Whoa! Time-skip!
The final arc of this series, consisting out of three episodes has finally started, and I’m pleasantly surprised by the setting: we see another Bake Neko, and the setting of the series has suddenly skipped about hundred years, to the industrial age. The medicine seller however remains in the same shape as ever. Is he a Mononoke himself as well? Something tells me that this series is never going to answer that question, and leave it up to the viewer’s imagination.
Anyway, this arc has the potential to be the best one yet because of this. It all revolved around one suicide of a young woman. Somehow, her anger created the Bake Neko, who transported all important people to this mystery in the cabin of a train, who just departed from a newly built station, with lots of festivities.
- We first have a waitress who works at a restaurant where the woman often used to visit.
- Then there’s the conductor who ran over the woman, after she fell off the bridge above the train tracks.
- We also have the detective who investigated her case.
- There was also a young boy who witnessed the woman jump, along with her cat.
- And there’s her employer: a journalist.
- There’s also the mayor of the town, who gets eaten by the Bake Neko before he can tell the others what his role is.
- And to close off, there’s a mysterious widow, whose part in this isn’t quite clear yet, apart from the fact that it’s absolutely vital. Apparently, the woman couldn’t forgive the widow.
And the journalist is hiding something: he’s contradicted himself in this episode. At one time, he says that he often writes on the train, which explains how he doesn’t get sick while doing it (apparently trains back then were quite shaky), but later he claims to often work behind a desk, though he was at the station because the company he works for was short on staff. Why would he lie about something like that? I think that he, the mayor and the widow are the vital ones that need to be watched, the others sound more like unlucky bystanders who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
