Durarara!! Episode 1: Kaikou Ichiban

開口

一番

The First Words You Say Out of Your Mouth

Though this isn't as dramatic as Eden of the East or Code Geass, the atmosphere of me wanting to watch it for more is there. This feeling applies to K-On! too: there's no real storyline, but yet, I liked watching it. This used to apply to Railgun too, until they had filter episodes, especially episode 13 onwards and major difference in sequence from the manga and how little it had on parts that co-inside with the main storyline (Index). One of the best anime in the Winter 2010 lineup. A sharp contrast with Winter 2009, where I had dropped everything I had picked up as those were so boring. Look in the archives of this blog dated around April or December for that year or last month for my review.



Watching the opening theme for the first time tells me that there will be a large set of characters being featured. The opening animation matches quite well with the music (裏切りの夕焼け; Treachery Sunset), but the PV of that song is nothing more than the band playing musical instruments on the roof a low-rise building during sunset, which actually looks quite nice. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there's a woman who had the same effect displaying their names like everyone else, but there is no name given.


This episode introduces to us the world of Durarara through a 15-year old Ryugamine Mikado. Mikado has never left his hometown prior to heading to Ikebukuro to start in his High School education there. There, he met Kida Masaomi, his friend from primary school. Though they had not seen for ages, they had kept contact with each other online. Kida brings him around Ikebukuro and tells him about the people they should pay special attention to.


The focus gradually changes to a girl that had walked past them to meet someone they had only known online for the first time, only to be kidnapped later. There are already rumors of people disappearing in the area between Ikebukuro and Shinjuku, targeting people who are least likely to be noticed missing like illegal foreigners. The group that kidnaps this girl seem to have a particular interest in teenage girls (十代女子).


After another brief section of Ryuugamine and Kida introducing to more people, like Simon who works for a Russian-own sushi restaurant, the kidnappers were waiting in a multi-story carpark for their higher-ups when a motorbike rider appears and tries to rescue the girl from the kidnappers. When one of the kidnappers try to ram her with the car, it was revealed that she did not have a head. This is the legendary black rider everyone has been talking about. Ryuugami and Kida were lucky enough to see her with their own eyes. Shortly before that, they encountered a strange woman that had a scar on her neck. (If you look closely, the skin tones of the head and body do not match)


Throughout the anime, there appears to be a chat room and a same voice (changes in each episode, and it seemed to be done by whoever was narrating the preview in the previous episode) narrating what they had typed. They are Kanra (甘楽), Seton (セットン) and Tanaka Tarou (田中太郎). As at episode 8, the real identities of these people are currently unknown, but it is for certain it was not the girl who was kidnapped.