Miko’s time thinking she can ignore the monsters, spirits, and those creepy shrine maidens that she originally had help from throughout the series but now want to take her soul (or kill her) is over. Reality sets in for the girl who can see but tries to claim she can’t, and going into the mountains and towards the shrine makes it official. Thankfully she has Mitsue, a.k.a. the godmother, and eternal weirdo Rom to help her through her crisis as she tries to find a way to get out of this mess. Rom then offers a suggestion — while he and Mitsue prepare to lower the barrier around the shrine, Miko will distract the shrine maidens and the big, terrifying monster by…acting like she can’t see them.
Well so much for not becoming the girl who can’t see them!
Mieruko-chan volume 6 adds not only more incredibly creepily designed monsters in this volume — no seriously, it’s to where I have no idea how Miko doesn’t faint on sight — but gets into more backstory between the only supernatural powered people Miko knows. As it turns out, Mitsue was asked to take in Rom from a former fakeish exorcist, Towako. While he had a weird view of things as a kid, Rom could see so much better than the two that he had the potential to surpass them all in terms of skill. But as you can guessed from prior volumes, issues arose, and it involved their former master.
So course that led the two to live the life they’ve chosen since then — still scamming people off, but then on occasion actually dealing serious blows to those monsters normal people can’t see. The two now have gotten mixed up with something pretty dangerous however: Miko! Yeah, we still have very little on how Miko can see these ghouls, but it’s starting to become a situation where someone had to have done something to her at some point in her life. It’s unlikely to be a family thing since she’s the only one who can see them; she just was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and that’s all she wrote.
Well, only time will tell if that’s actually the case. But for now, you’ll just have to feast your eyes at more impeccably creepy monsters, some in full-page spread glory, and Miko just being totally terrified. Humor? Hardly knew ya! Ok, there might be some humor one can glean from just the absurdity of it all and Miko’s resolute desire to never say she can see these things.
But the only really humorous chapter was the extra one at the end. Can guess the author was thinking things were too bleak, so let’s throw Hana bumping chest-first into Hana’s little brother and then the two running into Yuria at Mrs. D (with Hana of course bringing Yuria into her chest for a hug). Let’s then also throw Yuria somehow thinking Miko’s little bro can also see monsters after he pointed at one of them and they exploded, unaware that he was just looking at the menu options.
Will that type of humor return to the series? Probably, and I’m kind of curious if these three — well, really Hana and Yuria — will get involved in the overall narrative. But chances are once things up at the mountain’s been solved, there will still be wild monster times for Miko alone to solve and a dose of Hana being a hungry goofball. Will look forward to that, but for now the reveal at the end of this volume suggests there’s more to the shrine maidens than we could’ve suspected, so volume 7 will have a bit of explaining to do!