Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi

Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi is a short series with a really unique plot premise.  Basically, God has abandoned the world.  Yup, just washed his hands of it and disappeared.  The result of that abandonment is that people don’t die.  Or rather they do die, but they continue to function as human beings.  So the world is full of both the living and the dead.   Unfortunately, if the dead keep functioning for long enough, they become very self-centered, leading into insanity, so in this new world there are also hakamori.  Hakamori, or grave keepers, are human-looking creatures who can use a special shovel to bury the dead.  If you are dead and are buried by a grave keeper, you stay dead and in the ground and your soul departs.

The story is centered around a young girl named Ai whose mother was a hakamori and father was a living human.  Ai is a hakamori.  She has grave keeper powers, but she also has the instincts and feelings of a human, unlike most grave keepers who are cold and unfeeling and just do the job of burying the dead.  After her mother’s death, Ai is raised by the members of a small village, who she doesn’t realize are all dead humans until a man comes to town whose mission is to put all dead humans in the ground.   Ai and this man, who goes by the name on Humpnie Hambart, don’t start out well, but because of him, Ai ends up burying the whole town and leaving on a personal mission to save the world that God has abandoned.

The rest of the series is Ai’s travels and interactions with people who become her friends.  Two of them, a man named Yuri and a woman hakamori named Scar, travel around with Ai in a beat-up van.  These two are her constant friends and travel companions, with other characters being introduced as this trio enters their lives and changes things. 

This short series is composed of five short story arcs.  The original arc is where Ai meets her father and is set on her path of saving the world.  The second arc is where Ai, Yuri and Scar deal with an entire city that is composed of dead humans and only allows dead humans to live there.

The third arc is one where Ai helps free a group of school kids with special powers from a restrictive academy, including a kid named Alis who is followed around by a ghost named Dee.  Between this third arc and the last arc is a one episode arc where Yuri and Ai struggle to help Scar deal with becoming more human than hakamori.  The final arc is where Ai and Alis fight to release a time loop that has trapped a class of students and thousands of other people in an alternate reality that resets and loops through the same year forever.  When you think about it, that’s a pretty amazing number of story arcs seamlessly woven together in this 13 episode series. 

I really enjoyed this series for a bunch of reasons.  Obviously I’m attracted to unique environments and story lines and this one has those things in spades.  In addition, the music from it is just gorgeous.   Really, really nice.  Also the animations style is pretty, and the characters are cool, even if they did kill (and bury) my favorite character in the second or third episode.  That’s pretty standard for my luck though.  I almost stopped watching the series there, but I’m glad I didn’t.  It’s well worth watching all the way through.