Category: Himitsu ~The Revelation~

I’m not sure if I’m the only one in this, but so far I’ve found the one-episode stories of Himitsu more interesting than the arcs that took up two episodes. Okay, that may be because the shorter stories were easier to understand, but the shortness of the one-episode arcs also has something appealing to it: it’s episodes like this one that are short and sweet, and still pack a punch. I’m interested in whether this’ll remain the same during the second half of this series (assuming of course that Himitsu will have 24/26 episodes. It would obviously be awesome if there turn out to be more episodes).

In this episode, an important businessman dies. He has a large family, but the most peculiar thing is that he can’t see people’s faces. His entire life, he’s been working hard, though he never could enjoy much social interaction, especially in the later half of his life, I believe. AS a result, he never had a good connection with his family, and refused to put his family into his will, because they’ll just waste the money he worked hard for. Instead, he left all his possessions to the one girl whose face he could see, and whom he met ten years before. That meeting made a huge impact on him. But as a result, his son got jealous and decided to kill him over it.

It’s a bit hard to imagine how someone wouldn’t be able to see faces, but you can also see this in symbolism: the guy was married, he lived with a large family, but there was no attempt made to connect to him, which in his turn didn’t give him much motivation for social interaction. I think he felt like everyone around him was around him because of his money, and not because of himself. That’s why the innocence of this little girl made such an impact on him, because she was too young to really care about his money or status.

Judging from the pattern of this series so far, the next episode is probably going to be two episodes long again. This time, I’m going to try and understand it immediately, instead of finding that I missed some huge plot-hole later. The power of Himitsu really emerges when you see the big picture, and not the smaller ingredients. Though I do hope that the focus won’t be on Aoki so much. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good character, but he has a nasty tendency to overshadow all of the other characters, who are just as interesting as he is. 😛

Another very solid episode from Himitsu. Though it wasn’t among the best episodes of this series, it still had me glued at the screen during the tense moments. This episode kept a lot of things unmentioned. It never went into detail as to what Kinoko’s father, three friends and family did to her. All that we saw confirmed is that she was once abused by her father. Her father turned out to be obsessed and in love with her, and Kinoko knew this, so she used him as a scapegoat to take all the blame, which is why Kinoko didn’t kill him. He’d be sentenced to death anyway.

Still, I like series that assume that their viewer has a brain. There’s of course a fine line between left-out information and plain laziness, but I suspect that the creators knew full well what they were doing in this episode.

I think the reason why this episode wasn’t as good as the previous ones was that there were times in which we didn’t follow Aoki’s thought-pattern, but just jumped right to his conclusions, while the thing that made me fall in love with this series was the seemingly endless search for that one clue that helped to push the case closer to getting solved.

This is going to be another two-episode arc. I like how the creators have managed so far to relate Aoki’s ordinary problems to the extreme cases that we see portrayed in the cases that have to be investigated. This episode is all about privacy and the intrusion of it.

In this episode, a girl murders nearly her entire family, and her father ends up taking all the blame and smashes the victim’s heads while the daughter hides for three years until the case dies down. The father then passes away (I didn’t quite catch how), and Aoki how the girl had murdered these people. The problem however is that for some reason, Aoki is not allowed to reveal the information he discovered. I didn’t exactly understand the reasons, but I think it has to do with the fact that Kinuko (the girl) claimed a loss of memory, and she would end up being released anyway.

Aoki basically doesn’t want a killer like that to go unpunished, but at the same time, Maki reminds him how acting like this won’t bring the dead ones back. There’s one thing I don’t understand, though. I mean, what guarantee is there that the girl will never kill someone else again? If I’m not mistaken, then one of the purposes of throwing killers in jail is to make sure that they won’t repeat their actions in the future.

In any case, in the next episode we’ll probably discover why Kinuko ended up killing her parents. We already know that her father invaded her privacy once, when she was “spending time” with her boyfriend, but that doesn’t yet explain why the father was the only one surviving and the rest of the family died.

Really, this is clearly the cleverest series to have come out this season. Kaiba may be good at other points, but Himitsu is a master in dropping hints that might solve the mystery. This series really draws you in like no other, also with the help of the terrific soundtrack. You really need to watch an episode at least twice in order to fully understand it.

The way the creators also revealed that Nanako fancies Aoki was also quite creative. Most series just show a very obvious and unsubtle blush, though Nanako instead just misses her chair, and you can also constant see her around Aoki, without him noticing it.

And the theme of this episode… it was really pushing taboos, as it reflected an issue of modern society that even Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei didn’t want to enter: the bother that elder people are to their younger generations. The culprit is a guy who ritualistically kills off older people who aren’t wanted by their families due to poverty. That one scene where the kid asks when he can get his own room: “you’ll get your room as soon as grandfather dies”. “Oh, I hope he dies soon then”.

On a side-note: there’s something I’ve been wondering. It rather annoys me a bit how many people are dismissing this series because it looks “gay” (what’s wrong with homosexuals anyway?). But at the same time, you don’t hear anyone saying this about Death Note (a series that shows quite a few similarities with Himitsu, by the way), even though that too featured a number of *ahem*”bishies”, that even ended up washing each other’s feet at one point.

I must say that Maki has a great personality as a leader. He’s scary, but not in the way that he loses his entire personality. This series has done really well to show that the guy’s got experience. I’m really glad that this season came with so many series with adult-characters. I mean, teenagers are nice and all, but seeing teenagers in every single series does go too far. The picture that these offer is just too one-sided.

In any case, this series really knows how to deliver its mystery well. The picture that the president shredded turned out to be the one of his daughter’s fiancée: Ross Macaulay, who turned out to be a terrorist. The president didn’t know any of this, until the guy delivered a note to the president, telling him to meet at the lighthouse. When the president got stabbed, he realized that his daughter was dating a wrong guy, and yet he tried to protect both her and her fiancée by shredding the picture of him that he carried right before he died, in order to lay as little connection as possible between him and Ross Macaulay.

Aoki realizes this, because he’s in the same situation with his sister. She too is dating the wrong guy, and yet he can’t get himself to separate the two, and he’s always watching from a distance. The great thing about this episode is how everything comes together, and yet it does force you to think about the case. And that’s EXACTLY why I like mystery so much.

I’m amazed. I’ve now seen most of the second episodes of the major series that aired this season, apart from Kaiba, Toshokan Sensou, Nijuu Mensou no Musume and Kyouran Kazoku Nikki, and without a doubt Himitsu has been the best series of the season so far, and Kaiba is going to have to be really good in order to top it, but even RD, Kurenai, xxxHolic and Amatsuki didn’t match up to the awesomeness that have been the first two episodes of Himitsu.

The storytelling in this series is absolutely amazing. We first get a bit of background on the main character. He’s clearly a rookie (he still lives with his sister and parents), and he still needs to get used to the idea that he’s invading the privacy of the people he investigates. We then switch to the investigation of the murder of the president of America. The only clue (we don’t even get to see the face of the murderer) is a strange picture he shreds, just as he’s about to die. What is this picture, and why didn’t he want anybody to see it?

The irony is of course obvious: it’s the only clue that the investigation-department has, and they’re basically trying to find something that the president wanted to keep secret at all costs, even after his death. The rest of the episode explores this guy’s life as the investigation department tries to find the moment in his life where he got the picture. I think this post by Iwa ni Hana sums up why I love this series so much:

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is the typical pattern that Shimizu-sensei’s stories will follow. The first half typically presents the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and in the second half the action accelerates faster than you can react, and finally the story is brought to a climax and ends like a bang on a forceful note.”

It really makes me wonder why it’s taken this long for one of the artist’s mangas to get an adaptation. Especially considering how she (he?)’s been writing for decades now. You can also really hear that the music has been done by the same guy who worked on the music of Death Note. I’ve said it before, but it’s great to see so much great soundtracks this season.

Before this season started, I expected that my favourite animation-studio of this season would end up being Production IG, but now that I’ve seen every new show, I realize how wrong I was: this really is THE season for Madhouse. They made a great move to transfer all of their bad staff to Kamen no Maid Guy, because their other series really shine so far (okay, perhaps Chi’s Sweet Home shines a bit less than the others, but even that one turned out better than I expected). Before the season started, I was a bit angry at Madhouse because they kept screwing up their adaptations. Claymore’s ending got screwed up, Shigurui missed its entire final chapters in the anime, Dennou Coil’s ending was rather rushed, Saiunkoku Monogatari ran into budget problems for its final episodes, Kaiji disappointed, and let’s not start with Nougami Neuro and Devil May Cry.

But with this season, they really have the potential to redeem themselves. It first started when Mokke suddenly delivered an awesome ending. With Himitsu and Chi’s Sweet home being concepts where you can’t screw up the ending, and the director of Mokke working on Allison to Lillia, the only real fear for a screwed up ending remains in Kaiba.