Shiboyugi: Playing Death Games To Put Food On The Table And Souta Ueno’s Deranged World

Souta Ueno is one of the most radical rising figures not just in anime, but commercial animation altogether. With his latest work Shiboyugi, his unorthodox influences ranging from French impressionism to modern avant-garde film are all in service of depicting the psychology of one disenfranchised girl and the deranged world she inhabits.

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Back in 2024 and in what felt like the blink of an eye, Souta Ueno became a critical darling. In our coverage of his debut work Gimai Seikatsu, we noted that this peculiar rise from being completely unknown to becoming many a nerd’s favorite director made sense within context. Sure, a retroactive analysis of his career showed some glimpses of style, but it wasn’t until he was in a position to lead a project that his ideas blossomed. Ueno’s avant-garde artistry, drawing from everything between arthouse film to classic paintings, gives him a flavor that you won’t really find within Japan’s commercial animation; and also, one that can’t really exist under someone else’s vision. It’s not just about getting permission to make highly idiosyncratic audiovisual choices, but also about the mindset that makes him derive those from the foundational principles of an entire series. Unless he has a thorough grasp on those as well, Ueno’s approach is fundamentally restricted.

Far from being antagonistic to the source material he’s entrusted with—so far, all very rooted in classic bishoujo aesthetics—he approaches these stories with utmost reverence, even if his adaptive methods are necessarily transformative. In his ability to tie themes and artifice in deeply compelling ways, he’s a rising figure akin to 86’s director Toshimasa Ishii; though again, his completely unorthodox techniques make any comparison to his peers feel like it’s missing something. That much was once again evident through the snippets of footage that preceded the broadcast of Shiboyugi: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, as was the fact that his arresting delivery would synergize with a peculiar story that takes many swings. Before, Ueno had managed to make the everyday feel ethereal. What would he be capable of this time, then, with a tale of marginalized girls stuck in a shady company’s bizarre, broadcast death games? It was to be expected that Ueno would have much to say and even more to express with Shiboyugi, from a psychological to a societal level. And that is exactly what happened.
It’s worth prefacing any analysis of Ueno’s work by highlighting their holistic integrity, which makes it all the easier to get lost within them. It’s true—and a big part of their appeal—that you don’t know what sort of craft awaits you on the very next shot, with inspirations ranging for hundreds of years and wholly original ideas that are just as stylistically dissimilar. And yet, the clarity of motivation glues everything tightly together. Shiboyugi’s everything revolves around the psychology of its protagonist and the world she lives in, but only insofar as she interacts with it. It’s the type of show that greatly rewards attentive rewatches to pick its pieces apart, but upon first watch and whether it speaks to you or not, it feels thoroughly committed to being itself.

With that in mind, a proper dissection should explore not only the many fascinating artistic choices but also their conversation with the director’s overall vision. That relationship can grow abstract and complex, but it begins with something as simple (and directly inherited from the source material) as the character designs. Despite the novels themselves barely containing illustrations, Shiboyugi is synonymous for many people with Nekometaru’s lavish drawings. The entire premise revolves around attractive girls being made to wear thematic outfits that just so happen to overlap with common kinks, because they also just so happen to be broadcasting the events to an audience. The ornate art in the novels and Banzai Kotobuki Dai Enkai / Murasaki Pomeranian’s stylish manga counterpart, then, serves multiple purposes. On the one hand, it underlines that exploitative nature with eye candy that emphasizes the product the organization is selling. On the other hand, and because hypocrisy is never going to stop any otaku, many readers also find that fancy suggestiveness very attractive.

While you can get away with that with illustrations, anime is burdened with movement, so highly detailed designs that are meant to emphasize beauty are often untenable—especially if you lack the animation muscle to support them. For the good and for the bad, Shiboyugi ignores common sense and opts to stay rather close to Nekometaru’s intricate aesthetic regardless. One aspect that leans particularly strongly on that level of detail, as you’ll notice right at the beginning, is the rendering of the eyes. As the director revealed during the talk stage that followed  Shiboyugi’s prescreening event, the team designed a special method for close-up shots emphasizing the characters’ eyes.

To put it simply, they would superimpose microphotographs of minerals, aiming to achieve a look like the universe itself. Given that this was such a time and resource-sensitive process, they agreed to only apply it to perfectly still shots. Consider the following, however: the very first scene of Shiboyugi features its protagonist Yuki waking up in an unfamiliar place, and also, Ueno is as ambitious as it comes. Which is to say, the show begins with a striking shot of her eyes opening, containing one of those beautiful, carefully assembled collages of minerals that took so much work he earned some scorn. Right off the bat, Ueno was already testing the limits of their production capabilities.

In the same way that you’ll quickly pick up on this adaptation’s more flamboyant side, the elegantly austere stylizations will catch your eye from the get-go. In contrast to the overwhelming level of detail from Yuki’s eyes, the characters are often abstracted into colorful silhouettes, with no visible linework. It’s no exaggeration to call this one of the most prevalent artistic choices in the entire show; right about any medium to full shot has a high chance of being painted in this fashion, a probability that increases the further the camera pulls away from its subject.

Fortunately, this also happens to be an approach that works on multiple levels. In the first issue of his interview with Newtype, producer Takaaki Koyama praises the deliberate contrast between those modes of presentation for the character cels, noting that it increases the richness of Shiboyugi’s expression—all while balancing its animation. Knowing how Ueno’s mind operates, I would add that beyond the visual appeal, it also comes across as a purposeful dehumanization of the characters. Stuck in one cruel death game after the other, the participants are stripped of the lines that clearly define them as individual human beings. It’s a look that often brings them closer to objects; if anything, less defined than the fancy furniture that adorns the location of their first death game.

And if all that sounds too abstract, consider the more straightforward, utilitarian aspect: it masks how janky Shiboyugi’s 2D animation is. This isn’t an attack on its staff, but rather an acknowledgment that they’re asked to do something beyond the means of a modest team at studio DEEN that has to rely on cheap outsourcingOutsourcing: The process of subcontracting part of the work to other studios. Partial outsourcing is very common for tasks like key animation, coloring, backgrounds and the likes, but most TV anime also has instances of full outsourcing (グロス) where an episode is entirely handled by a different studio.. Between Ueno’s ambition, the complexity of the designs, and the occasional bouts of action, the quality of Shiboyugi’s character art and movement can dip rather low. By stylizing so many cuts into inoffensive shapes, though, its production constraints become more palatable.

As a side note, Ueno being subjected to such strict limitations has brought back conversations wishing that he were granted leadership over a more robust team. Seeing how unpolished his first two TV productions have been, that’s an idea that everyone could support on paper. At the same time, however, we shouldn’t take the incredible run he’s had for granted. Ueno has been the first person to express his happiness over getting personnel continuity; in the same way that representatives of other idiosyncratic crews like SHAFT have expressed, there is a lot of value in building familiarity among a crew formed by the same people across multiple projects, especially when what you’re going to ask of your peers is unique and specific.

Perhaps even more importantly, Ueno has managed to carve out a niche under the wing of certain producers. Directors as radical as him can struggle a lot in an industry hellbent on depersonalizing artists, afraid of criticism—which may not even be representative of the fandom as a whole—if a show’s flavor ever becomes too strong. He was fortunate to debut with a surprisingly daring series, alongside an original author who adored his proactive reinterpretation of the story; shout out to Gimai Seikatsu’s Mikawa Ghost, far and away the biggest fan of the TV series. It’s not by chance that he’s directing Shiboyugi: a comparatively odd series by another challenging writer, published under the same brand, sharing the same editor, and now led by the same producers.

Ueno has earned this trust and the ability to work alongside creators who fuel his idiosyncrasy rather than calling it into question. While it’s easy to dream about a director of his caliber being entrusted with a more technically capable team and a wealth of resources, simply dragging him into a high-profile project this early into his career would likely involve the type of creative restrictions that are poison to his brilliance. Hopefully, the critical acclaim he’s been accumulating will be enough to gradually improve the conditions of his projects without having to sacrifice anything in the process. And if he continues to work some magic in these limited environments, so be it—this is clearly not enough to shackle his genius.

Returning to the early stages of the show can tell us more about what the director’s approach entails. Yuki’s awakening is a wake-up call for the audience as well: this is an anime so anchored in its protagonist’s depressive state of mind that there’s a lethargic quality seeping into its everything. She’s not a loudly pessimistic person when speaking to the audience, and Ueno’s direction is as diverse as it gets, but the languid shot length and pacing are fundamentally tied to the subjectivity of someone who—as we’ll see later—leads a textbook depression lifestyle. Just, you know, with a bit more death games than the norm.

A few more things stand out as Yuki surveys the setting of her 28th death game, as well as the people she’ll be participating with. Perhaps most obvious of all is the fact that Shiboyugi defaults to a cinemascope aspect ratio, which it often adjusts to increasingly narrower frames. In the series director’s mind, as confirmed during the aforementioned prescreening event, the feeling of extra horizontal space you get with such compression ought to evoke the sense of loneliness felt by the girls who must survive on their own. At the same time, the inherent imbalance in the screen is meant to literalize the pressure and instability of the situation. The storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime’s visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue. More plays into that to keep the viewer on their toes; an overtly tense moment can be enhanced by asphyxiating framing, and a mere meeting can make you hold your breath—is it as innocuous as it’d seem otherwise, or are we truly in danger?

Although it’s not as obvious as the black bars you’ll be constantly seeing, there is another key aspect to the framing in the first episode: the voyeuristic feeling. You might be surprised to hear this, but death games are in fact not a naturally occurring phenomenon. In Shiboyugi, it’s not just danger that is constantly peeking around the corner, but also an implied audience that delights in the suffering of others. This is quite the contrast with Ueno’s previous work in Gimai Seikatsu; while that also had a voyeuristic spin to its framing, its Jonas Mekas-inspired lens felt more like a nonchalant snapshot of daily events that just so happened to occur in front of a camera. There’s no such chance in Shiboyugi: the in-universe viewers observe, maliciously.

Now, there is simply no way to tell this story that isn’t critical. We’re talking about the exploits of a secret cabal of rich people who target very young girls, manipulating their weaknesses (financial, psychological) or even outright kidnapping them. These girls are made to wear right about any outfit that someone might have a fetish for, as they face cruelly devised death games. It doesn’t take a character pointing at the camera to say that’s awful for the audience to understand that it is. And yet, most writers would approach this type of story from that angle, with a protagonist righteously set to take them down.

That is, however, not the case with Yushi Ukai and Shiboyugi. Instead, we see that story of a deranged world—the words that open the first novel and every episode of the anime—as filtered through someone somewhat numbed to it, as well as to her own desperation. Of course, Yuki is repulsed by much of what they’re subjected to, and this adaptation makes it particularly clear that many of her actions weigh heavily on her. As a veteran who has convinced herself that there is no other viable path, though, Yuki doesn’t bear the same fear and animosity as the newcomers we also accompany in the premiere. Likely because of that and despite her awareness that they’re being watched, the increasingly more Yuki-centric framing in the following episodes doesn’t have quite the same voyeuristic feel to it. If anything, it’s a different type of being watched that you occasionally experience, as we’ll see when we delve further into her character.

In the process of framing this introduction to the death games with such a voyeuristic angle, Shiboyugi #01 finds itself highlighting the enthralling architecture as well. There is something fascinating about the physical settings of these competitions. Whether they’re a fancy mansion or a run-down building, an ordinary place like hot springs or a park modified into a surreal state, they always feel like places where time has stopped. Much of this is owed to the choices of concept artist Hewa, who was also behind the execution of the opening and ending sequences. After handling the latter for Gimai Seikatsu, distilling its essence into a somewhat painterly approach to CG animation, Ueno was very vocal about wanting him back for his next series.

This time around, however, Hewa was due to handle a more central role. Rather than a special sequence that comes across as a what if, he was entrusted with defining the main aesthetic of the series. His design process advanced in parallel with the scriptwriting, and the production pipeline was altered so that the surreal atmosphere his work evoked was funneled directly into the show. Instead of the usual process where an art designer provides 2D references for the settings of the work, Hewa himself would create 3D environments and decorate them as seen appropriate. Snapshots of those locations were then treated as if they were artboards, serving as the direct guidelines for the style and specifics seen in the background art. His uncanny style, somewhat realistic yet always demonstrably off, contributes a lot to the entire show’s unsettling vibes.

Just as important to the atmosphere is Shiboyugi’s unnerving audio, one of the main topics of discussion in the Comic Natalie interview featuring Ueno and sound director Noriyoshi Konuma that we’ve also translated. While they talk about aspects like the deliberately dissonant score by Junichi Matsumoto and how they proactively messed with its sound, that’s only the beginning for the show’s unique soundscape. You’ll quickly realize that Shiboyugi also places a lot of emphasis on muffling voices across walls, on giving almost physical presence to the characters’ interactions with the world.

This physical dimension to the sound ties into one of Ueno’s main goals with the series: solemnly depicting that these girls, finite as their lives are, existed in this world. Whether it is fine-tuning the sfx of bare feet steps once they’re forced to leave even their shoes behind—a detail he asked viewers to pay attention to after the prescreening—or adding a moment where they go to the bathroom, he was always preoccupied with leaving proof behind that they had been there. They may be about to die, their bodies may have been tampered with for the spectacle, but they’re humans all the same.

And because they’re alive, because they’re human, they die.

The depiction of death is one of the aspects that Ueno struggled with the most. It’s something that always looms over the show, yet also an aspect he didn’t want to bring to the forefront in a sensationalistic, shocking way. The need to underline how ruthless these events are had to be balanced with the wish not to trample on the characters more than necessary. Mind you, this isn’t Ueno’s ideology reshaping the show, but rather an idea he inherited from the source material. During one particularly gruesome challenge in this first arc, Yuki and the rest of the survivors are forced to chop off some limbs to reduce their overall weight under a stated limit. In her own narration, she directly states that she chooses to wipe the specifics about what that entailed from her memory to protect what little dignity these girls have left.

What fundamentally separates the original work from the adaptation, then, is the degree of commitment to Yuki’s beliefs. Sure, the novel does tell you where she stands, but it then follows those statements with multiple paragraphs explaining the specifics of the dismemberments; while it could have done so in even tackier ways, it’s still a betrayal of the protagonist’s worldview, and the details about what transpired feel vaguely fetishistic. Mind you, this isn’t intended to be that harsh a criticism of Ukai’s writing. It’s generally assumed that your readers want to know the events that happen within your story, and unlike Ueno and the rest of the team, he didn’t have a visual component to constantly play games of implication.

Even as the anime elegantly dances around death, sometimes there’s no solution but to look it straight in the eye. As Ueno explained in another Newtype interview, this time alongside Yuki’s voice actress Chiyuki Miura, his storyboards were initially going to depict those deaths from a more dramatic, physically closer point of view. Believing that to miss the point, though, he found himself revising them. His point of reference became Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CURE, a 1997 suspense horror film. The movie follows a mysterious series of killings by seemingly disconnected—apart from a shared signature—perpetrators, which you gradually realize have been operating under hypnotic spells. To depict otherwise regular individuals committing these atrocities in completely casual ways, Kurosawa opted to pull back the camera and rely on loose framing with plenty of empty space to the sides. And so, in a world where death can be equally nonchalant, Ueno does something quite similar.

The major exception to this approach, not just when it comes to this first arc but for the show as a whole, is the trap that leads to the loud, harrowing death of the quietest participant. For once, Shiboyugi leans into the Saw-esque nature that these death games can have with the gruesome execution of a girl, a victim of both the uglier side of human nature and a devilish contraption. While the graphic violence is still relatively obscured, Ueno doesn’t seem particularly pleased that they had to take this route, seeing it more as a necessary concession that would only be allowed once. As mentioned in a making-of video, what truly stuck with him in the long run was a different realization: that it was the surviving witnesses to such brutality who looked more dead than the victims.

While the reasoning behind this one-time choice is sound, and I personally believe the first arc to be quite powerful as a result, it’s so unlike the rest of the series that I don’t find the mismatch in reactions to be surprising. People who were impressed by the intensity of Ghost House and that Saw-like dread were then transported to a series focused on the numb pain of a girl who is tragically used to this. Meanwhile, I’ve seen people who would adore the depiction of Yuki’s turmoil bounce off that introduction due to its aggressive bleakness. I suppose that it makes sense for an unorthodox story filtered through an even more unique director to be divisive. In that sense, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

More so than Aoi’s traumatic death, it’s the final sacrifice in this arc that feels representative of Shiboyugi. As they near the end, Yuki and the viewer alike grow fond of Kinko: a short, self-sacrificing girl who somehow manages to make it that far on the back of the protagonist. Facing a final door that simply demands one more death, Yuki is forced to fall back on the rules she’s had to establish to survive one death game after the other. Namely, the decision that if she ever needs to kill to survive, the inevitable hesitation of choosing a target should be eliminated by always going after the closest person. And so, she lets go of the girl she’d taken a liking to. She crushes her skull with a walking stick, but Ueno will spare us from that; instead, it’s abstracted into the descending needle of a record player, channeling Yuki’s thoughts through the classic Qué Será, Será. In these death games, whatever will be, will be. Or so she must tell herself.

Before her tragic death, Kinko was honored with the addition of live-action clips alluding to her life before joining this death game, which hadn’t really been mentioned in the book besides her desire to pay for her father’s debt. Ueno revealed that he didn’t ask the management and directorial crew for a specific kind of content in the live-action footage. It’s not that it didn’t matter, but that what he was interested in was the evocative power of it all. What the director wanted was clips that made the staff think so tangibly about moments in their life that they could almost feel their smell just by looking at recordings—that is what a girl like Kinko would reminisce about during a death game.

After that cocktail of emotions in a double-length episode, Shiboyugi #02-04 cover the next arc. And by next, of course, I mean they return to the past. This anachronical approach to the story is something else that the anime inherits from the source material, but once again, it tweaks the idea in the process. While both the books and the show return to a more inexperienced Yuki after Ghost House, the anime deliberately leaps to a different point. Understanding that the team only had a single cours of television as opposed to an indeterminate number of novels, Ueno’s approach was to build around Yuki herself. When it came to the series compositionSeries Composition (シリーズ構成, Series Kousei): A key role given to the main writer of the series. They meet with the director (who technically still outranks them) and sometimes producers during preproduction to draft the concept of the series, come up with major events and decide to how pace it all. Not to be confused with individual scriptwriters (脚本, Kyakuhon) who generally have very little room for expression and only develop existing drafts – though of course, series composers do write scripts themselves., that meant structuring everything around the first volume of Shiboyugi.

For the record, the anime does adapt the first two novels, even incorporating details from later events to enrich the flavor. The experience the director wanted to match, though, was specifically the one a reader might have after finishing the first book. That’s why its arcs bookend the TV show, why its epitaph is attached to every episode—even those that technically belong to different volumes. Shiboyugi began by presenting this deranged world and a protagonist deeply lost in it, and that became Ueno’s point of emphasis throughout.

In the same way that the director’s unorthodox metaphors are something that naturally comes to him, the way he’ll reconstruct a story because he wholeheartedly believes it benefits the source material’s goals is key to understanding him as a director. Shiboyugi’s adaptation choices have received mixed reception, and rather than treating it merely as a matter of liking or disliking his unique approach, the internet has been as quick as ever to brandish accusations of pretentiousness and egocentric antagonism of the original work. One of the reasons why we chose to translate his interview with Natalie in particular was that—in a way he has done before—he explicitly states that he believes he’s fundamentally faithful to the source material he’s entrusted with.

Mind you, it’s not as if adaptations have to be rooted in the exact worldview of the original work in the first place, but it’s telling about the increasingly narrower views of the audience that even a director with that respectful a stance is branded a traitor. It goes without saying that it’s perfectly fine to not be fond of every choice he makes, of every unusual technique he deploys. I will be the first one to point out that some aspects of the original work were sacrificed in the transition to television. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about a director so committed to protecting the writer’s original ideas that Gimai Seikatsu’s author wrote a book’s worth of essays about him. In his words, Ueno possesses an uncanny ability to retrofit details so genuine to the source material that they feel like something the original creator always intended to add, but simply forgot. Whether he succeeds or not, this is what he sets out to do.

So far, this look at Shiboyugi has been rather Ueno-centric. If we move onto its second arc, that framing appears more and more justified. Scrapped Building places a less experienced Yuki in a deadly escape game alongside a group of returning (yet still fairly green) players, led by the haughty Mishiro. The story is rather simple this time around: the protagonist quickly catches on to the multiple layers of this challenge, straying from Mishiro’s pack in ways they misread as naively altruistic, since they haven’t pieced together that they’re ruthlessly self-serving as well. It’s a neat way to learn about the contradictions at Yuki’s core, by watching them play out through the methodology that precariously keeps her in balance. And that’s something that, once again, is sold through Ueno’s memorable delivery.

The thing is, Ueno is no longer the sole storyboarder like he was for the initial arc. In fact, that’s a position he only ever reclaims for half an episode, near the end of the show. The directorial roles for the rest of the series are instead occupied by workmanlike freelancers and DEEN-adjacent personnel who already have sizable experience alongside the series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario.. It’s clear that the former had their storyboards very meticulously revised and altered by Ueno, whereas the latter he has personally thanked for understanding his intent so well that it streamlined everything. Even when a rather well-known individual swings by to draw a storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime’s visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue. More, such as Noriyuki Abe for the second episode, there is a stylistic continuity to Shiboyugi that you rarely find in commercial anime.

As Scrap Building marches to its conclusion, we get more examples of how those overarching guidelines established by Ueno enhance the experience. By the fourth episode, originally storyboarded by Shinji Ishihira and directed by Shunji Yoshida, things have gone as poorly as one might have predicted. The Mishiro-led team has completely fallen apart; her clinical obsession with leadership and misreading Yuki’s rustiness as a lack of understanding of these games caused them to part ways unamicably, which is more or less what’s happened between Mishiro and her arm as well. Meanwhile, Yuki’s better judgment and her incredible survival skills have allowed her to earn brownie points with everyone else, leading them to the final stage before turning around to save Mishiro for thoroughly petty reasons. When she shows up ready to do so, she gladly exploits the opportunity to get back at the girl who’d bullied and belittled her, urging her to apologize if she wants to escape death.

In short, it’s the worst day in Mishiro’s life, and she’s had terrible ones to spare. As her brain goes into overdrive during Yuki’s pointless countdown—she’d save her anyway—the final pillar of Shiboyugi’s stylistic identity comes into play: chapter numbers as punctuation. This pacing technique is present in the source material already, as it doesn’t use chapters in the way most books do. Rather than a clean break for a new page and maintaining a standard length to them, Shiboyugi chapters are continuously printed, and can last between a sentence or two to a sizable chunk of an arc. They are, in that way, a mechanism to control the rhythm of its storytelling.

Normally, a stylistic choice so rooted in the literal text of the work wouldn’t transition directly into animation. Given that Ueno is anything but normal, though, you shouldn’t be surprised that this adaptation happily embraced it. Across all arcs, which have the tendency to spiral out of control as you’d expect out of a death game, there is an inherent tension in watching a number approach an end goal that may very well be synonymous with a massacre. Although the adaptation will often retain the same total of chapters, or at least a number in its ballpark, it’s worth pointing out that their content doesn’t map directly; this adaptation is all too aware of its structural changes and the inherent differences between book and television. To match its effect as punctuation rather than pointlessly reproducing numbers, the anime constantly changes the placement and flow of those markers.

To exemplify the impact such a small stylistic choice can have, let’s return to Mishiro’s conundrum. This is a good moment to point out that, for some reason, Scrap Building appears to have 3 chapters more in the anime than its book counterpart. If they can adjust the content assigned to each of them, what’s up with that? The answer is in this scene. Time has slowed down to a crawl as Yuki counts down to demand Mishiro’s apology. The logical understanding that she should, her immense pride, and this slow psychological torture reach a boiling point—and then she snaps, refusing Yuki’s demand and running away. There, the counter leaps, skipping fake chapters to fuel the acceleration of this unexpected turn. Switching to Yuki’s mindset again, the stillness as she processes what happened eventually leads to a new chapter. This time, signifying her realization that she finds the haughty girl’s insanity to be quite attractive. Who are we to judge how these people flirt, I suppose.

In the end, Yuki saves the ridiculous woman she has become weirdly fond of, defeating the man-eating beast who’d been snacking on Mishiro’s lost limb. Not only that, but she also demonstrates that she’d always known they’d eventually have to vote their way to survival. Her unquestionable superiority allows her to make it through that final stage with ease, even earning her an apology she may not remember she asked for. What she doesn’t quite realize, however, is that she has effectively rewired Mishiro’s brain through a humiliation that she didn’t think deeply about. Surely that won’t be an issue in arcs to come!

Before we get to the reaping that insists on following the sowing, though, we get one of the most interesting episodes in the entire show. Shiboyugi #05 includes parts of a prologue to an arc, aspects from later supplementary material, and enough original additions to feel like an all-new experience. Originally, Yuki’s conflict at this post-Ghost House juncture was focused on the dread of The Wall of 30. Which is to say, the observation that even the most experienced and skillful players tend to drop dead by their thirtieth participation, as if it were a curse. While that is still something she’s worried about, this episode immediately broadens its scope by beginning with an in-universe interview with the protagonist. Yuki exposes her perceived inability to participate in society and her little attachment to her own life as the reasons why she took this path. And yet, she also gestures toward a change in motivation at a certain point. That is, of course, what this TV show will eventually culminate in.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, what follows is a taste of Yuki’s routine outside the death games, back to its most dysfunctional now that she has a lot on her mind. Lengthy, uncomfortably quiet cuts of a lethargic protagonist, as she wakes up at night and even then is barely active. Strolls outside that once soothed her now don’t do much. She’s framed from behind and often from an upper point of view, with fixed cameras. Eventually, she voices feelings answering potential questions about her mindset, as if the interview that opened the episode had continued; something the visuals literalize at one point. The recollections of the traumatic events she’s trying to process are being witnessed by Yuki herself. It feels like she’s the subject of a documentary, its director, and the audience all at the same time—exactly what Ueno and the rest of the team were aiming for.

The Newtype interviews with both producer and director explain that the latter always saw Yuki as a bit of a dual existence: her physical body in the moment, and a presence so detached that it’s as if she observed herself from above. Such a contradictory individual could only exist as a collection of dualities; she’s of course a human being, yet the kanji in her name and her faint presence evoke ghostliness; she’s a survival genius, yet she’s rather terrible at living; she can kill without a second’s hesitation, yet she’ll carry regrets for an untold amount of time.

To emphasize this aspect of the main character, Ueno began drawing links between her design, key narrative beats, and that dual presence of hers. For example, there’s the fact that her mentor in these death games constantly insists that she must keep a record of her actions and revise them as much as possible. After tragedy strikes in the final arc—the earliest point in the timeline we witness—Yuki begins following that advice, hence why the show will sometimes portray its protagonist in the theater of her mind, watching projections of past events. Earlier, we noted that the heavy voyeuristic angle from Ghost House lessens in further arcs, but that there is a certain reason why shots sometimes still give the feeling that someone is peeking at Yuki’s actions. That is, in a way, Yuki herself.

Perhaps the most striking mechanism to embody the protagonist’s duality is what the team came to refer to as odd monologues, derived from the term odd-eye that is used to refer to heterochromia in Japanese. As seen early into this fifth episode, Yuki will sometimes slip into third-person narration, parsing her own reality as if she were a mere witness. When subjected to particularly stressful situations, this is overlaid with regular first-person narration that is slightly misaligned, creating a cacophony of dissociation. Chaotic moments like the lead up to the most gruesome death in the first arc, as well as the instant she realizes her mistake in episode #05 might anger the organization running these death games, are made more memorable (and terrifying) through yet another brilliant artistic choice.

There are two other things worth highlighting regarding this episode. One, that a meeting between Kinko’s dad—now on a mission to dismantle the shady cabal that got his daughter killed—and Yuki allows the latter to demonstrate once again how curious a story Shiboyugi is. Pulling the figurative trigger on that young girl is something she’s genuinely traumatized about, and she can’t in good conscience tell him that she wants to participate in these death games, but she also cannot even conceive leading any other type of life. The way the direction mixes his tailing of Yuki and her chaotic mindset plus the heavy silences in their conversation are as impactful as any other choice in this show. And that brings us to the final point: the director and storyboarder for this episode is not just the most interesting discovery about this team we made as the audience, but also a clear favorite for Ueno himself as well. Since they have a key role in a later episode as well, though, let’s postpone that reveal for a bit longer.

After such effusive praise for this fifth episode, it would be fair to say that the next arc is the anime at its weakest. Golden Bath spans episodes #06 and #07, covering Yuki’s long-awaited 30th death game. The broad criticisms for the adaptation hold the most water when it comes to this arc; get it, because it’s set in baths. While it has interesting points like showing other reasons why people might feel like they don’t belong in society, and establishes the foundation of success for the excellent closure of the show, it’s the moment when the adaptation’s priorities and the content of the story are most misaligned.

The idea that the Shiboyugi anime increases the subjectivity of its protagonist is something that we, the director, and her voice actress have mentioned repeatedly by this point. By committing to that, our point of view will not be particularly concerned with things she also holds no interest in. Between Ueno’s already cryptic delivery and Yuki’s disinterest in the literal mechanics of Shiboyugi’s world, many aspects that play a role in this arc aren’t spelled out. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that they’re not actually present in the anime; a mention of a cold hand is an acknowledgement of a certain someone’s prosthetics, Yuki’s victory relies on mechanisms that exist even if they’re not explained, and the absurdly powerful tiny girl did undergo extreme body modifications—something not all too uncommon in these games, but that Yuki doesn’t care for. And thus, the anime doesn’t either.

That said, Golden Bath marks the return of Mishiro, and that is in and of itself a victory. As it turns out, she spent all her time after Scrap Building grinding in the death games mines, raising a group of trustworthy disciples and fantasizing about a fated duel with Yuki. Unfortunately, the target of her twisted affection hasn’t been quite as active—Mishiro has overtaken her experience by this point—and is barely scraping by post-Ghost House. Their interactions hadn’t meant all that much to Yuki, but being casually humiliated by the ghostly girl’s talent rerouted Mishiro’s entire life. Her obsession with standing at the top made her idolize the person who’d soundly beaten her, fantasizing about defeating her in epic duels where they both wear wedding dresses; surely that means nothing at all. After all that, seeing Yuki at her lowest while she stumbles around in Golden Bath makes Mishiro explode.

With her life under genuine threat, Yuki awakens just enough to finish off Mishiro and her underlings, surviving the dreaded Wall of 30. Her assertion of life (or at least, rejection of death) is important in a show that’s all about a girl finding a drive to move forward, but that’s something we’ll see more powerfully in the final stretch. More than that, and thanks to the adaptation changing the order of the arcs, what is key here is having established how Yuki’s nonchalant actions had such a profound and ultimately deadly effect on someone else. After all, the final confrontation in the show is between someone who did something quite similar, even accusing Yuki of being just like her. That arc is Candle Woods, and the name of Yuki’s foe is Kyara. Oh, and she’s a psychotic serial killer. That part is noteworthy too, I suppose.

This final arc begins with episode #08, sporting the same number of chapters as its novel counterpart—something quite funny in retrospect, considering how radically different this animated version is. Yuki’s behavior in this introductory episode and the few allusions to her experience are enough to realize that this is the furthest we’ve backtracked in this story. In truth, that much is made clear with the first cut within the game; this mirror of the first shot in the anime underlines that Yuki has two regular eyes at this point, meaning that something has yet to happen, and that we’re in for a painful time.

As far as Shiboyugi goes, though, #08 is a low-key episode. On a surface level, it introduces the rules of this game: a confrontation between two factions, a larger one—including Yuki—that can succeed merely by surviving, and a smaller one, armed with weapons but forced to kill several people to clear the game. To make things messier, all but one member in the latter are absolute newbies, forcing a single girl to sacrifice part of their meager forces to steel the rest of the group. Just as importantly, we see the first extended interactions between Yuki and her mentor Hakushi. The latter is inching closer to her preposterous dream of clearing 99 death games, urging Yuki to consider what her goals in life are. For someone with so little attachment to living at this point, that’s hard for her to conceive.

What follows is arguably the most impressive stretch of the show, and not coincidentally, the one time Ueno himself returns to the position of co-storyboarder. Omnipresent as he feels across the show, it’s significant that he chose the culmination of episode #09 in particular as the part he ought to draw from scratch. Even more so, because this is an episode without the protagonist at all. Within an adaptation that he pushed toward a more Yuki-centric subjectivity, it’s a virtually original interlude where she’s missing that he emphasized in this way.

Instead, the spotlight is on Moegi, the one girl we just saw leading the opposing faction in Candle Woods. Although she acted like a ruthless despot during those scenes, the end of that previous episode already gestured in a direction that is fleshed out across #09: that Moegi is pathetically mimicking someone else, hoping to channel their strength. That individual is, of course, Kyara. Through Ueno’s storyboards, we learn of their first meeting; even amidst the chaos of the death game she’d been thrown into, Kyara’s nonchalant violence was dazzling to someone incapable of asserting herself like Moegi. The latter’s declaration that she wanted to kill her parents piqued the murderer’s curiosity, so she took her in as she seemed to have done with other similarly desperate girls. Transparent as it is that Kyara is molding them to her cruel liking, to a person who has known no affection like Moegi, even that interest reads like a form of love. That is, at least, how she chooses to interpret it.

Despite the Yuki-centric lens that frames most of the TV show, previous episodes had already given additional glimpses of the backstories of the participants. From the live-action shots embodying the joyful days Kinko yearned for to the extended presence of the sister that Mishiro’s inferiority trauma is rooted in, the anime grants more personhood to the girls the protagonist meets. What’s so different about this arc, then, is simply the magnitude of this broadening scope, as episodes like #09 are chock-full of meaningful details about their lives. This is most evident with Moegi herself, but it applies to Kyara’s entire gang. The adaptation makes the choice to include Shiori, another disciple who doesn’t cross paths with Yuki until much later in the series, and uses a recurring pattern of behavior to show Kyara’s effect on people. The maniac killer herself is seen browsing her favorite type of clothing, which clues you into the demented reveal that her upcoming massacre in Candle Woods is triggered by making her wear an outfit she doesn’t like.

Just as important as what is said is the way all those things are communicated. In the presence of an existence as irrational as Kyara, Shiboyugi’s already outrageous soundscape only grows crazier. The series is inherently tied to violence, but the visceral direction in episode #09 makes it clear that her bloodthirst transcends these death games—killing is both enjoyable and entirely unimportant to her. And yet, Moegi feels warmth in her presence. In classic Ueno fashion, this contradiction is rendered through an accumulation of metaphors and techniques. The uplifting embrace of a serial killer shines with hope like nothing else in the show, but it’s also done in the vicinity of a whale carcass, likening Kyara’s nonchalant, mass violence to a large animal that swallows everything. Two Kenji Miyazawa stories are intertwined: The Nighthawk Star, tied to the miserable loneliness Moegi used to feel, and The Twin Stars, representative of Kyara’s gravitational pull on her. In referring to her as the Sun, and especially through the painterly depiction of this toxic, beautiful relationship, there’s a clear Icarus-like quality to Moegi’s immolation.

We’ve been alluding to some of Ueno’s most valuable in-house talents for a long time, and there’s no better opportunity than now to name them. Likely because of his broad, all-encompassing artistic sensibilities, the director seems to have grown particularly fond of DEEN personnel who aren’t tied to just one department. That’s the case for Tae Sakurai, a Gimai Seikatsu veteran who regularly shows up in right about any animation task—from supervision to in-betweens—while being equally active in the digital coloring department. This time around, she painted the watercolor animation we see in the gorgeous climax of the episode, and also across the fake chapter cards that imply the length of Moegi and Kyara’s relationship.

Although Sakurai’s execution of those ideas is great, we can’t forget about the person who oversaw all those special sequences: Ueno’s new right-hand woman, Yui Kamura. We’re talking in this case about a less seasoned individual, who acted as a regular key animator in Ueno’s previous show. In addition to that and a fair amount of in-between checking reps, more recently she has gained some directorial and 3DCG experience as well. This has clearly caught Ueno’s eye, considering she has shown up across basically every department in the production of Shiboyugi.

It’s not the sheer amount of work she did for the series that made Kamura stand out, though, but how important and striking it has been. She was the lead episode director for the first arc, processing Ueno’s storyboards, and later returned to the same position for the show’s finale. Her greatest accomplishment was arguably the storyboardStoryboard (絵コンテ, ekonte): The blueprints of animation. A series of usually simple drawings serving as anime’s visual script, drawn on special sheets with fields for the animation cut number, notes for the staff and the matching lines of dialogue. More and co-direction for episode #05, which we effusively praised earlier for its engrossing delivery. And now, we have this visual poetry that grants beauty to a harrowing relationship. Although Kamura’s work under different project leaders isn’t this idiosyncratic, Ueno’s trust doesn’t seem misplaced in the least. Perhaps, with time, we’ll see her turn heads the way he’s doing now.

Hakushi’s advice to avoid confronting homicidal maniacs resonates within Yuki as we move onto the tenth episode, now with Kyara’s murder spree—targeting everyone regardless of their faction—already underway. If the previous episode was a showcase of DEEN-affiliated talent, #10 is the strongest effort led by a freelancer. Mind you, Ueno remains inescapable; I need no confirmation to know who was responsible for the golden phase Gustav Klimt inspiration accompanying Yuki’s depressive spiral. That said, director and storyboarder Shinya Kawabe (recently seen in notable works like Cosmic Princess Kaguya, The Summer Hikaru Died, and Apocalypse Hotel) clearly has the technical chops to bring the overall vision to life. That much is obvious in the equal parts mystical and disturbing lead up to Yuki and Moegi’s confrontation, losing you in wondrous sound even as you know that a certain someone has no chance to escape alive. Even details as small as the connected blinking are satisfying, especially in a context where we transition from one point of view to another.

Calling the following events a fight feels like misrepresenting a one-sided affair. Yuki herself remarks that there was no way someone like Moegi could ever best her; far from being arrogant, it’s undeniable that even a still somewhat green Yuki has an outstanding talent at survival… and at killing, for that matter. When the inevitable happens, some of the best character drawings in the entire show embody the deep frustration Moegi feels at the time—not over the path she chose when following Kyara, but about not being able to walk any further alongside her. It’s that continued burning of her star that shocks Yuki to her core. As a deeply depressed girl who vibed her way into these death games with no goal in sight, the protagonist feels deeply inferior, less valuable than the directed, focused life she extinguished.

As usual, the delivery of these feelings is stunning. More conscious than ever of her dispassionate and detached behavior, Yuki switches once again to third-person narration of her own life. Even without the previously used odd monologue technique, her voice resonates like a ghost haunted by herself, sinking deeper into her own agony. As viewers, we can reach the more rational realization that, if the consequences of your actions torment you so much you want to disappear, you do care, unlike what Yuki has told herself. While she has yet to formulate a tangible goal, there is nothing inherently lesser to Yuki’s existence, but depression clouds her perception. Grass does look greener on Moegi’s head, I suppose.

The results of Kyara’s slaughter, including Hakushi’s torn-apart body, await Yuki at the bottom of the stairs. Their inevitable fight is preceded by Kyara’s claim that the two are similar beings. This is an aspect, especially in the context of a TV show that seeks to answer Who and What is Yuki?, where the adaptation’s structural changes pay off in a big way. Mind you, this arc already begins with Yuki wondering if she’s any different from a serial killer, as her master warns her against confronting such foes. What’s particularly interesting, though, is how placing Scrap Building and Golden Bath before this point informs our perception.

In the arcs that originally composed the second novel, we see Yuki come across Mishiro and irredeemably change her life. While she didn’t put all that much weight on their interactions initially, her confidence and skill in these death games derailed Mishiro’s trajectory forever, leading up to her eventual, somewhat self-immolating death. So what has much of Candle Woods been about, then? Kyara coming across Moegi, and without putting all that much weight on their interactions at first, derailing her entire life thanks to her confidence and skill in these death games. As we saw in the previous episode, that does lead to Moegi’s somewhat self-immolating death. Does that make them the same? As viewers, we’re very aware of the fundamental difference between a girl who has been torturing herself over her actions for an entire show and an unrepentant serial killer, but Yuki doesn’t value herself enough to give weight to her feelings.

The fight quickly tips in Kyara’s direction, stabbing Yuki not just with blades but with the accusation that they really are the same: two lost causes born to live and die within this chaos. Incapable of denying it, Yuki sinks into self-reflection for the last time; in characteristic Shiboyugi fashion, she’s quite literally watching the credits to her own life. Telling herself she’s ready to vanish, she gets lost in memories. The places she’s been, the people she’s met, the many regrets she carries, but also traces of remaining warmth. Chronology be damned, Ueno exploits that duality of Yuki as a person and an overseeing presence to have acquaintances from the future pay her a visit. The curtain is closing on her life as she faces the jealousy she has always felt toward Moegi, toward everyone in this deranged world whom she perceived as having something precious. And that’s when she remembers Hakushi’s advice: find a goal, a tangible objective to play these games for. When she grasps that, Yuki stands up and affirms herself. She won’t just be in this world.

In a way, the goal itself doesn’t particularly matter. Hakushi had chosen to beat 99 games, an arbitrary number that she couldn’t even be sure was the all-time record. Yuki decides on the spot that she’ll inherit that objective, without giving it all that much thought. After idolizing people she felt possessed something she lacked, though, this is enough to reinvigorate her. Thanks to even more memories of Hakushi’s advice and a weapon that her master had hidden just in case, Yuki is able to emerge victorious from the worst bloodshed in the history of these death games. Not only that, but she adjusts her lifestyle according to the recommendations that her mentor left behind; she’ll start properly reviewing her actions, she’ll go to school to gain more knowledge, and of course, she’ll continue to play death games to put food on the table.

Normally, the ending would be a refutation of the idea that Yuki and Kyara were ever the same—you know the drill with Shiboyugi, though. The show’s final trick, after underlining their similarities and then setting them apart, is a final but. In the Natalie interview we translated, Ueno mentions the thought he put into the setting. Surely, something fundamental must be missing in a world where girls can be subjected to fates this cruel. He determined that it had to be love, but didn’t want to succumb to the hopeless implications of that, noting that the finale is built on the pushback against it.

And what is the climax of the final fight, after Yuki manages to shoot Kyara? A tender meeting between the latter and Moegi, returning to the motif of the two stars. Up to this point, the title of every single episode had been hiding a 4 letter word, and it’s only in this instant that it’s revealed to be love; we’d been in that world without love Ueno saw, yet even then, there are meaningful bonds. In the end, even Kyara did care, in her own maniac way.

This tracks with the director’s view of the series as a whole. Across the Newtype interviews we’ve mentioned before—both Ueno’s and the flabbergasted producer’s—it’s revealed that his point of reference for Shiboyugi was Edgar Degas’ paintings of ballerinas. Not other death games stories, not an anime nor any other piece of pop culture, but the work of a French impressionist artist. Like many other Ueno perspectives, the seemingly out-of-pocket reference proves to be thoughtful the moment you think about it. Degas drew dancers in flamboyant settings, but mostly wanted to sketch their everyday realities, much like the director’s insistence on showing how the participants live. Beyond the opulence of the outfits and atmosphere, you could often see figures in the dark, manipulating these young girls and subjecting them to arduous training for their own amusement; the similarities in this regard go without saying. And yet, the paintings weren’t gloomy. They’re attractive, hopeful despite their awareness of the surrounding malice. That’s the Shiboyugi that Souta Ueno set out to create.

When compared to the director’s first TV show, Shiboyugi is undoubtedly a bit of a bumpier ride. And how could it not be, considering the sheer scope of what he attempted to pull off? Even with any misgivings I may have, though, every important piece clicked with such clear intent by the end that I feel nothing else really mattered. Ueno’s radically diverse influences, especially for a field as meek as current anime, don’t prevent him from earnestly engaging with the works he’s entrusted with. If anything, he’s a very humble director who just so happens to have a genuinely unique perspective. And that is something we ought to treasure, even if you didn’t love every choice he made with this project.

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