Recap: Yasaburo is found quite easily by our femme fatale, who forces him to join her and the Friday Fellows for a meal. What follows is the most unsettling conversation I’d ever heard.

Man, I knew Yasaburo was gonna get caught, but I didn’t think it’d be so easily. He really didn’t think to take the daruma that was already there and like hide it or something? Oh well, minor point. It at least made for a funny scene where Yasaburo seems to prefer staying as a daruma as he’s taken away by Benten. It also got us another meeting with Kaisei, the only good Ebisugawa. When I first heard the plot of this story, the mention of Kaisei immediately made me think this was going to be kind of a Romeo and Juliet thing, not the complicated character drama that we actually got. With the romantic subplot seeming to be entirely between Yasaburo and Benten, it’s hard to see where or when she’ll become more relevant to this story.

I feel like I’m going to have to assume the Friday Fellows are supposed to sound stupid, right? There’s no way that strange line delivery we heard was anything but intentional. Each member sounded like they either stuck a duck call down their throat or took a shot of helium before recording. It would go with the strange nature of these people that they simply even sound strange as well. This has been a constant question for the past few weeks, but it’s finally being directly addressed this episode: How is Yasaburo able to converse so easily with the people that literally killed and ate his father? How do these humans justify the consumption of sentient beings? The short answer seems to be: Because they’re either bound to tradition or fucking crazy. It does seem like a big theme of this show that people easily find themselves bound by tradition to do things they don’t want to. Hotei seems to be the legitimate crazy one, apparently having some weird furry streak as well as finding no qualms with loving something and eating it. With him being the next to select a tanuki, it makes me afraid for Yasaburo’s mother, who may quite be the thing he loves so much he wants to eat it.

The suspense is really getting to me. I need to learn what happened between Yasaburo and Benten. So much has been teased and referenced, but the only thing we have to go on is that something drove a great wedge between them that drove them apart and turned her towards the Friday Fellows. I know the mystery is a lot of what makes Benten’s character so intriguing, but eventually we’re going to need some subtext for all the vague lines we hear from her, and eventually a story behind the Demon King Cedar Incident.