Title: Tasogare Otome x Amnesia
English title: Dusk Maiden of Amnesia
Genre: Mystery, Fantasy, Romance, Supernatural
Sub-genre: Shounen… and fanservice, no?
Flavor/Theme: Ghost
Character design/Original artist: Maybe
Source media: Manga
Seriousness factor: High
Studio: Silver Link
Episodes: 12, “half-season”
OP: “CHOIR JAIL” by Konomi Suzuki
ED: “Karandorie (カランドリエ)” by Aki Okui
Airing status: Currently airing
Aired by: Animax, Chiba TV, Showtime, Sun TV, Tokyo MX TV, TV Aichi, TV Kanagawa
Watchability factor: High
Rewatchability factor: Medium
Hateability factor: Low
Recommendability factor: Medium
Characters: Teiichi Niiya, Yuuko Kanoe (the ghost)
Characters I like: -
Characters I’d like to beat to a pulp using a spiky baseball bat: -
What I’m in for: -
What I hate about it: -
Other noteworthy remarks: -
The title must be from this series being full of dusk scenes that not only add up to its mysteriousness feeling but also look beautiful. I might not be able to get the same feeling if I were to read the manga only. That said, let’s not compare the manga and the anime here but for now I’ll give the anime the higher priority.
We have cute zombie (Sankarea), now we have cute ghost too, and they’re released in the same season …and they are both tall, dark and bishoujo. Meet Yuuko-san, the main character in this series, or should I say the ghost in this series? For starter let’s say this series is about Yuuko-san wandering around the school ever since she became a ghost. All these years she was extremely bored to the point of no longer knowing what ‘loneliness’ is. Her ‘life’ became brighter once Niyaa entered the school because he is the only one who not only can see but also touch and feel her as if she was alive.
That is only a small part of the story. The real story is she has no memory of her lifetime (thus the ‘amnesia’ in the title). Niyaa tries to help her recovering her memories but so far the efforts produced no positive result. However there are times where Yuuko’s “body” remembers being in certain places, like in the episode 01 she somewhat remembers that she’s been on the hilltop before though she can’t remember how and when. The only thing she knows is her name and it’s seems like she knows where her body is. This makes me think that she might be murdered and her body was hid somewhere under the club room or something like that.
I seriously love the atmosphere of this anime. At one time I could feel the ‘soft’ mysteriousness, some other time I feel the comedic moments and there are also times I could almost feel the love in its air. It could be a mystery-theme turned investigation comedy anime. However at the same time I could also feel the deep sadness that comes with Yuuko’s loss of memory. Whether she’ll be able to recover them or not, we’ll see but the most important thing is what would happen once she recovered them? Uh! I can’t imagine it. From what I’ve read in similar-themed manga (that features romantic relationship between living human and ghost) it usually ended up with the ghost partner goes to ‘heaven’. Right now I’m telling myself to be prepared to face that.
Oh BTW I have an announcement to make here. This blog has just registered at Anime nano, meaning that from now on I’ll blog more anime and less non-anime but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop completely on non-anime stuff like sci-tech, philosophy, etc. After all this place also serves as my personal blog and over the past decade I’ve learned that maintaining more than one blog is REALLY hard so if possible I’d like to avoid doing that again. I’ have reached the point where this blog has evolved from “life-humanity” blog to anime blog, and that was unintentional. This blog maybe new if you count from the first article published here but if you take into account the first time I blog about anime (in my former blogs like right-o-matic, you gotta) you’d find that it took me nearly 10 years to reach this point. It was fun.
