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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Karandi James
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