YATAGARASU: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master

Episode 18

With only two episodes remaining, the answers are coming thick and fast. And yet, it doesn't feel like Yatagarasu is rushing towards its finish; instead, it's more like that one piece of a jigsaw puzzle was finally slotted into place, and now the rest of the picture is easy to see. It's also not completely out of the blue because, with hindsight, we can see that all of the hints were there, casually dropped in the middle of other, more immediately important, plot points. The major one is, of course, the fact that our world, the modern human world, exists just outside the borders of Yamauchi. Our clue there was the scene of the kin'u repairing the boundary – Yukiya saw what he thought were thousands of ghostly blue fires, but were probably in reality the electric lights of a human city. With no point of reference for the sight of a city at night, his mind turned them into something he was familiar with. The sagecap, too, was a hint: although sage is in the plant family that produces catnip and other plants that have a psychoactive component, the word "sage" can also mean "wise person," and the reveal this week that the drug comes not from leaves, but from powdered human bones could be read as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the humans (who hold themselves the most intelligent animals), and the way the powder robs yatagarasu of their reason and human forms.

It's a lot for Yukiya to take in, and I wouldn't blame him for being upset with his lord for withholding the whole "human realm" thing. But even if it wasn't likely protected information available only to the highest echelons of government, it makes sense for it to have been kept secret. The yatagarasu are fully aware of the advanced technology the humans have, as we see when Yukiya is flipping through a book with ink drawings of cars and planes, and since they have no intention of making contact, opting instead to keep renewing the barrier, letting the people know what's lurking just outside their boundaries is just an invitation to panic. It's bad enough that some unscrupulous folk are selling drugs made of human bone; most reactions are more likely to be stunned fear if not outright panic. There's also a hint that there was interaction between the two realms at one point in the distant past; the wording of the kin'u's statement that yatagarasu model their forms off of humans indicates that the two groups used to have knowledge of each other. (The flip side of this is likely that this is where tengu legends come from.) If that was the case, then clearly something went wrong, leading to the sealing off of Yamauchi from the outside world.

No barrier is truly impermeable, though. We don't know for certain why this one has been cracking, but someone clearly found a break long before the one we watched get repaired. This allowed the monkeys to get through, with the prevailing theory being that this happened somewhere in the Underground beneath Central. The dual results were the production of sagecap and the predation of yatagarasu by the monkeys – with Koume's father, one of the unscrupulous yatagarasu, working with the monkeys to find them new prey. He does get taken care of this week, but the larger question is whether or not Koume knew what he was doing. Based on the first scene we had of them together in the inn, I'm inclined to think yes. Even if she didn't know exactly what her dad was up to, she clearly knew it was nothing good. Her survival also speaks of some complicity, although we could also view it as her father getting her out of the way so that she wouldn't know precisely what he was doing.

Either way, she's still not entirely trustworthy, and how she reacts to the death of her father next week will be very telling. It seems that some yatagarasu model more than just their appearances on humans, and how that plays out – and whether the barrier can be made to hold – may ultimately decide the fate of Yamauchi.

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