The art was gorgeous and the story was interesting, but overall the worldbuilding and character work fell kind of flat. Couching the concept of framing exorcisms/cleansings as “evictions” is interesting on theory, but in practice it looks the same as any other paranormal case manga with some extra words. Other than the zashiki-warashi, we don’t really see where the ghosts end up or why it’s a better place for them, or how just moving them into a new location is going to stop them from inconveniencing humans. Or is the point to move them to a place where they can inconvenience humans the right way? It sounded like the hanako-San was just being moved to a different bathroom, would she not just cause the same problems there? The premise left a lot to be desired and had way too many holes.

The story boarding was also abysmal, it felt like all the creative juice was spent on making the leads as beautiful as possible and none of it went towards making the panels flow. There were way too many close up panels on their reactions and not enough establishing panels to tell how the characters were moving in the space. The decisions to draw out certain actions (opening a door to discover gift onigiri) over others (main character getting chocked (?) out by a yuki-onna) were bizarre and seemingly random. Continuity between the panels was also lacking, and it fumbled some of the jokes (Nijio falling over from drinking alcohol when we never actually saw him drink from the cup. We only see him hold it and then fall, so we have to assume he must have drank from it). All of this made it kind of hard to follow in some places and not a very enjoyable read :/

I can’t say much about the characters since we only just met them, so of course they’re going to seem thin this early in the game. I did find their relationship to be cute, I liked the handholding bit 🥺 and I liked that Nijio comforted Osuka 🥺If the rest of the plot wasn’t so bad, I might have been interested to see how they progress lol.