This one gets under your skin because the horror is domestic. A junior high girl walks a Tokyo street, steps wrong, and comes out the other side in Taisho-era Japan, where a nine hundred year old onmyoji is still paying off a curse he never chose. Rumiko Takahashi has been writing cursed boys and stubborn girls for forty years, and here she strips out the slapstick and leaves the ache: Mao's immortality reads less like power and more like a sentence, and Nanoka's body knows things her memory refuses to give back. The car crash that took her parents is not backstory, it is the wound the whole mystery keeps pressing on, and the moment she watches herself heal from something that should have ended her is when the show stops being a time slip and starts being a diagnosis. Twenty six episodes is exactly enough rope for a slow burn between two people who are both already dead in some way. Stay for the quiet scenes where nobody explains anything and Mao just looks tired.

Mao is an onmyoji of Japan's Taisho era who has lived for nine hundred years because of a curse. He is also cursed by a cat demon named Byoki, and so is his sword. Nanoka Kiba, a junior high student from the present day, lost both parents in a terrible accident when she was small. When she returns to the shopping arcade where it happened, she crosses into Mao's time, a world where ayakashi flourish, and he reluctantly saves her from a monstrous yokai. Back home, she discovers she has gained strange new abilities, and a sudden, odd question from Mao leads her to see her own life differently. Going back to the past for answers, she is drawn into his investigation of a string of brutal murders, and the two join forces against the sinister powers hanging over them both.