Inugami treats the supernatural mystery straight, no winking at the camera, which makes every revelation feel earned instead of clever. The boy's inhuman nature isn't a twist that recontextualizes everything you've seen, it's a quiet fact that changes how you understand every interaction going forward. This is a show that respects your intelligence enough to let you piece together what's wrong before the characters do, and then makes you live with being right.

Kohachi Inugami, a Tokyo detective who specializes in the occult, arrives at a remote mountain village to look into a bizarre case: animal carcasses keep turning up and rotting away overnight with no apparent cause. While investigating, he meets a strange boy who toils in the fields instead of attending school. The other children avoid him and call him Dorotabou, and he is surprised when anyone shows interest in him. Ignoring the villagers' disapproval, Inugami recruits the boy to help with the case. Together they find that cursed supernatural forces lie behind the deaths, and the boy himself may not be entirely human. The investigation opens his eyes to a hidden world of beast-like beings called Kemono that live alongside humans, and it gives his once empty life a new sense of purpose. The result is a supernatural mystery with action and drama.