Kotoko is asked to come to the nearby mountains where a giant serpent yokai dwells. This serpent needs advice and Kotoko is the only one who can answer the serpents questions.
But before that, she tries to convince Kuro to tag along but he refuses saying that he has plans at home, cooking. He just doesn’t want to go and be around other yokai who cower in fear at the sight of him.
Also before she see the serpent, Kotoko stops by Kuro’s apartment, which she found out the location by having a yokai follow him and report back to her, and tries to convince him one last time. She also didn’t believe him that he was cooking, but was surprised when she barged in his apartment and found that he was telling her the truth. He then kicked her, gave her a jacket for her trek up the mountains, a thermos of soup, and sent her on her way, but not before he took one of her yokai friends for himself which he uses to follow her and find out her location on the mountain.
Anyways, the serpent asked Kotoko about a recent murder that happened on his mountain. A woman, Tanio Aoi, brought a dead body, Yoshihara Hiroo, in a wheelbarrow up to the swamp in the mountains where the serpent lived and dumped the body there.
The serpent was perplexed by a few things: why did she dump the body up in the swamp, why didn’t she weigh the body down, and why did she say that she hopes that the body was found?
Well Kotoko uses the connections that she has, don’t know how she has those connections, and digs up the police report and other information about the incident.
Kotoko proposes many facts and theories about the case as to why the woman did what she did.
Some facts included that Aoi had a boyfriend, Machii, that cheated on her with someone else and they died together in what appeared to be a double suicide, but what actually happened was that Machii was killed by Hiroo, who was discovered to be embezzling money from the construction firm where both of them worked, and Hiroo killed Machii to cover it up.
Aoi was so distraught that she quit her job and moved back into her parents home at the base of the serpents mountain. It would take her two years before she could go back to a resemblance of her former normal life.
Well, shortly after that Hiroo came down with a bunch of bad misfortunes. His wife and child died in a car accident, he mad a huge error at work, and to top it all off he found a malignant tumor in his body. So the only thing he could think of doing was to apologize to the people that he affected with his decisions.
That is how he found his way to Tanio Aoi.
He thought that if he apologized for his wrong doings then the bad things in his life would just stop. Yeah right.
And that is when Aoi, in a fit of anger, killed Hiroo. Well according to Aoi’s own confession.
Hiroo also contacted Machii’s younger brother to apologize, but could not reach him first so Hiroo went to Aoi to seek forgiveness.
But the serpent is still unsure about why the body was dumped in the swamp in the first place.
Kotoko speculated that Aoi might have been covering for the real killer of Hiroo, Machii’s younger brother. Now, it seems that Kotoko speculates that the younger brother killed Hiroo, and that Aoi covered for him because the younger brother has a lot going for his life at the moment and Aoi does not.
So, she takes the body to the swamp and remembers of the legend of the serpent in the mountains. Her hopes are that the serpent eats the body and disposes of any trace of the body. Well, that’s one speculation.
But Kotoko truly believes that Aoi is the sole suspect of the crime and the her reason for her dumping the body is…..
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An interesting episode, but one that is not prevalent in the original manga or the overall story. It’s more of a side story with a confusing cliffhanger.
Why the cliffhanger?
The next episode goes along with the original story from the manga and forwards the overall story too. I mean it wasn’t a bad episode but not an important one either.
Kuro and Kotoko didn’t really have much interactions besides a brief interaction in the beginning and then on the mountain, but even on the mountain Kuro was more of an onlooker.
Again not a bad episode, but seemed kinda early to have a side story episode in just the second episode.
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Thanks for reading.
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