Manga Review: Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits, Vol. 1

Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits, Vol. 1
Midori Yuma (story); Wako Ioca (art)

Aoi’s recently deceased grandfather has a sordid history, and sometimes she feels she’s the only one who truly misses him. They shared a special bond over their ability to see ayakashi (spirits), one which her grandfather seems to have abused when an Ogre who runs an esteemed Demon Inn comes to collect on the debt he left behind– and she finds out he used his granddaughter as collateral! Faced with the choice of marrying the Ogre Oddana (head of the Inn), or being eaten, Aoi makes her own decision- she will work off the debt to the Inn! Now if only she could find an Ayakashi who is willing to hire a human… If she can’t find a job by the day’s end, she will be eaten.

The set up for this manga is original, and I can’t quite nail down a genre for it yet because the possibilities of where it will end up are many. Supernatural romance? Maybe! Cooking manga? Maybe! Slice of life set in a Demon World? Maybe! Strangely enough, I want it to be all of these, and I liked that the story isn’t making it obvious which direction the plot is going to continue.

Aoi is likable without being a shell character. Her demeanor and quick wit definitely lend to her amicability, and you can’t help but cheer for her. Her habit of feeding the spirits she comes across in the human world so they won’t eat her is not only wholesome, but good self-preservation as humans that can see spirits are often eaten by them. Aoi is kind, but not gullible or naive, traits that are often conflated for shojo progatonists. I liked that her immediate reaction to the Ogre, who’s definitely a looker in the Demon World, was revulsion because she knows that he’s as likely to eat her as marry her. She isn’t swept away by him, and remains cautiously on her guard. 

The Ogre does not seem to have a name beyond Odanna, even when referred to in the anime (which you can bet I’ll be watching now that I know it exists). I want to clarify that this isn’t some Shrek-looking Ogre, this is a Japanese Ogre, a fearsome spirit with horns and massive teeth. If you have a smart phone, it’s got an emoji of an Ogre. So the Odanna being handsome is in some ways trite and stereotypical, but important, because his nature and appearance, as we know it, is ugly. There is an air of danger about him since he is so cool and collected. He lets the veneer slip once, and while I wanted to laugh at him because it made him seem immature, I identified more with Aoi’s worry because I didn’t know how he would react.

The threat of being eaten hangs in the air of the entire story, but if it actually happened this would change the genre entirely.

By changing the setting to be in the Kakuriyo (Demon World) instead of Utsushiyo (the human world), the reader learns things at the same pace as Aoi. Culture, government, and beings are completely different here, which makes any semblance of expectations unreliable. I hope those differences are explored more in future volumes, as the Demon World felt bland artistically and narratively in comparison to what characters were telling Aoi about it. I attribute that to the limitation of the format, and it can easily be remedied in the future.

Every character introduced is handled by Aoi with a certain trepidation, and for good reason she is slow to trust them. The only exception, and the only one that I’ve come to enjoy immensely, is Ginji. Ginji (featured prominently on the cover of volume 2) is a nine-tailed fox who has the ability to take on nine different physical forms. As of volume one, four of his forms have been seen, and I hope that more will be shown in future volumes. He seems to be able to transform at will with little strain, and his fluidity with his physical form makes him dynamic, especially as he chooses forms best fitting the situation. His considerate nature is endearing, and he has a special and eager joie de vivre that makes him approachable. It also doesn’t hurt that his primary form as an adult male, is also a looker.

Overall this book has lovely character design, and its art style reminds me of Kakegurui, as it works to add a fluid emphasis to the designs in order to make the entire manga have an otherworldly feel. While similar in overall style to other manga’s line work, it still feels unique. Any other artist wouldn’t have the same way of drawing.

One quirk (not a downside) to this manga is it relies heavily on the Japanese nomenclature for things. Other manga does this too, but often with an annotation at the bottom. Kakuriyo has an entire dictionary page at the back, which made reading it take a little longer since I was either googling the terms, or looking them up in the back.

My only critique of the manga is that it is established early on that Aoi was adopted by her grandfather, but doesn’t go into any explanation that one of her parents was his child. This could be a pretty handy loophole if she isn’t technically a blood relation to her grandfather. Hopefully there was some mistranslation, or it gets clarified in another volume.

Overall, this manga was enjoyable and I hope more people give it a try. It still hasn’t settled into a genre, and that works to its benefit rather than detriment. Fans looking for a read-alike to Spirited Away, I don’t think there’s a closer match.

 

–and apparently this is my 100th post! woohoo!–