When she was seven, Nanoka Kiba was the sole survivor of a wreck when a sinkhole opened up beneath the car she and her parents were travelling in. At the time, Nanoka remembers being pulled from the vehicle and seeing what looked like a shopping street burning, but there's no mention of the fire when she goes back to look up the accident. So when she hears girls in her class discussing ghosts at the location where the accident happened, Nanoka returns to the scene for the first time in years...and somehow finds herself standing on a street in 1923. There she meets a strange young man named Mao, who claims that she's an ayakashi.

I'm not exactly the biggest Rumiko Takahashi fan. While I don't dislike her work in general, InuYasha really burned me out on her style of storytelling by the early 2010s, and even moreso on her questionable ideas of romance, and I have yet to fully recover. It doesn't help that the last Takahashi-related work I watched that wasn't a throwback adaptation of a decades-old classic was Yashahime, the misbegotten InuYasha sequel that I couldn't even finish on account of how fucking demon-dogshit it was. Even then, Takahashi apparently only contributed the character designs and maybe the basic story concept, which explains a lot. That means we can all collectively pretend Yashahime never spat on the good name of InuYasha and move on to a new, original series that truly represents the vision of this industry titan.

Well, "original" is maybe putting a bit of spin on things. As anyone with functioning eyes and a cursory knowledge of some of the most famous anime of the last 30 years will notice, Mao definitely reads as a Rumiko Takahashi: Greatest Hits collection. This goes beyond the simple inescapable fact that her artstyle basically defined an entire generation's perception of what this kind of anime looked like. Stop me if you've heard this one before: An ordinary 14-year-old girl from modern Tokyo is spirited away by magical circumstances and finds herself in a version of a past era filled with all sorts of monsters and bad guys. Thankfully, she also finds herself a cute boy with a penchant for monster slaying and stylish white hair to serve as her guardian, adventuring partner and inexplicable love interest.

So yeah, you could easily accuse Mao of being a flagrant rehash of Takashi's own previous works, with InuYasha being the most obvious inspiration. However, I'd counter that perfectly valid criticism with a few key points in Mao's favour. First of all, I don't see many folks complaining that Hideaki Anno has spent the last 30 years tormenting himself to keep giving otaku more Evangelion and self-consciously faithful remakes of all his favourite childhood shows. If Takashi wants to plagiarize her own work, then I say let her. She's earned it.

Second, Mao does at least differentiate itself by using the Taisho era setting of Nanoka's adventures to give the story a slightly more horror-tinged edge. When you combine that with Sunrise's solid production work, which makes it feel like a lost Toonami classic that all the nerds in the anime club would've obsessed over back when my old ass was in highschool, you get a product that's honestly just a lot of fun. Does it have an original bone in its body? No, clearly it doesn't. That's okay though. Sometimes you just want to see a classic formula executed with confidence and style.

Plus, I appreciate that Nanoka feels like a slightly more modern heroine who'll play better for a 2020s audience. Don't get me wrong, I'm not throwing shade at Kagome (especially since Yashahime already did her dirty enough), but she's very much a product of her time. Nanoka's personality feels more forceful and direct, which makes sense since her co-lead is less an edgy dogboy with an attitude problem and a necklace that makes him faceplant when his on-and-off love interest yells "SIT" and more a mysterious warrior with that enigmatic flair that'll need to be unraveled over the course of the series.

What stands out the most in this episode is Nanoka herself. The lone survivor of a terrible car accident, Nanoka lives with her grandfather and Uozomi, their unsettling fish-faced housekeeper. She doesn't really question why they keep making her drink these incredibly vile "smoothies" every morning, assuming it's for her purportedly fragile health. As the episode goes on, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that they're not for her health, but rather to keep something inside of her in check. Technically, Nanoka didn't survive the crash, she was revived. When she travels back in time (although she hasn't quite put that together yet), the strange young man she meets, Mao himself, gives her medicine that undoes the power-suppressing effects of something else she's taken. When you add that information to the fact that Grandpa and Uozomi try to give her a SUPER smoothie after she manifests some very feline abilities, it starts to look like Nanoka's not as human as she thinks she is.

But even beyond the powers she manifests, like dissolving monsters with her blood, Nanoka really makes the episode shine. She's strong in a believable, grounded way, freaked out by her time travelling and all the monsters, but retaining enough calm to look for answers. She's annoyed that Mao and his young ward Otoya think she's an ayakashi, but she also recognizes that some very weird things are going on around her. She'd like help, but she's also not helpless. She feels like a real person and displays just the right balance of headstrong and totally freaked out. Something weird is going on with her, and she wants to get it figured out. Meanwhile, Mao, while seeming callous at first, genuinely thought she didn't need help and was more than willing to help her once it was clear that she did. In this episode, they make a good pair where much of their mistrust for each other comes from the fact that neither is being truly open.

Then there's the question of how our titular monster slayer and his curse fit into the whole situation, and why the shopping street acts as a time portal. Oh, and why everyone in the past except Mao, Otoya and the evil yokai is a ghost. What I'm getting at here is the episode does a great job of creating mysteries and making the answers feel just out of reach. I feel like it's no coincidence that Mao's scar looks like a burned-in tear track, and it's clear that he's seen a lot of bad, perhaps more than his apparent age would suggest. His calm demeanor balances out Nanoka well, and there's already a bit of actual chemistry there, which is a delightful surprise in a Rumiko Takahashi production--and I love that she's unfazed by him changing his shirt, no blushing and overreacting as he briskly tucks it in and does up the buttons or some BS like that.

In short, I feel confident that Mao is going to make for a very entertaining anime this season. It might play all the better if you don't have much experience with Rumiko Takahashi's most classic stories, or if you've at least held off on rewatching InuYasha within the last 15 years, but there's more than enough to enjoy in this premiere that even a cynical old-schooler like me can get a kick out of it.