Yuuko Archives | 100 Word Anime

Overview:

Watanuki can see spirits and they bother him fairly continuously. One day, as he is being harassed on the street by spirits he touches a fence and suddenly they back away. Entering the house he meets the mysterious Yuuko who offers to fix his problem in exchange for Watanuki working in her store where she grants wishes for a price. Though reluctantly, Watanuki accepts her offer and enters a world full of strange and supernatural occurences.

Review:

The idea of a mysterious person being able to grant wishes for a price is hardly a new one in fiction. Its pretty much as old as they come when you consider Rumpelstiltskin and other fairy tales that play on exactly that notion. What makes xxxHolic interesting is that you never really know if Yuuko is out for personal gain or not. While the price she demands at times seems steep, she always follows through on her end of the deal and considering what is being asked of her it only makes sense that it come at heavy cost.

So the premise of this story works fundamentally very well. As does the slightly spooky and yet glamorous setting of Yuuko’s store/house. It is unsettling and yet visually compelling as is Yuuko’s basic appearance. She is beautiful but beautiful in a way that makes you sense something slightly inhuman about her. The opening music, the butterfly motif, all of the aesthetics work at creating a truly enjoyable atmosphere for a mysterious story about spirits, contracts and other supernatural occurrences.

What I like less about the show is Watanuki himself. He is an incredibly irritating character. His hissy fits, his moments of self-delusion as he imagines himself with the pretty girl from school that he clearly has a crush on even though she’s clearly up to something, his sudden bursts of anger, his constantly underestimating or misinterpreting Yuuko’s actions… He is an incredibly childish character and most of the time you just want Yuuko to put him straight and yet for the most part his actions go without rebuke. Occasionally she’ll deliver a cutting remark to make him reflect and then we get the even more painful Watanuki being humble scene usually before he flies into yet another unwarranted rage.

This means I kind of have a love/hate relationship with the show. I watched xxxHolic because I loved Tsubasa Chronicles and Yuuko’s brief appearances in that anime fascinated me. On learning there was a story focused on her I just couldn’t resist. And she is fantastic while Watanuki is just kind of tiresome.

It isn’t as though he doesn’t grow some through the course of the series and certainly the follow up season did have him grow significantly. However, despite liking the overall premise of the show and loving Yuuko and the aesthetics, Watanuki is a bit of a sticking point. He just isn’t a lot of fun to watch as a character.

The rest of the cast are all kind of interesting or forgettable by various measures but they help to fill out the world and give direction for Yuuko and Watanuki so that isn’t really a problem. Watanuki’s friends (?) from school each have secrets of their own though in the first season of xxxHolic little is revealed about that.

Each episode is more or less a stand alone story, however artefacts from previous stories come up later and Watanuki becomes more knowledgeable and asks less questions later on in the series. Still, the basic set up is someone comes to the store or Watanuki stumbles upon something, there’s a brief consultation with Yuuko and Watanuki will usually be unimpressed with her initial response so do something stupid, there’s another consultation with Yuuko where someone will make a deal and she’ll either take action or direct someone to take action to resolve the problem. It is fairly formulaic but it doesn’t feel overly repetitive given the sheer number of different issues the characters face.

If you are in the mood for a slow paced story with a little bit of mystery and a focus on the supernatural, xxxHolic is certainly something worth checking out. Not to mention, some of the quotes that you will come across in this show will stick with you long after you finish watching it.

If you’ve watched it, please let me know your thoughts.

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Karandi James

There’s no mystery that I really enjoyed aspects of this anime. Yuuko took a place on my Top 5 list of Characters with Convenient Missing Memories and the anime made my top 5 list of supernatural anime. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues with this series. With its varying tone, characters that don’t always click, and generally a sense that the main story is really only about four episodes worth of content and the rest is just kind of padding to flesh it out to a whole season, Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a fun ride at times but isn’t exactly A+ material.

So what is it about?

Teiichi Niiya has just enrolled in a new school and after getting lost in the old school building comes across a room that is rumoured to be haunted. There he meets Yuuko, the ghost of the school and somehow he can see and touch her. The two form the Paranormal Investigation Club to figure out the mystery of Yuuko’s forgotten past. They are joined by Kirie Konoe who can also see Yuuko but is convinced she’s an evil spirit and Momoe Okonogi who would love to see spirits but remains blissfully ignorant of most of the goings on.

Just so you know, there are spoilers in the review below.

As much as I genuinely love the experience of watching Dusk Maiden of Amnesia it is a hard anime to recommend to someone else. The biggest issue being that this story wants to be three separate anime and keeps changing its mind and shifting directions. That isn’t to say that each part isn’t entertaining in its own way, however the abrupt tonal shift and change in direction for the characters is a little bit jarring. Also, the first episode, while amusing if you watch it through after watching the rest of the anime, is a pretty terrible introduction to the series. Given how many people will stop right then and there, it isn’t a mystery as to why so few people end up talking about what is otherwise a fairly reasonable anime.

One of the positives of this story is Teiichi Niiya. As the lead in this story had the potential to be just another middle-school anime protagonist. And at first he does seem like that. He starts out fairly generic and dull in his response to Yuuko’s dilemma.

Oh, you’re dead. That’s too bad. You don’t remember what killed you? Let’s find out.

But that quickly gives way. After his initial acceptance of what Yuuko tells him and the situation he starts to realise that things are off and becomes quite active in his pursuit of the truth hidden in the school. He persists in this even after Yuuko actively seeks to stop him. So does that make him just a go-getter who won’t give up on his goal?

Not really. There are several instances where things look dicey for the pair. After Niiya breaks his leg (or his leg is broken after shadow Yuuko pushes him down a flight of stairs), and after Yuuko purposefully sheds all memory of Niiya it really does look like things are done and it takes awhile and some prompting after some events for things to get back on track.

Teiichi, while accepting enough of the premise so as to not be the annoying ‘in-denial’ protagonist (of the kind William became in Devils and Realist) is also not over-powered, super-smart, the centre of a harem (though it almost goes there) or anything really other than the descendant of someone who had been close to Yuuko and an actual nice guy (but not a complete push-over for the whole series).

Yuuko is another positive. The reason for her fairly selective memory loss is not only a plot device that is explained, but it is actually kind of clever and almost believable in a supernatural story. That the trauma of her death was too much of a burden to carry that she threw it off, creating a shadow version of herself, and then she continued to throw off any negative emotions or memories, feeding the shadow version and remaining up beat regardless of the situation, feels like something that could happen (when dealing with a ghost at least). I really liked how this part of the story played out and I loved how Yuuko utterly resisted being reconciled with her memories. And when we see how she was killed it is pretty horrible.

With these two leads at the helm, there’s a lot to enjoy about how the events in Dusk Maiden actually plays out even if it isn’t all smooth sailing.

The music and atmosphere of this show is also pretty amazing. It’s part of the reason I wish they’d played this story straight as a supernatural investigation with a hint of romance instead of trying to squeeze in the school club, slice of life, comedy elements. The old school building is dripping with atmosphere and the sunsets, lighting, use of wind, everything just creates this glorious supernatural atmosphere and it is all preceded by an opening song that while it isn’t great to listen to on its own (it’s not bad) just perfectly fits what this show could have been.

But, that brings us to some of the more negative elements of this anime.

I mentioned this before but the show does not know what it wants to be other than supernatural (which doesn’t tell you much other than that there’s a supernatural element in this case a ghost). It starts off almost pure comedy with the ghost playing with Okonogi who can’t see Yuuko, and this is almost immediately followed by the ghost trapping herself and Niiya in a food elevator which leads to the standard accidental breast grabs that show up in anime all the time.

However, after a few episodes the comedy elements seem to give out to actual supernatural investigations and several cases are taken and solved (though it turns out Yuuko’s boredom accounts for a lot of the mysteries around the school). Anyway, this is very much the kids in a club phase of the story.

Then things take a turn for the dark and it seems like they are looking for some genuine psychological horror at this phase of the story but it is hard to take it seriously due to everything that came before.

Lastly, we seem to hit upon a supernatural-romance ending. Which is sweet and dramatic and really touching but was I watching a supernatural romance?

None of these parts are bad in and of themselves and they actually do all work to form a cohesive story but it’s hard to know just who the intended audience was given very few people are likely to sit through all of those different phases happily even if it is only 12 episodes.

And of course, this anime being a school comedy goes for the classic boob grab as comedy aspect. Girls have breasts. We get it. Amazingly enough this is a known fact. Do our two female students and one ghost need to compare sizes and take any opportunity to glare at each other’s busts. Does our male lead need to actually grab Yuuko’s breast to prove he can touch a ghost?

While this isn’t over the top groping or fan-service it just doesn’t feel like it fits into this story (at least not after the first couple of episodes where it kind of feeds into the comedy elements). Normally these sorts of anime antics are ignorable, but as I said, they just don’t fit with anything else on the screen so it almost makes you wonder if they were contractually obligated to include it.

The entirety of episode 1 is a problem. As an extra or something similar, this episode isn’t so bad, but as an introduction to the series it is pretty terrible.

While I know this gets said a lot, I will say it anyway. This show does get better. The first episode is really not a good example of what this show does well nor is it particularly interesting when you don’t know or care about any of the characters. This episode fares better after you’ve watched the whole series and then when you do a rewatch you actually don’t think the first episode is so bad. I just remember it took me three goes to initially watch the anime in the first place because I kept rage quitting episode 1.

As I said, this is a hard anime to recommend but if you like supernatural stories then you will probably find lots to enjoy in this even if one or two parts of it annoy. On the bright side, none of the elements really stick around long enough to be too painful because this show just keep pushing forward.

If you’ve watched Dusk Maiden of Amnesia I’d love to know what you thought of it.

Thanks for reading
Karandi James

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