Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin Episode 5

This week the team finally got permission to investigate the North and South Elevators at City Hall. An urban legend has been going around on the occult board about the Parallel World Elevator, that when a person goes up to the observatory deck, they are brought to another world where there they meet a strange woman.

That woman was of course the Another, Pandora. She has been roaming around the world to collect the contents that she has clumsily spilled out of the box when she dropped it despite having been warned not to open it (hence Pandora’s Box). They were only able to find her because Sakaki’s sense of tremendous loss had tripped the spell she had placed on the elevator to bring her those who have the feelings of lost love. However because Sakaki’s didn’t quite match, he was promptly kicked out, leaving Miyako stuck with Pandora after she learned he can understand her. For most part, she was a harmless Another as she simply taking their feelings and then sending them back once she was done, and did the same with those she came by mistake. The lost memories was not intentional as she didn’t care whether or not they remembered her or not, but what spooked Miyako was how she couldn’t understand why her actions would be inconvenient to Humans, nor did she care. That’s when he finally realized that it’s difficult to effectively communicate with Anothers, especially when their sense of right and wrong does not necessarily align with Humans, or worse, they may simply not care at all, such as Koharu.

But with Miyako learning about Sakaki’s sense of loss makes him wonder more about it. While he had chosen to exclude it from his report, he seems determined to follow up on it. It also looks like next week might expand into that as it’s titled “Devil and Sense of Loss”, continuing the theme that had been established this episode, along with continuing to investigate the unsolved cases of missing women.

There isn’t much to say for this episode since it was pretty straight-forward. But as usual it certainly had me cracking up with Miyako’s reaction to various situations or possibilities, such as when Seo suggested someone incorporating magic into the elevator, as a gateway to offer their deity sacrifices, (I too thought “EEK!”) which was close enough, since it existed to bring certain people to Pandora so she could take their feelings, or when he was desperately pressing the elevator’s doors to close. I think the most hilarious part about the ordeal was when Miyako realized he could receive and sent texts from the parallel world. I don’t know about you, but with the whole isekai trend, I laughed way harder than I probably should have when Miyako made the comment of “Posts from another world”. All I could think of was how it felt almost as though it setting up for another story of the sorts to pop up if it doesn’t already exist!

Looking forward to the next one!