Eden of the East - Episode 9

After spending so much time trying to find out about his past and why he wiped his memory, Akira Takizawa finally starts to get some answers in episode nine of Eden of the East. However, in the typical style of this series, those answers only beg even more questions for the viewer...

These answers come courtesy of Yutaka Itazu, the pant-free NEET genius who he was introduced to last episode, and after proving his Seleção credentials by basically deciding who should win the baseball championship for, he finally has himself an ally with the ability to unlock the historical data stored on IV's phone.


What this reveals is that, far from being the instigator of Careless Monday, it appears that Akira was actually the hero of the day, diverting civilians away from the areas that the missiles would hit using any means possible to ensure that nobody was killed. This phone's history also confirms what we already knew about the 20,000 NEETs, who were all kept fed and then shipped to Dubai for some unfathomable reason (although given Akira's tendency to cheer on this generation of shut-ins as the future of Japan, it could well have been some kind of massive character-building exercise on his part). Some more digging reveals which Seleção did arrange Careless Monday, and indeed we get to see him with our own eyes during this episode as he appears to be on the tail of Akira for some reason - A state of affairs which proves terminal for Yutaka, although not before he sets a data transfer running which could be about to shake things up massively for Japan.

So, that's that then, Akira really is the hero of Eden of the East... Or is he? We still have questions about the assumed names we now know he operated under thanks to the Eden system, where numerous people seem to have a grudge against him to put it mildly, we still don't know why he chose to wipe his memory on that fateful day in front of the Whitehouse, and I'm still not entirely sure how he knew enough about Careless Monday to prevent any deaths - Sure, he would have seen most of the plans of that plot from his phone's history, but was that really enough to know exactly where they'd land? Call me paranoid, but I think there may be more than meets the eye to this one.

Once again, Eden of the East seems to succeed at telling its story almost effortlessly, from the way it introduces new characters and builds up relationships through to the way it handles existing ones (Saki's character has become a wonderfully understated examination of a girl who both trusts and doubts Akira to a massive degree almost simultaneously over the past couple of episodes). Again, I have to ask how they're expecting to resolve this series in just two more episodes, surely that's just plain impossible given the number of questions it's still throwing up, but no matter how many of those questions it poses I still simply can't get enough of this magnificent series.