If I actually read my Saiyuuki eps when I got them instead of skimming and then reading when I have a thick(ish) pile and enough material to sate my fannish appetite, I'd have realized earlier that Mr. Topknot-and-beads in the current arc is Minekura's version of a Taoist immortal. I call this Flow, because I'm currently swimming leisurely through the later volumes of Konron no Tama which is about a Taoist immortal and his dog otoko-rashii wind spirit who transforms at need into a dog.

(I'm swimming leisurely because like any Chinese-based manga it's slow going for this Japanese-based reader. I can only assume the real middle school Japanese readers just let the not-even-in-the-wordtank hanzi flow past them as semi-registered 'atmosphere', like the Latin sections in The Name of the Rose. Me being linguistically heta no yokozuki me, I have to look up the hanzi anyway, just as I had to plow through the Latin passages, to see if I can extract meaning from them.)

(Heta no yokozuki is your useful phrase of the day. Heta is heta, no good at. Yokozuki is side + like, love. It means someone who's mad about something they're lousy at. I love languages, I just have no memory for the dead ones and no ear for the living ones. A Sunday painter, sort of, except that Sunday painters may be talented or even geniuses, like the Douanier Rousseau.) (And why 'douanier' come to that? A French notion that a man is but-of-course his job, no matter what he's known for? No-one here talks about the banker Eliot or the insurance agent Stevens, after all. It's considered an oddity, that a *poet* actually worked in an *insurance company*- and Google tells me, as a specialist in investment banking, no less.)

However, we've gone from semi-Lutheran bishop to Taoist practitioner. Interesting. The bishop is still around and still hot on the trail, one sees, and I get a definite feeling of movement here. Also emotional movement.

Our Taoist has an agreement with the local youkai: all chance visitors to the village get handed over to them and the youkai leave the village in peace. The villagers think this is fine: some strangers die to keep the place safe. You may figure for yourself how this goes down with Hakkai, who's already been bent out of shape by the run-in with Hazel's values. This is called torture by one's creator aka character development, and I have no problem with it at all. Been a while since we did this, back in the kami-sama arc, where Gojou and Sanzou got theirs. One just hopes that the development remains and appears in later stories.