Kusuriya no Hitorigoto – Episode 27 Review

「冬人夏草」 (Tōjinkasō)
“Corpse Fungus”

I will say, this series ties a bow tighter than a department store at Christmas. Everything from the past few weeks comes full circle today, from smells, poisons, rear palace rivalries.

But first, in a plot line full of dark narrative alleys, we start off with some lighter fare. Maomao runs into Lady Gyokuyo and Jinshi, who then pulls Maomao in for a private conference. The big news is that Concubine Jin died, supposedly from food poisoning, and a court lady, Tao, about to finish her terms of service, is missing. But, that’s not what Jinshi calls Maomao in for, at least on the surface.

Jinshi is building a school for the common born maids in the rear palace and wants Maomao’s opinion. She gives some solid advice, from location, down to how to bring the masses in. Renaming it “vocational training” is apparently more palatable, emphasizing the practicality of it. The idea of using an occasional snack to draw people in is a clever idea, one I hadn’t thought of. I appreciate Jinshi’s progressive spirit, though I do wonder about the accuracy of it, since I’m not sure that they had schools for commoners, particularly women, in historical China, especially given the emphasis Confucianist thought placed on distinctions between the positions of women and men in it’s philosophy. After some discussion, Maomao and Jinshi decide that the best place to build the new school is the North side, the very same one that was referenced last episode as having “strange smells”. As I noted earlier, there are no coincidences in this series.

The last order of business in the min-conference is Jinshi dispatching Maomao to hunt mushrooms due to dangerous mushroom scavenging on the part of the palace ladies. Mushroom poisoning, food poisoning- methinks we have the cause of the murder here, and so does Jinshi. Maomao, of course, is only too happy to oblige.

Honestly, it sounds convenient that a pain in the ass concubine suspected of poisoning the emperor’s favorite gets poisoned and dies. Lady Hongniang is certainly not grieving the woman’s death, as she was known to be cruel to the other women out of jealousy. There we have our suspect, or so I thought. I connected the dots between the dead concubine and the mushrooms sooner than Maomao did, but I guess you can’t have the MC deducing things too quickly, otherwise the episode couldn’t stretch to 23-24 minutes.

Funerals are always an opportune time to kick up some drama, which the lower ranking Concubine Son takes full advantage of in kicking up a storm and announcing that Concubine Jin is getting her just deserts. It was truly horrible what happened to Concubine Son, suffering abuse at the hands of another raging woman. That scene showing her disfigurement from the poison actually reminds me of a well-known kabuki, Yotsuya Kaidan, where a woman is poisoned by her husband who goes off with another woman, scarring her appearance. There’s a particularly famous scene where her hair falls out as she brushes it, which is echoed in the scene with Concubine Son, though I don’t know that that was intentional, given that this anime is set in China. As horrible as Son’s fate is, I don’t think that justifies the chain of events that followed, a year prior.

After reviewing the evidence from Maomao, Jinshi’s conclusion is that Jin tried to use it on someone else and accidentally touched it herself? I would’ve thought it was that someone else found out about the mushroom and used it on her. Maomao’s deduction seemed pretty close to what I thought, pointing out that the recent inflammation on the corpse was as if someone rubbed it on her face, while her hands were lily white. Who doesn’t have lily white hands- the one maid handing out white lilies at the funeral- well, there’s the culprit. The mushroom itself is a very deadly one that scars to the touch and causes death upon ingestion. Maomao herself had a brush with it as a child, though it bothers her less than it does Jinshi.

The actual outcome, I did not anticipate, involving a body switch with an imposter, namely Tao. Jin actually died a whole year earlier in a scuffle after which Tao, due to her similarities to Jin, is forced by the serving ladies to take her place, using illness as a pretext for changes in personality and habits. Sadly, when Tao was about to leave for marriage, they killed her to keep up the act. Sounds kind of convoluted in a way, but I can jive with it. I will say, though, it makes no sense why the ladies buried Jin with her jewels, when it would be more logical to keep them for the imposter to wear. Instead of the Telltale Heart here, we have the Telltale Mushrooms, which have been growing so plentifully on the North side, due to the corpse fertilizer, which also explains the stench.

As is typical for Kusuriya mysteries, we never find out what happens to the culprit, and Maomao doesn’t particularly care. Though, she cares very much about trying the corpse-fed mushrooms, which are promptly taken away by a disgusted Jinshi. And there we have our first mystery of the season 2. It was way too neatly packaged, but at least they threw some twists in there, as convoluted as they were.

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