Mouryou no Hako

Absent-minded schoolgirl Yoriko Kusumoto only has eyes for Kanako Yuzuki. After planning for their summer trip, their journey comes to a premature and brutal end when Kanako is found severely wounded on train tracks and Yoriko in tears on the station's platform. Shuutarou Kiba, a detective who happened to be on the train that hit the girl, takes up the investigation. However, he discovers that the mystery behind this case is intertwined with an intricate network of deceptions involving the Yuzuki family, especially its most prominent member, Youko Yuzuki—a famous actress and Kanako's sister.

Although Kanako survives after surgery, her critical state prompts Youko to entrust a doctor, Dr. Koushirou Mimasaka, to take care of the girl in an ominous, box-shaped facility in the forest where she will receive experimental treatment. But soon after, on a night where Kiba and Yoriko visit Kanako, the convalescent suddenly vanished. Now searching for her whereabouts, the burden on Kiba dramatically grows when he learns about other gruesome discoveries: limbs of young girls in boxes.

Kiba is suggested by a colleague that the macabre findings are related not only to Kanako's disappearance but also to the truth behind her sister. As the investigation continues, the detective—enlisting the help of his partners Tatsumi Sekiguchi and Akihiko Chuuzenji—has to find a way to solve this series of crimes and find Kanako back.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Chuuzenji, Akihiko Main

Hirata, Hiroaki Japanese

Enokizu, Reijiro Main

Morikawa, Toshiyuki Japanese

Sekiguchi, Tatsumi Main

Kiuchi, Hidenobu Japanese

Kiba, Shuutarou Main

Seki, Takaaki Japanese

Yuzuki, Kanako Supporting

Tomatsu, Haruka Japanese

Mysterious Man Supporting

Furuya, Toru Japanese

Yuzuki, Youko Supporting

Hisakawa, Aya Japanese

Kusumoto, Yoriko Supporting

Takahashi, Mikako Japanese

Policeman Fukumoto Supporting

Ueda, Youji Japanese

Chuuzenji, Chizuko Supporting

Minaguchi, Yuko Japanese

Tamura, Manabu Producer

Takahashi, Ryouhei Producer

Nakamura, Ryousuke Director, Storyboard

Ishizuka, Atsuko Episode Director

Reviews

Jul 10, 2023

_DOLOS_

Recommended

This is for those who might think of dropping the series due to it's randomness and diverging plotline
That's was mind blowing. I am still speechless. The anime keeps on giving you hint to solve the mystery but is often neglected by the viewers as being part of the eccentric art style (like SHAFT studios).
The way the incongruity in storylines smoothly converge, leaves viewers in awe and wondering why didn't they notice the clues mixed in.
But have to admit that was the cringey kind of incest there.
Liked the part where the wires got replaced by flowers in the author's pov of how the scene appeared ... to him. That completely defined why he went through all the box making.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Dec 21, 2016

ktulu007

Mixed Feelings

Mouryou no Hako was first published in 1995 as a horror mystery novel. It was written by Kyogoku Natsuhiko. The same writer who wrote the story that Kousetsu Hyaku Monogatari was based off of. Cut to more than a decade later, Madhouse picked the novel up for an adaptation. Which aired from October to December of ’08. I don’t really know anything about the series beyond the genre and studio. And Madhouse has been involved in some terrible, mediocre and stellar anime so that doesn’t say much. So, let’s take a look and see how this one fares.

Story:

Someone out there is dismembering young girls. Police ... have found limbs in boxes in a variety of places. A group of old friends find themselves drawn to the case. Can they resolve it and find an abducted teenage girl, Kanako, before it’s too late for her?

Let’s start by talking about the big flaw with the series. It’s slow and not in a good, suspense building way. No, it’s slow because the narrative comes to a grinding halt so that it can spend long stretches with these blokes sitting around a table talking about spirits or it grinds to a halt to spend a while talking about clairvoyance. And what do these elements do for the story? They allow the “mystery” to be solved without any actual investigation because… bullshit. I’m going to just put this forward as a possibility. Maybe, just maybe, the suspense and mystery elements would have been significantly stronger if there had been a proper investigation instead of long scenes with our heroes sitting around a table like a bunch of bloody nobs. That isn’t the only problem with the series. Some of its attempts at horror come across as more than a little silly and a lot of its “twists” are so heavily telegraphed that you can see them coming far before the reveal.

There are some aspects of the narrative that work well. The series does have some legitimately disturbing scenes. It also starts out pretty well, establishing the mystery and looking like it’s going to get interesting. If they’d kept the momentum and kept the mystery going well, then this could have been a compelling series. But then it all gets derailed for faffing about.

Characters:

The characters in this are all right. You get a sense of personality from them and they certainly aren’t just tropes. However, the are a bit under-developed and there are certainly points where they succumb to bad horror clichés. To give an example, there’s a girl who readily goes to meet the obvious villain, in spite of him being blatantly sketchy. There are also moments where the dialogue reaches purple prose levels of stilted and trying too hard to make the language sound grandiose.

Art:

There’s a lot about the artwork in this that looks good. The backgrounds look good. The characters are nicely designed and there are a few scenes with well done horror imagery. That being said, most of the horror imagery in this is bollocks. First off, there re the limbs themselves. There’s no sense of muscle, sinew or blood. Instead, you’re left with something that looks like a cheap plastic mannequin’s limb instead of an actual limb that came off of a person. Which results in a disconnect betwixt the disturbing concept and the non-threatening mediocrity of the image. There are also multiple occasions where the series tries to scare us with boxes. Because when I think of a frightening, grotesque image, I think of a room with boxes strewn about. In all seriousness, I don’t think that’s going to scare anyone unless they have pygmachophobia.

Sound:

The acting is competent, mostly. It is brought down a bit by the overly flowery moments and by those tedious stretches of our main characters doing exposition about spirits. However, there are a lot of good actors in this. Hirata Hiroaki, Morikawa Toshiyuki & Tomatsu Haruka to name a few. This is a series where there’s enough range to the characters that they can show their abilities but not so much that you could call it a great performance for any of them. The music was composed by Murai Shusei, the same bloke who did the music for Terra Formars. And he did do a pretty nice job with it.

Ho-yay:

There is quite a bit of it at the beginning. The early stuff with Kanako and Yoriko is full of les-yay. Then Kanako gets abducted from hospital and there’s no more ho-yay.

Final Thoughts:

This is a series that had a lot of potential. There are some strong ideas behind it. Unfortunately, the execution is weak. Ultimately, the series suffers from the mystery being poorly handled, the characters being under-developed, lousy horror imagery and long, boring interludes. There’s still some good stuff in there but not enough to make this a decent series. Ultimately, it ends up being average with its execution failing utterly to live up to the potential of its ideas. My final rating is a 5/10. Next week I’ll end the year with a look at Coppelion.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Feb 5, 2016

NekoMinSeo

Not Recommended

This review is one of the hardest that I put myself to write; when I sat in front of the MAL review box and tried to think about something to say about this anime, I was simply blank. Why?

In short, Moryou no Hako should be re-entitled "Moryou no Hako - Let's sit down and talk! THE ANIME".

Story

I'm still not sure, to be honest. Moryou no Hako had this gimmick of having its characters say a lot of stuff, make a lot of references, when in reality 3/4 of it didn't even seem remotely pertinent with the actual issue. At around episode 6, I ... just brought my hand to my chin in a thoughtful position and thought: "This anime is making me feel stupid for not being able to grasp the point of their dialogues", then I just questioned: Am I really stupid? or is this anime trying to sound intellectual for the sake of being intellectual? Or, even worst, cryptic for the sake of being cryptic? Now, believe me, I really like mystery shows in all their glory, I also enjoy philosophical shows and I definitely don't consider myself to be stupid, so then, what happened?

Answer: Moryou no Hako tries too much to make itself sound more "complex" than it actually is by inserting several elements and stories that might sound that they're important, but in the end they're completely ignored or have no meaning. As an example, the exposition episodes that spoke about the difference between mediums, priests, onmyouji and fortune tellers only served as nothing but background exposition that was in no way related to the actual story and sincerely, we could have lived without it or have the short version from each character itself. The drama behind the fortune teller ladies? Same. Useless. The story behind the box making? Useless. Kaiba's supposed trauma? Err... The reincarnation theory of the two girls? .......... Do I have to say more?

Besides exposition, the execution and delivery of the shows fail a lot too. There isn't even one moment when I felt enlightened, like "ooh, this is what happened!". It simply didn't allow me to. I just had to let myself pulled by their weird reasonings and conclusions till the last episode when somebody brought himself to solve all the mystery for us and enlighten those that were supposed to actually solve the mystery. Yay!...

There was really nothing to get tensed about, the revelation just fell flat and my reaction to it was something like a blank “oh”. The plot twists that concluded in that revelation had me give similar reactions; they definitely failed to do their job: to impress, maybe out of being so vaguely brushed to a side, that I was more than once left speechless wondering whether it was important or if it was some sort of revelatory turn that was portrayed in such a trivial manner as if they were talking about it over tea! Which they probably were for most of the show!

I would say (or somebody might assume) the slow pacing influenced my lack of “feelings” for this anime, but actually, I do like slow paced series when I think that they’re justified to take their time; usually they do to portray certain events and/or characters in certain ways to make ground for a justified development, but in this case, throwing exposition over exposition and reference to Japanese Shintoism over other references doesn’t represent “good slow pacing storytelling” since, again, most of them didn’t even matter.

On a lighter note, the conclusion was actually quite well made and I definitely understood where it tried to go, but 5 minutes of awesome in the last episode kind of looses "awesomeness" when put against all the episodes that lead to that.

And saying all this is a shame because overall it could have turned into a very interesting show if they only knew what to focus on, what to develop and when to throw in hints. The original idea was actually VERY intriguing, so I just feel sad for its failure.

Characters

Bland. If there was supposed to be any character development, I didn't see it and the little that we actually have comes out of nowhere, definitely because they were busier talking and narrating rather than doing anything ( I know I’m repeating myself). If Eno could have just been on the screen for the whole time, I would have been happier and more entertained. Not.at.all.because.he.was.pretty.*coughs* Yes, I actually needed these shallow reasons to be entertained.

If it knew how to deal with the characters, once again, it would have turned into a pretty decent show. But sincerely, I wasn't even able to remember most of the characters’ names, nor did I empathize or at least cared for anybody at all in their current states. Their expressions didn’t exactly help me figure them out either, since there was a lack of them overall. I question whether they were supposed to be viewed as humans or as “masks”.

Other, if not most, of the reasons why the characters suffered of bad writing could be copy-pasted from the Story section.

Art/Animation

Art was fairly nice seeing that CLAMP worked on it, but I can't say the same about animation. The close-ups were gorgeous, some background scenes like the cherry blossom trees scene were also gorgeous, or the "limbs" scene, but then you get the rest of the show... The characters were simply butchered in most scenes where the focus wasn't their faces and sincerely there's not much animation at all since most of the show happens as they sit in a chair and talk or sit around a table and talk.

I would like to point out that the manga had designs that would have worked far better for this story. All characters look VERY different from their anime counterparts; they’re way less “beauty-fied” and more “real” or made to “disturb” the reader or at least give them a sense of uncomfortableness even while looking at them. And actually, some scenes would have made more sense if the characters weren't "glamored" up.

Soundtrack

I really liked the opening and ending songs, but for the actual OST, it was limited and quite forgettable. Some of it didn’t exactly fit the scenes we were shown either.

Conclusion:

I did not enjoy it. At all. Moryou no Hako anime is simply a waste of potential that I just wanted to finish and scrap from my list. As far as I know, the manga’s execution is considerably better, so I’d like to direct you towards the manga if you’re interested in this show. Or if you already read the manga/novels and want more, then yes, I guess you’ll be able to enjoy this.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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	Poll: Mouryou no Hako Episode 13 Discussion ( 1 2 ) DeathfireD - Jan 2, 2010	57 replies	by RenaPsychoKiller »» Aug 19, 8:54 AM
	Poll: Mouryou no Hako Episode 12 Discussion Mikiyo - Jul 30, 2009	19 replies	by RenaPsychoKiller »» Aug 19, 7:44 AM
	Poll: Mouryou no Hako Episode 11 Discussion Mikiyo - Jul 14, 2009	12 replies	by RenaPsychoKiller »» Aug 12, 5:33 AM
	Poll: Mouryou no Hako Episode 10 Discussion Jacut - Jul 9, 2009	15 replies	by RenaPsychoKiller »» Aug 9, 3:57 AM
	Poll: Mouryou no Hako Episode 9 Discussion hikky - Dec 24, 2008	20 replies	by RenaPsychoKiller »» Aug 8, 4:20 PM