Darker than BLACK – 08

Summary:

Hei manages to track down a Fiore company directory from ten years ago and hands it over to Huang, but the group’s problem right now is that they don’t know where Mao is. At that moment, a police sergeant named Yabuta Tatsuo is bringing Mao to the Yuzuki household, though Mao is at a complete loss for where he is right now. Yabuta later explains to Gai that the corpse he found in the house filled with garbage was identified as Katsuragi Toshiko, and the police suspect she died after the upstairs railing she was leaning against broke and she fell to her death. He refers to Gai as Matsukichi, but even though Gai says that he threw that name away and is now called Kurasawa Gai, Yabuta isn’t impressed and thinks that detective work is impossible for Gai. On the way back to the Yuzuki house, Gai runs into Hei on the street and questions what Hei is doing loitering around. Hei claims that he’s out for a walk because the stars are pretty, but when Gai looks up to see what Hei is talking about, Hei uses the opportunity to disappear.

When he arrives at the Yuzuki house, Gai learns that the cat he caught and gave the police to return to Arisa was the wrong one. Unbeknownst to them, the cat they have is Mao who’s worried about losing his wireless bell communicator and being turned over to the public health department. Talking with Gai, Arisa recalls being visited by Toshiko when Toshiko was still married and remembers realizing that Toshiko didn’t wear perfume. Her late husband had never told Toshiko to wear perfume because he didn’t hate her body odor, and this was very frustrating for Arisa. As Gai leaves the house afterwards, the housekeeper gives him Mao in a cage to take along. Unsure of what to do with a cat, Gai plays around with the idea of throwing Mao into the river until Mao speaks up against animal abuse. Gai doesn’t notice that it was the cat who spoke, so he looks around and sees the Contractor who’s been following him because of the jacket.

Gai recognizes the Contractor from the cafe and thinks that this man has something to do with the case, but he jumps to the wrong conclusions when the Contractor asks if Gai is also a Contractor. Tired of the talk that’s not bringing him any closer to getting his jacket back, the Contractor activates his power and takes over Gai’s body. In stumbling backwards from the initial body transfer, the Contractor inadvertently knocks Mao’s cage down the steps towards the river, but the Contractor doesn’t notice because he’s only concerned about the jacket. Mao looks around and finds a crow in a nearby tree, so he decides to uses his own power to possess it. He is able to use the crow’s body to steal the jacket and fly away with it, but unfortunately he doesn’t pay attention to where he’s headed and smacks right into the side of a bridge. Luckily for Mao, he’s still able to see his cage and returns to the cat body before the crow hits the ground and dies. Having figured out that Mao is the same cat from last time, the Contractor gets ready to kick the cage into the river, but he then gets attacked by Hei.

Speaking quickly, Mao advises Hei to get into the guy’s blind spot so that Hei won’t be possessed. Hei manages to pull the Contractor against the railing and jump behind him, but the Contractor is now within sight of his old body, so he throws the jacket over and returns to it. Back in his original body, the Contractor immediately stands up, grabs the jacket, and runs off. Hei attempts to chase him, but this lets loose the cable that was holding Gai’s body to the railing, so Gai’s body tumbles backwards towards Mao’s cage and the river. Mao’s cries for help force Hei to give up the chase in order to save the cat and Gai instead. The next day, Gai has a cold even though he’s not sure what happened. When Kiko tells him about hearing of something strange in the neighborhood concerning Arisa, Gai inquires around and finds himself back at Toshiko’s house where the garbage men are collecting all the trash. It is here that Gai notices some plastic bottles glinting in the sunlight and realizes something.

Elsewhere, Hei gets a picture of the Contractor from Yin and shows it to Mao, but the cat initially doesn’t respond because he’s connected to the network. Since Hei doesn’t know what that means, Mao explains that a server compensates for the shortfalls of a cat’s brain. Sometimes this doesn’t work, so the cat’s consciousness wins over – that’s what happened earlier when Mao was at the garbage mansion. As for the person they’re after, Yin identifies him as Ukiyama Norio, a Contractor with the ability to manipulate gravity. Hei finds this weird because Ukiyama has shown his power to be possessing other people, so Yin tells him that the person with the power to possess is Amitabh Kapur who is in north India. Mao realizes that Kapur took over Norio’s body, and during that time lost his own body in some accident. Gai meanwhile returns to Arisa to reveal that the police found out that Toshiko had chronic heart disease and think that she had a heart attack, causing her to fall over that railing.

Although the police have ruled it an accident, Arisa detects some doubt in Gai and wonders if he suspects her. Gai starts by questioning why Arisa sent him to Toshiko’s house, and when Arisa tries to say it was because of the missing cat, Gai asserts that Toshiko wouldn’t have taken the cat because she didn’t like them, as was evident by the plastic bottles filled with water. Instead, he thinks that Arisa wanted him to find Toshiko’s remains and explains that he was told that Arisa was seen around that area half a year ago. Thinking that she had enough motive, Gai accuses her of being the criminal, but when she asks him for evidence, he can only say that it’s a detective’s intuition. Arisa starts laughing at his request to turn herself in to the police and reveals that Toshiko was already dead when she got there. She had heard about the garbage and had gone to check it out because that’s where her husband had lived since he was young, so Arisa didn’t want it to get dirty. That’s when she found the dead body.

Arisa hadn’t told anyone about it because she wanted to stay out of trouble, though in truth she had thought at the time that it would have been fine for Toshiko’s body odor to become rotten. Gai doesn’t understand this because Arisa had been the one who stole Toshiko’s husband and ended up getting everything, so Arisa explains that her husband had greedily used all his senses including seeing, touching, and licking. If it had just been those, Arisa wouldn’t have lost to Toshiko, but her husband was mainly obsessed with smell, and the smell he loved wasn’t Arisa’s. She knows now how strange it seems now for her to have been fixated on body odor, but Arisa feels she only achieved the title of wife, so she hadn’t been able to get what she had really wanted. While she and Gai are having this conversation, Hei meets with the Contractor and quickly kills him. The last thing the Contractor does before dying is to sniff a dirty sock.

Hei finds some vials on the Contractor which Mao explains are from industrial spies. After Huang appears and makes Hei hand over the vials, Mao wonders if the price of this contract was really smelling socks since Hei hadn’t allowed the Contractor any time to use his power before dying. Huang suggests that the Contractor just wanted to smell, making Mao realize that this sock must have belonged to the original Amitabh Kapur. The smell on it is the only thing that remains of Kapur’s body, and Mao thinks that maybe this guy’s price had been paid when he lost his body – just like Mao. It is sometime later that the daughter of the ramen shop owner who fed Mao finds a similar looking cat. She at first thinks it’s Hernandez – her name for Mao – but she soon notices that its a different cat. When the cat runs away from her, its collar falls off and the girl finds that the cat’s name is Miiko – the same cat that Gai had been searching for.

Gai, however, never ended up finding that cat and thinks that perhaps it was all an excuse. Regardless, he doesn’t care too much because he got the rest of the payment, so this is all in the past. He also notes that he sees Hei around sometimes, but he only thinks of Hei as someone who eats a lot. At that moment, Hei comes out of the ramen shop and finds Mao sleeping across the street on a playground slide. Mao doesn’t like being woken up since he finally got to have a dream, which surprises Hei because he didn’t know Mao could see dreams. Mao admits that it was only a silly little dream where he ate and bathed, though it makes him think of how great it is to become a cat. Seeing Hei’s gloomy face, Mao winks and tells Hei that this is the point that Hei should laugh.

Preview

This wasn’t a bad episode, but overall I think this was the weakest of the four mini-arcs so far. I liked how we got to see a lot more about Mao and how he can use his powers, and I liked the story with Kapur and Ukiyama, but I thought those didn’t fit together very well with the Arisa and Toshiko story since they were only really connected by Gai and the theme of smell. The Arisa and Toshiko stuff was interesting, but it didn’t have any particular impact on Hei’s group or what they were doing. I suspect though, that the Fiore company stuff might come into play again later. I also felt that this episode was almost too serious in comparison to last week’s first half, and there were parts where Gai lost his charm and just became a normal detective.
Part of me also wishes that this show had a bit more action to counteract all the dialogue. I enjoyed the part in the middle where Mao took control of the crow, but the final fight between Kapur and Hei could have been a bit longer. In any case, the preview for next week shows that we’re starting a mini-arc centered around Kirihara Misaki and her past, and it’ll hopefully be better than this one.