I started to follow the “Kyokou Suiri” manga just after “Zetsuen no Tempest” finished because I had really liked ZnoT and I was hoping that the author could create another interesting story. Kyokou Suiri hasn’t turned out to be as compelling to
me as ZnoT but it’s still reasonably entertaining if you don’t mind a detective story with multiple theories being thrown out and dismissed for each mystery. The anime has caught the feel of the manga quite well while not slavishly following the
manga. This made the first episode of the anime a bit more interesting than I had expected.

This is a story of star-crossed (almost) lovers. Kotoko is a petite seventeen year old rich girl who is smart and who traded off one leg and one eye when she was eleven so that she could be an advisor and arbitrator for Japanese spirits. Kuro is a
college student who terrifies spirits and can destroy them if they eat some of his flesh. Kotoko got a huge crush on Kuro two years before and now has come out to tell him because Kuro just got dumped by his girlfriend.

Kotoko sees an advantage of having Kuro and his powers on her side to help her with some of her more difficult problems concerning spirits. She also sees this as a means to stay close to Kuro while she works on getting him to like her. Kuro has no
interest in Kotoko as a girl and isn’t really interested in dealing with spirits either. Never-the-less, Kotoko gets Kuro to solve a problem with an aggressive spirit in the first episode, although she is rather horrified by how he accomplishes this
feat.

As I wrote above, Kyokou Suiri is good but not great. One problem that I have is that most of the time Kuro is a dick no matter how nice Kotoko is to him. The manga explains why he is that way, but that doesn’t really justify his bad behavior. We’ll
see how the anime handles this. In any event, I liked the anime enough that I will continue to follow it and my current rating is B+.

Dave Baranyi

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