Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, chapter 42
Reread post for Pet Shop of Horrors chapter 42 “Duplication”.
Again, heads-up for inevitable Implicit Spoilers For Everything. Occasionally including the sequels/spinoffs! We’re getting into Deep Lore territory, here.
(I posted the D/Tetsu fic, it has explicit post-canon spoilers, anyone doing a first-time readalong here should definitely save it until you get to the end.)
Originally liveblogged on Mastodon / Bluesky. Get your own: Affiliate links for the whole Collector’s Edition.
Opens with a splash page (hah) of our D falling into that river. No text to compare between editions, but the higher-quality Seven Seas printing makes it a lot easier to tell what’s going on, compared to Tokyopop.
Cut to the D who picked up Leon, now at a super-fancy skyscraper. He says he’s only rented the top 4 levels (including an open-air garden that might span several of them?), but I’m a little suspicious that he just owns the whole thing. Handprint scanner and metal detectors in the elevator.
Not sure if this disembodied voice is supposed to be a human guard calling in from a security station, or some kind of full-on AI:
TP: Count? The person with you is carrying a pistol and a mobile phone.
SS: Count, your companion is carrying a firearm.
(Weird point for TP to invent a cell phone. It would meaningfully change the plot if Leon could call for help!)
—
Leon thinks the garden looks bigger than the building. Might be a little fakeout to make readers suspect the shop is here now? But no, the D family can just generally Do This.
…And then. And then Leon gets a moment of incredible cleverness. Which took me a minute to figure out in the SS translation, so I was sorta wishing they had localized it more, but then I reread TP and they didn’t even try!
TP: Wait a minute! Where’s Q-chan? And Pon-chan and Tetsu?
SS: Hey, where’s Q-taro? What about Ponkichi and Tetsu?
Leon gets the first two names wrong! But in a way that still sounds like Plausible Japanese Pet Names! (Compare Hamtaro the cartoon hamster, Shippeitaro the fairy-tale dog, Monkichi and Daikichi the Hello Kitty monkeys…)
So they’re made-up names, but they’re not obviously made-up names. You would have to be personally familiar with D’s specific pets to know those aren’t their names.
Leon has already clocked that this might not be his D, and is running a quick test to check <3 That’s our ace detective in action <3
—
Not Our D is savvy enough that he just ignores the question, and redirects to “let’s go up this ominous spiral staircase to have tea at the top of the giant ominous space-warping building.”
Look, I’m not saying he and Akio Ohtori *definitely* have the same architect…but I’m not the only person who hears Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku playing in the background here, right?
—
Cut back to our D, carried upstream and deposited onshore by a river dragon (“Prince of the Black Dragons” in TP, “Lord Héilóng” in SS — that’s just Chinese for “black dragon”) and some mermaids (or maybe fish with humanoid appearances).
He lost the suitcase, though! The fish go to find it.
Along with river/forest creatures, some of the shop pets gather around D to help him up. Our first firm confirmation that the shop’s current anchoring-point in this world is through D, not the suitcase.
—
Pon-chan urges D to move on to the next town, but D is having a bad time:
TP: I no longer wish to be among humans. Pursued…hunted…hated…always running…no more.
SS: I don’t want to be anywhere near humans. I’m tired of being chased–hunted. I’m sick of running.
…And then the plants start winding in to reclaim him.
We’ve seen D more overtly-injured without any of this happening. And, sure, it’s very possible Akino just hadn’t come up with the “when Ds die, they revert into plant matter” worldbuilding before this chapter.
But I’m having a lot of feelings about the interpretation that D never got this close to “just flat-out losing his will to live” until he lost Chris, and Leon, and even [what’s in the suitcase].
—
The passing ghosts of various flocks/herds of extinct North American animals get D’s attention, pulling him out of it.
This brings us to a line I never liked in TP. It hasn’t been well-set-up in the narrative, and it doesn’t get a particularly satisfying follow-through, either. Reading the SS version has, genuinely, resolved a multi-decade point of frustration! It doesn’t make sense because That Was Not What He Said:
TP: And I remember my vow to avenge your suffering by punishing those responsible — the humans!
SS: I remember how you swore revenge on humanity.
Our D has always been mad about how humans treat other animal species, and the environment in general. That’s been an obvious recurring theme since the way he yelled at Leon in the museum not-a-dream chapter.
But “punishing humans for it” was never D’s driving motivation! When the pets at the shop deal out karmically-appropriate punishments to contract-breaking customers, it’s mostly for the bad things those customers do to other humans.
Sometimes it’s for the bad things they do to individual animals. Like the girl way back in “Desire” who picked on her dog Daisy.
It’s never for their involvement in wide-scale extinctions. D isn’t selling murderous pets to oil executives, or tech CEOs, or billionaires funding climate-change-isn’t-real think tanks. Oh, he wouldn’t lose a moment of sleep if any of those folks got eaten by T-chan — but “siccing T-chan on people like that” isn’t his beat, his career, his self-appointed purpose in life.
And he never promised anyone it would be, either.
—
Cut to Howell + local law enforcement, around the river. They get the suitcase. Can’t find any blood, they assume the rain washed it away, but there’s a trail of mysterious non-native flowers growing in D’s wake.
…I know these aren’t new baby D seedlings, but let’s pause for a minute and imagine how cute it would be if they were new baby D seedlings.
—
Howell takes the bag to his car, and then whoops, there’s D with a knife! Also, suddenly the car is full of hungry animals. Awkward.
Howell is frustrated/confused that D doesn’t seem to “remember” him. D infers that Howell is thinking of Papa D — huh, usually D assumes people are thinking of Grandfather. Is he just going off of how old Howell appears to be (1 generation behind Leon, rather than 2)? Or has Papa D specifically complained to our D about That Troublesome FBI Agent before?
If there was any doubt, though, this line from Howell surely gives enough info to pick out which D he’s looking for:
TP: The prints you left at the pet shop match the ones we lifted from your place in Washington 20 years ago!
SS: The fresh prints from the pet shop were a perfect match for the “Count D” who was in D.C. twenty years ago!
I double-checked the “when Howell met Papa D” bonus story that shows up in v2 of PSoH:Tokyo, hoping for any corroboration on whether this is actually Washington DC, or possibly Washington State. No luck — the opening location is captioned “University of New York, 1975.” (And then they spend most of it on vacation in Greece.)
Present day is probably late ’97. Strong implication of “they knew each other for about 2 years, then Papa D mysteriously disappeared, and Howell’s been looking for him ever since.”
Thinking about it…it would make sense if our D knows this backstory because, when he took over the shop, he was specifically warned “you have to keep ahead of This One Guy who’s looking for a Count D, and being a real pain about it.”
—
It was sunset when D washed up on-shore, and there’s a night sky overhead as he says this:
TP: Perhaps we should go meet Father. You’ll have to turn around. Father’s back in Los Angeles. That’s over a day’s drive away.
SS: Shall we pay my father a visit, then? If so…head back to where we started. By car, we should arrive by tomorrow evening.
Okay, gotta poke at the timeline here for a sec.
In the morning (a few days after D’s disappearance), LAPD gets the news about mysterious out-of-state animal murders. Howell gets in his car and goes to investigate. Leon leaves the building on foot, dissociates for a bit, then gets picked up by Limo D. We cut from “Leon getting picked up” to “Howell catching up with D, and chasing him through the rain” to “Leon arriving at Totally Not The Ohtori Building.”
I was thinking Leon stormed out pretty much immediately. But this only works if there’s a significant unflagged timeskip here. Did Leon stay at work all day, and only leave toward the evening? Hard to imagine him having the patience. He must’ve been insufferable.
Alternately, maybe Leon went outside right away, and then dissociated for like 6 hours.
…I’m genuinely not sure which of those I think is more likely.
So, how long do we think that limo was waiting out there? It sure looks like Limo D (actually, let’s just say it, this is Papa D) specifically waited until Howell was leaving the area to scoop up Leon.
Do we think Howell walked/drove right past him?? Because that would be great. I bet Papa D cackled so hard, watching Howell stomp right by his tinted windows.
—
It was sunset outside Papa D’s building when he invited Leon up the stairs, it’s full night at the end of this last D-Howell scene, now we cut back to Papa D and Leon…just arriving on the top floor.
Realistically, this is probably “doing the cuts based on what’s most dramatic, not on a strictly-accurate timeline.” But I am very entertained by the possibility of “it literally took that long to walk up all these Ohtori-ass stairs.” Just play Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku on an infinite loop until we get there.
—
Papa D takes Leon through a room of Ominous Taxidermy Chimeras, and into a nice cozy tea room…where we finally get the callout:
TP:
Papa D: Now, I’ve just discovered the most tasty mint tea…which they’ve set out along with the most delicious banana float. Would you like some sugar with your tea, Mr. Detective?
Leon: You know the answer to that. Who are you? You’re not D, are you?
SS:
Papa D: Now, I have some lovely lapsang souchong tea today. Oooh! And we could add vanilla ice cream and have floats. I’ll add a spring of mint to yours, Detective.
Leon: So who are you, huh? You sure ain’t Count D.
All right, this time I like TP better. Same basic info in both, but rearranged, and in TP it ends on a question that’s an obvious trigger for Leon to go “all right, I’m done pretending I buy this.”
—
Papa D pulls off his short-haired wig, revealing the hip-length hair we saw on his phone call with D. (…There’s gotta be something weird and Freudian about “getting a custom wig so you can pass as your own son.”)
Dialogue bubble that TP thinks is from Papa D, SS thinks is from Leon:
TP: Do you take me for a twin brother? Or perhaps a twin sister?
SS: So…what, you’re identical twins? There was an identical sister too…
Gotta pull for SS here, acknowledging my girl Xiao Mei. It was a little awkward that, when Howell originally went “have you ever seen D and his weirdly-identical father in the same place?”, Leon didn’t think to bring up “well, I’ve seen D next to his weirdly-identical sister (and she clearly ID’d him as Not Their Dad).”
—
TP:
Leon: Wait a minute…You’re Count D’s old man!
Papa D: Old man…That has such an odd ring to it.
SS:
Leon: Are you saying…You’re his dad?!
Papa D: “Dad”…! I haven’t heard that in so long! <3
The art has Papa D being extremely cutesey here. Fits the SS text much better. (Also, now I’m imagining a scene where he goes “oh, Leon must call me Papa now!” and our D + Leon, with different reasons but equally strong conviction, both go “no Leon must NOT.”)
—
How am I not even halfway through this chapter yet. There is so much to talk about.
—
Leon, finally having his “yep these are definitely immortals” moment:
TP: This guy doesn’t look a day over 30.
SS: He barely looks a day over twenty.
SS might be more accurate to the text, but TP is more accurate to Akino’s art style. The Ds could pass for 29, but not 19.
—
TP: Ferocity…cunning…relentlessness…and cowardice…That is what I like about you humans.
SS: Vicious. Cunning. Cruel. Cowardly. I like that about you humans.
sir please stop flirting with your son’s boyfriend, you are Making It Weird
—
Leon (reasonably!) infers that they’re vampires after all. Papa D says no, then gets poetic:
TP: We are…the painters of unseen images. The singers of unheard songs. The caretakers of what has been lost.
SS: We are simply…those who paint the invisible…sing the songs of the silent…and hold the weight of the vanished.
Maybe I’m biased because I heard it first and it made an impression, but I like the rhythm of the TP version better here.
—
…and then Leon passes out, because Papa D dosed his tea.
Well, huh, wonder if that smug little comment last volume about “I hear you’re keeping an unusual pet” was a veiled threat toward Leon all along.
Sidenote: A thing I’ve been pondering for a while is, why does Papa D make a grab for Leon now? Other than “it’s the last volume, so all the dramatic things have to happen at once.” He never gives a direct reason. For a guy who’s more than a little supervillain-coded, it’s sort of impressive how well he resists the temptation to monologue about this.
Current headcanon: He finds it offensive and embarrassing that his son has gotten all attached and emotional about an unworthy human. But he doesn’t want to have a big angry fight with our D about it — he just wants to quietly dispose of Leon while D is occupied somewhere else, then surely D will come to his senses.
This has been the first time in years that D left LA while Leon was still in town. Inconveniently, it was because of Howell, and Papa D didn’t want to draw Howell’s attention either. But as soon as Howell left LA too? Papa D saw his chance, and pounced.
—
Cut to Howell and D, still on the road, the next morning. (Leon’s been out all night…)
D is napping in the back seat, Howell pulls in at a gas station. Very cute moment with his entourage of Guard Pets enjoying rest-stop food.
He offers D chocolate and backstory: he met Papa D when they were in school 22 years earlier. D, surprised:
TP: So Father wasn’t living at the pet shop?
SS: Father didn’t run a pet shop?
I think TP is on-point, here. It’s not that Papa D didn’t ever live/work at the shop, just “he wasn’t there in 1975.”
(My guess is that our D was already living with Grandpa at this point, but was too young to remember the details. Either Papa’s bioengineering ambitions prompted Grandpa to take the kid, or Grandpa took the kid and that prompted Papa to think “welp, now there’s nothing stopping me from going to university.”)
—
Howell asks about D’s mom. D gets a cutely puzzled “uhhh…” face.
Feels like that’s a question he should have a pre-planned answer for, y’know? Even if it’s a total deflection, like “she wasn’t in the picture and I don’t want to talk about it.”
—
Howell’s tiny 1990s Nokia phone goes off. Hey look, we’re finally at the page I asked about back in January.
TP!Jill introduces herself as “Jill Freshney”, a flourished homage to one of TP’s editors at the time. SS!Jill just says “Jill.” Akino was really dedicated to not giving this woman a last name, huh.
(Although I guess this raises the possibility that “Jill” is her last name, and that’s why she formally introduces herself with it, and nobody in the department is familiar-enough with her to first-name her.)
—
Jill says Leon’s missing. The obvious hypothesis is that he went after D too. D has a cute moment of thinking “that idiot” (both translations).
Hasn’t occurred to any of them that Leon might be in danger. Howell’s assessment:
TP: Your detective friend is pretty reckless.
SS: That kid pulls some wild stunts.
Points to SS for the pun, since we’re about to cut to Leon in what sure looks like “the wild.”
—
Leon wakes up in a jungle surrounded by angry monsters. Tries to tell himself it’s like the museum dream all over again, and he better not do any reckless sleep-shooting…then they start drawing blood.
Papa D watches from his Ohtori staircase, wearing a fresh new outfit and thinking “How does it feel to be chased, to be hunted?”
Okay, addendum to earlier headcanon: Papa’s antipathy is part “it’s embarrassing that my son likes this human” and part “who does this human think he is, trying to chase and imprison my sweet baby boy?”
(Has nobody written the fic where Papa kidnaps Leon earlier, when D could realize “uh-oh, my detective is missing for no good reason” and actively run to the rescue??) (…I’d volunteer as tribute, but I think it would overlap too much with my fic where Xiao Mei D kidnaps Leon, where D realizes he’s in trouble and runs to the rescue.)
—
Howell pulls up to Papa D’s skyscraper. The sky is toned like we’ve gone through this whole day and gotten to sunset again. Our D, also in a new outfit, has a moment of “uh-oh, there are angry creatures up there,” but doesn’t yet know why.
Apparently D knows this address because his dad just…sends him New Year’s cards? How long has this been going on??
(We’ve known since back in “Diamande” that Papa D has some kind of work at a genetics lab in the city. So it’s not a huge out-of-nowhere twist for him to live here. But I do wish D had done something more clever like “figuring out which lab employee name was Papa D’s alias, and tracking down his housing records from there.”) (Maybe I’ll headcanon that’s what he did, and he’s just giving Howell a cover story.)
D and Howell figure out the elevator. Again with TP warning that Howell has “a pistol and a mobile phone,” where SS just says “a firearm.”
—
More backstory with Howell. I was waiting for a reveal on “the specific probably-criminal thing Papa D did in whichever Washington 20 years ago, the ominous reason the FBI was taking fingerprints in the lab he left behind.” But…nothing. We go from “he’s doing unspecified genetics research at school in NY” to “he disappeared, idk.”
Once in the FBI, Howell starts hearing about mystery animal deaths from “Count D’s pet shop.” And infers it’s his old classmate D, not literally any other Chinese person with the alias D, because…?
There’s a missing puzzle piece, here. A connection like “Howell is afraid Student D’s biology research was secretly about genetically-engineering animals to be extra-deadly, and now that he’s perfected that process, those are the animals he’s selling” would tie it together. But it never quite connects.
—
They enter the forest level. Our D smells blood, but still doesn’t know whose it is. Papa D strolls out of the trees, so he can have a little fun freaking Howell out.
Addresses Howell as “Vesca” in TP, “Wesker” in SS.
So, okay, Vesca is not a name (unless you’re a certain settlement in Slovenia). But Wesker isn’t much better! It’s an obscure English surname, it’s not used as a first name at all. (Nothing better turned up for Vesker, Weska, Weskar, or Wescar.)
Akino has mostly been good about choosing Actual English-Language Names for her USAmerican characters. What happened here? Is it an allusion to something, like “echidna” was, except this time neither translation knew what? Did she just like the sound…?
—
All right, time for a classic “Akino tries to fake us out, but she’s cheating” moment:
D and Papa D are having an uncomfortable back-and-forth, which Papa D ends by saying “…Father.”
Howell kinda spirals. Which of them is the son??
(The readers aren’t confused about that part, because we’ve seen these two address each other as “Father” and “my son” when they’re in private. It’s not ambiguous or confusing.)
The trick is — Papa D is, in fact, addressing Grandpa D.
But he’s the only one of these characters who’s figured out that Grandpa D is in the room.
Which means our D should be having a baffled moment of “…what? Why are you looking at me? Is Grandfather behind me??”
—
…And D *still* hasn’t figured out that Leon is in trouble! Our guy’s had to go and rescue his own damn self!
Hey folks, do you like your blorbos beaten-up and staggering and covered in their own blood? Have I got a manga for you.
There was an earlier line from Papa D’s gloating, which both translations handled differently:
TP: Kill or be killed.
SS: Only the strong survive.
TP makes Leon’s final line a perfect A+ callback — not just to earlier in this chapter, either! It goes all the way back to the “would you kill to save yourself” arguments Leon and D were having in the museum, when they were still basically just getting to know each other! This is one of those lines so good, it’s stuck with me for years:
TP: Kill or be killed, eh? Easy fucking choice.
While SS just…isn’t a callback to anything? It’s not a bad line, but it absolutely doesn’t have the same Wham Line landing, either:
SS: I just gotta win, right? Easy as pie.
(The image above is from the Ruthless Night scan, which takes us from “Only the ones who fight and win can survive” to “I have to win? Then I will win.” The English is more stilted than either of the official translations, but points for getting the callback in there.)
—
And that’s it for the second-to-last Pet Shop Of Horrors chapter! Tune in next time to find out if “Leon just straight-up bleeds to death” is how this manga ends!
#PetShopOfHorrors #RevolutionaryGirlUtena
