This episode wasn’t as serious as the previous ones, it was a bit more relaxed. here weren’t any serious problems like in the previous episodes, and it basically consisted of telling the story of two supernatural foxes, a lucky arrow and Shiritori.
We start out with Watanuki and Himawari attending one of Domeki’s arrow-shooting tournaments. Domeki wins, and he gives Watanuki the end of his winning arrow, as a memento. Watanuki, of course, doesn’t like this. When he walks to Yuuko’s place in order to make her some food, he runs into a strange food-stand, and two badly drawn human-like foxes. One old, and one just a child.
He eats a bit from their stand, and gives the small fox Domeki’s arrow, which appears to be a strong fortune-bringer, keeping away evil spirits (this is logical, as it comes from Domeki, after all). The food appears to taste delicious. Watanuki then remembers that Yuuko’s still waiting for him to make her food, so he leaves. The foxes give him a little meal as thanks for the arrow.
Yuuko, of course, has run into the foxes before, as she’s totally excited when Watanuki brings their food. This has to be, of course, celebrated, involving lots of sake. We also see a couple of screens of a nearly full-moon, meaning that the next night’ll probably feature a full one.
The next day, Yuuko requests Watanuki to go back to the foxes and deliver a package (remember her policies? ^^). Though, as it will be full moon, such as hinted, in combination with friday the thirteenth, and Watanuki’s little problem, he has to be very careful. Therefore, she gives him a little backpack with wings. I don’t know where I’ve seen this, but I got a serious deja-vue with this item.
Anyway, Watanuki heads out, and indeed, he runs into evil spirits, cleverly disguised as poorly-placed shadows. The backpack seemed to contain Mokona, who starts playing Shiritori. Shiritori works like this: you start with a japanese word, and the person next to you has to say another word, beginning with the same letter the first one ended with. This seems to repel all of the evil spirits, though Mokona can’t resist to make Watanuki’s job hard by ending all of his (her? what kind of gender is Mokona actually?) words with “Ri”. We also see Mokona for the first time serious, well, at least semi-serious. I have to say that I liked this play of Shiritori, while running away from the evil spirits.
They arrive at the fox, and then it became clear that Shiritori originated from people who had to walk through evil forest-like surroundings. The Shiritori would keep away all of the evil spirits and danger. Yuuko’s package appeared to be two rare shadow-birds, who only seem to appear in the light of the full moon. The old fox seems to be quite fond of them.
For a laid-back episode like this, I liked it. xxxHolic seems to be following the same pattern Jigoku Shoujo and Mushishi did, only with a lot more emphasis on the main characters, so laid-back episodes seem to be perfect to have been included once in a while.
One thought on “xxxHolic – 05”