YATAGARASU: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master

Episode 14

Sometimes no matter how far you run, you cannot escape. Yukiya learns that lesson two months after returning home to Taruhi. As you may recall, he opted to leave the kin'u's service at the end of his term, and although the crown prince appeared ready to let him go, he may actually have just been giving the boy a break before swooping in and employing him once again. Given how crafty he can be, it feels likely that he was just allowing Yukiya some time off without letting him know. It also shows how gently ruthless he can be: he's not about to let a retainer as good as Yukiya leave him, but he also knows better than to make that too obvious, especially since the boy has recently lived through the entire fiancée debacle that made up the first half of this season.

Our break is now over, too, and I can't say that I'm sad about it. (Although we'll be getting another one for a few weeks while the Olympics preempts Yatagarasu's broadcast.) The story doesn't waste any time jumping right back in, returning us to the giant bloodthirsty ape-like beings that we ended episode thirteen with. It's a gruesome reintroduction to the series, with a strongly implied child death, and the fact that it's happening in the north is worrisome – not just because that's where Yukiya lives, but also since the kin'u is tracking a strange new drug tied to dangerous transformations in yatagarasu there. The drug, known as “sagecap,” at first glance seems to create rabies-like symptoms, although crows cannot get rabies. But in addition to the foaming mouths and aggression, the yatagarasu under sagecap's repeated influence are also trapped in crow form, turning into mad birds who appear to have no control over any aspect of themselves – they're the lowest form of both human and crow, lacking the intelligence of either.

The burning question is, of course, whether the apes and the sagecap-poisoned crows are suffering from the same addiction. The apes' insatiable appetite for human flesh (we haven't seen them eating anyone who's in crow form) could be a corruption of some aspect of their carnivorous nature, while the crows' aggression is what is altered by the drug. Sage and salvia are both members of the mint family, as is catnip, which feels like it might be significant. We all know that catnip can give cats temporary behavioral changes, and salvia can be used as a psychedelic agent, so the name “sagecap” is unlikely to be a random choice. The dealer seems to be distributed among the disenfranchised, with tales of him first popping up in Central's pleasure district; we see him making a sale to a sex worker who grows desperate to get another dose in this episode. But she also seems to be looking to buy sagecap at a legitimate apothecary, which also suggests that it, or its parts, may have genuine pharmaceutical uses – or at least, she's assuming that they do or that sagecap is a legal aboveboard medicine rather than a street drug.

What does all of this have to do with Koume and Jihei, the two new characters we meet this week? Koume may be a survivor of the household ravaged by the ape, but she and Jihei could just as easily be somehow involved in the sagecap trade. We'll hopefully find out more after the Olympics when episode fifteen airs, which may give Yukiya enough time to realize that if he thinks he can coast by using his “foolish second son” act, the only person he's tricking is himself.

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YATAGARASU: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.