Kusuriya no Hitorigoto – Episode 34 Review

「怪談」 (Kaidan)
“A Ghost Story”

This episode was very much not what I expected, a deviation from the usual Kusuriya formula in some sense, basically turning out to be a summer ghost story “test of courage”. The big news at the Jade Palace is the arrival of three new maids, sisters in fact, who Mao Mao promptly confuses. That and her lack of sociability probably doesn’t give the best first impression, but she doesn’t care, scuttling off to her storehouse, much to the chagrin of the other ladies in waiting. As payback, Mao Mao gets reluctantly dragged along to a nighttime gathering of what appears to be some sort of ritual, everyone carrying a candle and wearing a head covering- except for the organizer, an older woman.

The way the camera kept focusing on the fire, I thought it was going to be some sort of attempted séance or fortune telling ritual involving burning incense or bones, but then they launched into “scary” stories. Which, as those sorts of things generally turn out to be, are urban legends based on hearsay and misinformation. The broken telephone chain game nature of folklore is precisely why I find them fascinating. Part of the fun is in deducing what the original, scientific cause could be and how it got twisted into the final end product. Which is exactly what Mao Mao does, explaining that the forbidden forest story was a matter of glowing poisonous mushrooms more than a spirit haunting people. Mao Mao’s own contribution is so hilariously in character for her- starting off with something spooky, a glowing fireball in a graveyard, which turns out to be something totally natural (well, in the sense that it’s not a ghost)- a human graverobber. My favorite of the stories might have been the one with the monk and the murderous ghost, because it reminded me a lot of the sorts of stories you hear in old Japanese legends, like in the ancient anthology Konjaku Monogatari Shu (some of the stories there were imported from China).

Mao Mao effectively kills the mood, but that may not have been the only thing that was dead. The organizer’s insistence on 13 stories in a group of 12 people was strange to be sure- they’re one person shy. Her story echoes the Empress Dowager’s story from last week about the Emperor collecting child brides. Everyone starts dozing off, which initially doesn’t seem so strange – it is late at night after all. Until Mao Mao wakes up enough to realize the dangers of the burning fire in a closed room, and rescues everyone from the gas in opening the window. That it itself was kind of anticlimactic- I was expecting the organizer to put up a fight in stopping Mao Mao, but instead, the woman just…disappears and everyone goes home.

I kept waiting for the story to turn somewhere- given how every episode connects in some way to the larger mystery at hand, I couldn’t see how this had any bearing on the recent chain of events in Kusuriya, and I couldn’t believe that they’d spend a whole episode just shooting the breeze in the midnight hour. Until we got to the final story, which had to have been referencing the concubine mentioned last week who gave birth to a girl whose parentage was disowned. Furthermore, that same concubine was the previous organizer of the storytelling circle until she died- last year. That certainly sends the chills up Yinghua’s spine and leads Mao Mao to muse that there are some inexplicable things in this universe. Could this potentially tie back to the beginning of this season, with the mystery of the pregnant princess, or even to Mao Mao herself?

Given Kusuriya’s emphasis on Mao Mao’s scientific mind and the way all the previous mysteries turned out to have natural causes (albeit sometimes anachronistic ones), I thought it odd that the story would take a supernatural turn, if indeed that’s what it was. It conflicts with the atmosphere of the series up until now. So, is there something deeper to this, a living person behind this that we’ll get to later? Or just a one off chills and thrills episode for the sake of it? While it follows the pattern of a breather episode in between arcs, it still left me confused for taking what seems to be a different approach. Like, why did Mao Mao accept those events so readily? It seems unlike her to simply buy into a “ghost host” theory. In the long run, it probably doesn’t matter and won’t impact my positive view on the series, but it’s a head scratcher nonetheless.

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