystery in each episode with little connecting the plots.

Instead some episodes have various scenarios and situations and episodes like episode 4 present us with a singular mystery, closely connected with our favourite cursing character Erika, and remains unresolved by the end.

This episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window begins with Hiyakawa loaning out Mikado to the cop (detective?) we met back in the first episode, Hanzawa. Hiyakawa ominously declares there’s a technique he’d like to try out and sends them on their way.

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And yes, his technique is as shady as you would expect. When Mikado calls him when they’ve arrived at their destination, Hiyakawa pretty much takes over Mikado’s body. Though they do an excellent job of having Mikado take on Hiyakawa’s mannerisms from that point and if it wasn’t so awful to think about the fact that Mikado was once again being body-jacked it would actually be pretty amusing.

The story of Mikado and Hanzawa investigating the shop which is a source of disappearances is overlapped by a parallel story of Erika and her teacher more or less laying a similar spell on another shop and making a ‘savings box’ for later (and nothing good is going to come out of that box).

I was wondering at first if we were seeing flashbacks to Erika cursing the same shop Mikado was at however that doesn’t quite work (unless there are some glaring continuity issues). To start with, the shop Mikado is at has a T-intersection directly in front of it whereas the shop Erika is sitting in front of has a playground across from it. I guess they could still have been the same shop but given they talk about previous places they’ve set up similar curses it kind of makes sense to think that Mikado and Hanzawa are investigating a previously established spell while Erika is setting up a new one.

Rather than deliver a definitive answer about whether or not Hiyakawa can overcome this particular curse or do anything about it, The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window goes a different direction. Hiyakawa actually muses about whether making his own curses to clean them up might be a better way to do business. And for once, Mikado gets actually angry.

This results in a weird moment where Mikado looks inside Hiyakawa and well other than being really purple I can’t tell you much about that. Though, given purple is the preferred colour for villains and evil energy in so many anime lets just assume something is not right there.

I said last week that The night Beyond the Tricornered Window gets better each episode and episode 4 continues that trend. Though, potentially it is because Hiyakawa is working through Mikado for so much of the episode rather than with them and so there’s a little less opportunity for truly cringe worthy dialogue.

You can read the full season review here.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Karandi James

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I get a lot of seasonal viewers have already dismissed The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window after the ultra-cheesy and somewhat sleazy first episode, however I’m kind of glad I decided to stick with it. Episode 3 is intriguing and we finally get a conversation with Erika who has a bit of a fun personality and also calls out Hiyakawa on his possessive tendencies. From start to finish this episode kept me focused and it left me with a real curiosity about who these characters really are and what is really driving them.

When The Night Beyond The Tricornered Window started it didn’t really nail its execution. However that’s left plenty of room for the next couple of episodes to show improvement.

This episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window stars with Hiyakawa and Mikado investigating a potential spirit in a pond though mostly this sequence just reinforces to the audience what we already know. Hiyakawa is most definitely shady and Mikado does not ask enough of the right questions.

What episode 3 adds to the mix later in the episode after the encounter with Erika is the possibility that Mikado can’t ask the right questions potentially because of some direct interference from Hiyakawa. The scene plays out uncomfortably, and I’m pretty sure it was supposed to, as Hiyakawa most definitely forces Mikado beyond his comfort zone (spiritually of course) and Mikado makes an attempt to stay in clear headed and in control but finds he cannot.

It is quite clear now that Hiyakawa is most definitely toxic for Mikado where in episode one it felt like poor writing and BL Tropes from an era we’d all prefer to move on from, by episode 3 they’ve very much established that there’s something off about Hiyakawa and how he has approached Mikado and it feels very much like the plot might actually explore that rather than just leaving the relationship as is.

It would be kind of fantastic if The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window did have Mikado actually remove himself from this situation, or at the very least confronted the situation head on rather than just succumbing to an imbalanced relationship. Whether this story is ambitious enough to deal with that sort of problematic content or whether it just wants to show it while at the same time look like it isn’t endorsing it remains to be seen.

Though I guess anyone who read the source would know, but I’ll just kind of wait and see.

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And before I get onto Erika (who definitely stole this episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window) I kind of liked that Mikado’s life continues to be explored. Why can he see so well? It is curious and the mystery of his father who left his mother when he was four, taking every image of himself with him is definitely suspicious.

We also see that Mikado ends up being contacted by people who knew him from school, and knew he could see spirits, for assistance. They aren’t grateful when he helps them but more see it as confirmation he’s some kind of freak but Mikado seems very used to this kind of treatment and just kind of shrugs it off.

A final point, the eye-balls peering out through the ‘cracks’ in the room was perhaps the creepiest visual I’ve seen in anime in a good long time. Not quite as creepy as Megumi in Shiki as she squeezes out from under the bed, but still, I’ll be seeing those eyes in my dreams I think.

Okay, so the best part of episode 3 of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window was Erika. Not only does she have a bit of a sassy personality when she encounters Mikado and Hiyakawa we also learn a lot about her but that just leaves so many questions about what we still don’t know.

We know she’s cursing people and we learn this is because there’s someone else in her life that is kind of forcing her too, but how and why are not really explored other than we get a glimpse at her home-life and it is off. That’s the only way to describe the situation in her house. It’s not right. We don’t yet know how it got to this point or what is causing it but Erika’s house if clearly not a home.

More than that, her movements are restricted and she’s clearly not free to make her own choices. That isn’t to say she’s an innocent bystander in all this. She happily admits to cursing the girl at her school in the last episode of The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window because the girl was unpleasant. So while there’s something behind Erika’s action she isn’t exactly against laying curses on people who cross her or she decides deserve it. It makes her a somewhat intriguing element in this story as her character really could go a number of different directions.

I hope we see more of Erika in The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. I liked Keita who was introduced last week but was strangely absent this week, but Erika is definitely show stealing quality.

Honestly, episode 3 has been the strongest episode of this series so far and I’m kind of hoping it continues to build on this as each episode so far has felt like it has been on more solid footing than the last and made less missteps. I’m looking forward to where The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window will go and I’ll just hope it hasn’t peaked already.

You can read the full season review here.

Images from: The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Dir. D Iwanaga. Zero-G. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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