School Cultural Festival! And of course Amami's class decides to do a haunted house! (With a little help from Amami's friends, of course.) The result is legendary!

But that's the B-story. The A-story is Amami's father, whom we meet this episode, and stories about her mother, about whom we learn a great deal.

Amami's mother had the same sixth sense that Amami has, only it was even stronger, and she also sometimes had the power of prophecy.

When he met her, his hair was black, and he fell for her hard almost immediately. The problem for him was that he's just as afraid of ghosts as Inoue is. Within a week his hair had turned pure white.

Let's sort out some names: Amami's given name is Hibiki. Her father is Asahi; her mother was Yuuhi. Asahi is a professor of Archeology at a university. His first meeting with Yuuhi was... rather odd, but I guess it couldn't be otherwise. Yuuhi probably knew when she met Asahi that they were going to get married, so she is willing to see him again, and they eventually were married. And when she was pregnant with Hibiki she told him she was going to die soon (by implication, in child birth). For someone who is so afraid of ghosts, having a wife like that was terrible trial -- but he loved her so much that he never considered leaving.

And raising Hibiki was just as bad, but he loves her too. (Besides which, Yuuhi had told him that Hibiki would have some problems but things would work out for her in the end.)

So it turns out that previously Hibiki had a lot of trouble making friends, for reasons which are obvious, and Asahi is very happy to learn that Hibiki has finally made a group of friends, and worked with them to set up their room for the cultural festival. He wanted to come see what they had done.

Unfortunately, he only learned at the last moment that it was a haunted house, but even so he's determined to go through it. Unfortunately, Amami's friends were really getting into this whole "haunt" thing, and gave Asahi and Inoue a special performance. Oh, well...

Amami Hibiki is talking to one of her friends, and Inoue (on the left) and Amami Asahi (on the right) are responding about how you'd expect.

The other three girls aren't reacting because they've long since learned that Hibiki's spirit friends aren't hostile. The only reason the spirits are haunting the Haunted House is because they want Hibiki's project for the cultural festival to be a success. And if you are scoring how many people you scare the shit out of, then it was a huge success. There were a lot of screams of abject terror coming from that room that day.

It won't soon be forgotten.

UPDATE: By the way, this episode felt legato, not staccato. Which is a good thing.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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