So Crunchyroll is still rolling out (crunchyrolling out?) new stuff! Tonight I checked out the first episode of We Rent Tsukumogami. Ahem:
Ancient treasures live,
and spy on Edo Japan.
Who watches Watchmen?
Proving that anime continues to be educational, I learned a new word from this show: “Tsukumogami”, or family treasures that after centuries of being valued take on a life of their own. In this case, the tsukus in question live in a rental shop, the proprietors of which covertly use the tsukus as spies to help them solve mysteries.
Wait, isn’t there already an anime this season about a guy and a girl who work in a shop and solve mysteries? Um, it will come to me… Ah! Holmes of Kyoto, an awfully pretentious name for a rather wooden show (at least after episode 1). And We Rent Tsukumogami suffers from similar flat characters, wooden behavior, awkward animation at times, and relatively shallow mysteries. Though I would say that We Rent Tsukumogami is a shade better than Holmes of Kyoto in all areas. But that’s hardly enough to recommend it.
What does it have going for it, then? In a word, it’s got tsukumogami. Instead of a Holmes in Japan, the MCs are more like an NSA in Japan: They loan out the tsukus, retrieve them, and pump them for information. And here’s where it gets really intriguing:
The humans can’t speak directly with the tsukumogami. Yeah, that’s right. While the rental shop proprietors can hear the tsukus and vice-versa, the tsukus refuse to converse directly with humans. The MCs can’t even give them orders to follow (and anyway, it’s anyone’s guess if the tsukus would follow orders in the first place). So the MCs have to listen behind a curtain to the tsukus, decide what course of action they want to take, and then let the tsukus eavesdrop on their conversation. This gets especially entertaining (for me, at least) when the tsukus don’t want to cooperate, and the humans need to find a way to persuade them!
Unusually, the anime for We Rent Tsukumogami is a Japanese novel, not a manga or light novel. I looked for it on Amazon, but only found it in Japanese:
And if you can read Japanese, then more power to you, say I!
Thanks for reading, and see you next time!