Kyouran Kazoku Nikki – 05

Summary:

With the honeymoon trip all planned out, Kyouka wakes up Ouka one morning to show him the airport that’s suddenly appeared right outside their home. Chieri and the other travel agents see the family off, and their plane flies until Kyouka tries to pilot it and crashes it instead. All members of the family make it safely off and find themselves on a crescent shaped island. Without even caring about where they’ll be living, Kyouka brings out her bathing suit and encourages everyone to have fun. When Ouka doesn’t join in, she tries to get him involved and questions if he really loves her. Ouka responds that he can’t love anyone, but he still cares about the family and still likes Kyouka. This is enough to get Kyouka embarrassed and so she drops the subject. The family enjoys themselves for the rest of the day until night falls and they have to find a place to stay. Kyouka isn’t worried about because she happens to have a pamphlet that leads her to a hotel on the middle of the island. Ouka is suspicious of why there’s a hotel in a place like this, but a person then comes out and welcomes them to the Chokokutou Riverside Hotel.

This person is the general manager of the hotel, Nishikura Akeru, but Kyouka insists on calling him Pierre. When Ouka gets a chance to talk with Pierre alone, he figures out that Pierre is actually from the Paranormal Phenomena Bureau of Measures, and Pierre is actually very grateful to Kyouka since her trip allowed him to take on this mission. Pierre also explains that the name of the island was given to mean the island where birds cry, but he reassures Ouka that everything has already been exterminated on the island. That night, Ouka dreams of blood in a city on fire, and he sees a masked woman who asks him about thinking about things that make him want to die. She also talks about a trap that God set and an infinite Hell, and she says that if Ouka were to become a shinigami, then she’d destroy his face. Ouka wakes up from this nightmare to the sound alarms blaring. The building is under attack by an unknown enemy, and Hyouka shows up at his door wanting to know if he can fight and kill. Ouka refuses to let him because he doesn’t think of Hyouka as a biological weapon anymore, and he doesn’t want Hyouka to become a shinigami. Instead, Ouka sends Hyouka to get Gekka and Teika so that they can protect Yuuka, Pierre, and the others, all while he personally heads for Kyouka’s room.

Ouka interrupts Kyouka as she’s watching a love comedy anime, and he thinks that she’s to blame for this attack. Kyouka, however, has no idea what’s going on, and the two are then alerted by Yuuka’s screaming. Outside the hotel, they find a group of bloodied white apes carrying Yuuka, and when Kyouka tries to attack them, she gets punched in the face. One of the apes then flies off with Yuuka, and Kyouka is too injured to stop it. After the rest of the apes leave, Ouka gathers the family and goes over how their enemy seemed to have been targeting Yuuka all along. Unlike how Ouka is approaching the situation calmly, Kyouka sees this as a challenge to the family and is willing to do whatever it takes to get her precious daughter back. To her, being a parent means going as far as performing miracles to save Yuuka. In this case, she uses her cell phone power to telepathically track down Yuuka, and once she verifies that Yuuka is okay, she uses her powers to see what Yuuka sees. It turns out that Yuuka – who had been joined by Gekka – is being served lots of fruit by the apes who are now acting very hospitable.

Yuuka manages to get out of that room and makes her way to a different room with a window to the outside world. To her shock, she discovers that she is high above the island in a castle in the sky. Yuuka then touches one of the crystals that’s lining the walls of the room, and a voice tells her not to. A door opens in the far side of the room, and inside, Yuuka finds an old man on a bed who is connected to a monitoring machine. This man gets angry at Yuuka when she treats him like a monkey and offers him a banana.

ED Sequence

ED: 「世界で一番ヤバイ恋」 (Sekai de Ichiban Yabai Koi) by 戸松遥 (Tomatsu Haruka)
Watch the ED!: Mirror 1, Mirror 2
I thought the Hyouka ED last week was pretty good, but the Chika one this week turned out even better. Tomatsu Haruka has a very easy-to-listen-to voice, and this is a rather catchy song, so I really like it.

Preview

Wow, after the preview from last week, I thought this would be a carefree vacation episode, and it wasn’t like that at all – at least not in the second half of the episode with flying killer monkeys, a castle in the sky, sinister plots, and Ouka’s bloody past. Those crystals in the castle looks suspiciously like the crystals inside of Hyouka, so I wonder if the old man is actually Hyouka’s creator or something, and those monkeys are doing his bidding. The confusing scene about Ouka’s bloody past, on the other hand, seems like it’s setting up for whatever will happen towards the end of the series and doesn’t appear to be connected to the current stuff on the island. The shinigami thing was the theme there, and it’s likely related how Ouka said that he couldn’t love anyone.

Overall, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how there’s what appears to be a pretty solid story beyond all the comedy. I like the contrast of how Kyouka does all these crazy things yet still has all these moments where she acts more parent-like than Ouka (though in this case, you could argue that she’s responsible for all of it in the first place). Since this episode showed that there’s much more here than just a normal vacation, I’m now curious to see how this is all interconnected, if it is at all.