It’s been a minute since we’d gotten a particularly good urban fantasy mystery anime series. When Mysterious Disappearances came up on the seasonal Anime List, it looked interesting, and I added it to my watchlist. I was not disappointed with what I got.
Mysterious Disappearances is basically an anime about investigating “weird crap” and urban legends. The series follows Sumireko Ogawa, an aspiring author who got published once as a child, but has been unable to get published since, and is currently working part-time in a bookstore. When she ends up inadvertently cursing herself with a collection of poetry in the store, she discovers that her co-worker Ren Adashino is an amateur occult investigator, who helps her get control over the curse, and the two of them begin to investigate various other occult objects, alongside Ren’s sister Oto.
The series is fun, as each of the occult objects, supernatural entities, and curses all take cues from a particular supernatural entity, work of folklore, or urban legend, but deliberately takes a specific twist on the concept that the cast has to investigate throughout that story arc. We get about 4 main story arcs this season, though the last one feels deliberately truncated. For example, one of these arcs involves a fun modern twist on the tsukumogami – a yokai spirit I’ve been looking for an more modern example of for a while.
The animation is well done, with very moody night scenes. It doesn’t quite have the same level of atmosphere that Call of the Night had, but that series was trying to get across the appeal of being out late, while this is trying to retain a sense of menace. The character designs that go with it are also good – Takuya Tani does a good job of making the characters feel distinct, and in particular making Ren and Oto feel visually just a little out of place – which fits with their role in the narrative.
The series does have some fanservice – Ogawa is spectacularly busty, and we do see her topless (though with no nipple detail) in the opening credits – but generally, the fanservice is limited to her, with no perving on underage characters (something that I wish wasn’t something I had to praise the show for not doing).
Where things stumble is the pacing of the last story of the season – it feels like they needed more time to tell that story well, not helped by having to juggle the introduction of a new character – the Cat Sovereign – while also bringing the series to a semi-satisfying conclusion. This means the Cat Sovereign is never properly explored, with a whole bunch of material left hanging in a very “Read the novels & manga or hope we get a second season” kind of way. I feel like if the series had just gotten 13 episodes instead of 12, it would have gotten some room to give an ending that satisfactorily resolved this last arc, because there would have been enough room to tell the Cat Soverign’s story and wrap up Ren and Oto’s stories in an interesting way.
In all, Mysterious Disappearances is a engaging mystery anime.
Thankfully, the manga has gotten a US release from Seven Seas, which is available through independent booksellers or the Crunchyroll store (Affiliate Links for both), so there’s that option to start reading the story separate from the anime.
Otherwise, if you do want to watch the show, it is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.
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