xxxHOLiC Manga Chapter 180

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Watanuki is talking with the cooking woman and mentions Yuuko-san, but she has no idea whom he is talking about. He tries to remind her by pointing out that she had tea with Yuuko-san. The woman denies it, saying that she never met anyone other than Watanuki. This puzzles Watanuki and as he and Doumeki walk to school, they encounter the twins from volume 4 whom Yuuko-san helped. The twins recognize both Watanuki and Doumeki and invite them to tea. Watanuki declines, saying he has to get back to the shop. When he mentions Yuuko-san’s name, they don’t know whom he is talking about.

Watanuki races back to the shop, feeling there has to be a mistake. He sees the shop is there but the moment he steps over the front gate threshold, he finds himself literally in the black.

Thoughts/Review:

I’d been somewhat frustrated with the cooking woman not being assigned a name. When the twins showed up, no name is mentioned in the chapter, so I went back to my Del Rey books and pulled volume 4. While I didn’t reread the volume completely, I did skim over it. To my amazement, the twins don’t appear to have ever been named. CLAMP gets away with a bit of this by having the younger twin address the older twin as “oneechan” (or a variation of that since I don’t have the source manga) which Del Rey just uses as “my sister.” Regardless, I now see that CLAMP has long had a history with the manga of not naming clients of Yuuko-san. One special ones such as Himawari-chan get named apparently. I guess that when reading the manga as a volume verses chapter by chapter over a multiple weeks/months makes a big difference on noticing a lack of names.

As to the chapter, I haven’t seen the current Tsubasa chapter to see if there’s something new happening with Yuuko-san. Unfortunately, Tsubasa is in the middle of the most tedious climactic action sequence I have ever witnessed. I’m guessing that Watanuki may get pulled back over there or something like that. We’ll see though.

It really is sad seeing how such an interesting and somewhat dark manga has turned so “meh.” I wonder if CLAMP are just tired of both these series.