Tamako Market Episode 6
What They Say:
Episode 6: “It’s Chilled Even My Spine”
No episode description provided.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
We start with Tamako and Dera speaking in front of a small Buddhist statue. When Dera learns about the local religious practices, he thinks it all very odd. Tamako warns him about upsetting the powers that be, but afterward, it seems as if it is Tamako who has fallen afoul of the spiritual beings.
Not really, it’s just that the shopping district becomes nearly empty during the hot summer months. This gives Tamako an idea: why not create a haunted house to draw in customers to the shopping district? She proceeds to carry out the plan, but things take a turn for the strange when Tamako’s father Mamedai sees a spirit while leaving the bathhouse. Some of the other merchants also have encounters with the supernatural, and suddenly they go into a panic, believing the shopping district is cursed. So, Tamako’s haunted house seems like not the best idea, but the shopkeepers led by Mamedai are determined to allow Tamako’s plan to go forward.
The haunted house proceeds and draws a very large crowd, which has the positive effect of bringing in foot traffic to the shopping district. Following the great success of Tamako’s plan (which did draw in a good number of customers for the shops), there is the after party, where it is revealed that the supernatural events the shopkeepers experienced were not so real as they thought. The two incidents that started it off were fake: Mamedai’s vision of two spirits was really just Dera whizzing around in excitement, while the salaryman covered in blood that another shopkeeper saw was just red paint that fell on a businessman walking home, paint dropped by Dera. All of this was engineered by Kanna, who felt that getting a whispering campaign going among the shopkeepers actually believing that the shopping district was haunted would help to advertise the haunted house.
Overall a cute episode, with as usual some of the better humor being provided by the exaggerated behavior and actions of the adults of the shopping district, who believe that they may be cursed for real and take great pains to ward off evil: the scene with them providing Tamako with all manner of exorcising materials without telling her what they are really doing is quite amusing.
But the strengths of this episode, the humor provided by the shopkeepers and Kanna’s oddball ways of doing things (which have a logic of their own that works), also highlight the continuing main weaknesses of the show, namely how uninteresting and bland the title character continues to be. While it is true that Tamako is the one who sets things in motion by suggesting the idea of the haunted house, the success of her plan is really the work of Kanna and her manipulation of everyone else. As if the creators themselves realize that they need to inject something into the mix, the end of the episode hints that they already turning to the “introduce a new character” ploy.
In Summary:
While the haunted house is a staple of school festivals in anime (usually more as a rejected suggestion than something carried through), here we have one that comes to pass and serves a useful purpose: drawing in the curious to the shopping district which is low on foot traffic during the heat of summer. Its success, however is the result of many of the shopkeepers believing that the shopping district is haunted for real (and spreading that word around their customers, who pass it on), a belief that had a little help from a certain oddball in the cast. The episode is cute and fun, though hardly memorable.
Grade: B
Streamed by: The Anime Network
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard
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