Ayatsuri Sakon – 11 – Kyouichi, Futaba, Miho and Shiho

I now realize that most people don’t really know how to obtain this series. The easiest way is through the link below, in which the Ayatsuri Sakon Project has provided downloads for episodes 1-10 and fifteen. Episodes 11-14 can be downloaded through regular bittorrent.

http://asp.dryfire.org

Anyway, about the episode. It promises to be a great arc once more. This time, it’s about a man with a mask, who’s been killing random villagers with a cursed blade. Sakon’s visiting the family who plays a major part in this murder drama. Let’s get on with the characters:

Sakon. He’s been rather cute at the beginning of the episode, when he got so much appraisal by the different members of the family. He remained a bit in the background this episode, in order to let the problem fully explain itself.

Shiho plays the role for the important side-character this time. She’s innocent in any case. Why am I so sure of this? Because she appears in the OP, alongside all of the other important side-characters. She’s the only one who believes in her brother’s innocence. I think this is because he used to play with her very often. She’s got a typical big-brother complex. She’s a bit rude to Sakon in the beginning, though this changes when she sees Ukon in action.

Kyouichi is the eldest brother of the four children of the family. He stole the sword, Byakko, crafted by the famous Muramasa, from his father and ran off with it. Afterwards, three murders on random villagers occurred and he never even returned. It’s indeed easy to label him as the main suspect, but I doubt that he actually was the one. It’ll be very interesting to see his back-story, though.

Akizuki Soushirou is the father of the family. What happened to the mother, we never know. He’s an old man with an obsession for swords, old weaponry and puppets. Around the middle of the episode, the message gets in that yet another villager has been killed. He then secretly leaves the house, rather nervously, to meet up with Kyouichi. This ends up with him getting killed by the killer. At the end of the episode, we find his body at a place, other than where he was killed. Why would the killer go through so much trouble to move a body?

Miho is the third daughter of Akizuki. She’s the one who suspects her older brother with the most enthusiasm. It seems that it’s been quite a shock when she found out what she did, and somehow, she convinced herself that her brother did it, and couldn’t be trusted.

Futaba is the second daughter of Akizuki. She also believes that Kyouichi was the murderer, but she does manage to stay a bit calm when she talks about him, unlike her sisters.

Kikuchi is Futaba’s fiancé. He’s the typical innocent guy who got caught up in events, and now is scared to death. I think he decided to at least find out what’s going on, so that he doesn’t actually get killed because of his ignorance.

Fujita Zenkichi is a reporter. Probably for a local tv-station. He’s got an overall laid-back attitude. An interesting fact is that he was supposed to show up at a performance of Sakon, at the beginning of the episode, but for some reason, he couldn’t find it. During the end of the episode, when everyone travels to Akizuki’s corpse, he also somehow forgot to take his camera along with him. That isn’t really professional behaviour, is it?

We’ve also got an unnamed maid, working for Akazuki. She picks up the phone, every time a mysterious person, thought to be Kyouichi, gives a call. Apart from that, she didn’t really have a big role.

Yoshida is a police-officer. He drops by in order to deliver the message that yet another villager has been killed, in the same way as a year ago. If that’s the only part in this story he has to fulfill, I’ll eat my hat. Especially if you consider what happened in the first arc.

Our main suspect, however, is Oki Katsumi. When you look at the silhouette of the murderer, he is one of the few who could be able to meet it. We also saw Akazuki getting killed. Afterwards, Oki barged in the room. When the phone rang for the second time, Oki was the one to grab it out of the maid’s hands. It’s never certain that he actually talked with Kyouichi in the first place. He also made a small mistake. He was so keen on guiding everyone to Akazuki’s body, that he forgot that nobody knew that he went to do something other than studying. He seems too focused at carrying out his plan that it’s obvious.

Another theory is that Oki and Yoshida are working together. After all, when Oki drove to the place of Akazuki’s body, he drove so fast and missed a turn. Someone who knew the area wouldn’t have done. This could suggest that Yoshida killed the guy and dragged it to the riverbank, while Oki distracted everyone. After all, someone had to be the one to make the phone calls.

And what was up with the guy with car trouble? Anyway, overall, this arc has started very promising. I really like the different characters it features.