xxxHOLiC (xxxHOLiC Rou) Manga Chapter 207
xxxHOLiC Manga Chapter 207 Review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

On a hot, summer day, Maru and Moro use water guns to hunt Mokona. They think they have him, but Mokona gets the drop on them and ambushes them. Watanuki then nails Mokona from the engawa. The fun stops as Watanuki senses the immanent arrival of a customer.

The customer is a young woman who wants her wish granted to become the girlfriend of a guy he likes. She’s tried to get his attention but failed. Despite the fact that he’s shown no interest in her, the woman believes they are a match and will not take no for an answer. She insists she’ll pay whatever price and provides Watanuki with the name and birthday of her intended. It is DOUMEKI Shizuka.

When Doumeki arrives that evening with a delivery for Mokona, Moro and Maru greet him happily before taking the adult beverages Doumeki has brought into the house along with an order from Watanuki for Mokona to clean the bathroom as payment for the liquor. Watanuki ponders aloud about Doumeki’s popularity and doesn’t understand it even after speaking with both Kohane-chan and Himawari-chan. Watanuki tells Doumeki to stay away from the store for a time but will tell him no more than that. Doumeki agrees.

The next day (or whenever), the female customer returns to have her wish granted. Watanuki constantly challenges the woman on what she would do if despite her feelings to the contrary, everything else said that Doumeki and she weren’t compatible. She doesn’t want to hear this and insists that she will do whatever it takes to make it happen, regardless of even Doumeki’s feelings on the issue. After a long conversation, Watanuki says that the woman, who appears to have more and more chunks missing from her as time goes on, will not be able to pay the price to have her wish granted.

Since the woman refuses to believe she can’t pay the price, Watanuki asks her where she is. He goes on to explain that her soul and body have parted. From the woman’s conversation where she appeared to be able to see what Doumeki was doing even though she was in the shop with Watanuki, Watanuki knows that her physical body is at Doumeki’s temple residence but her but her soul was the one that entered the shop on both occasions. As Watanuki gives the woman a lecture on what is really going on, she ends up disappearing, leaving Watanuki to hope that she would change her ways.

Watanuki gives Doumeki a call to let him know there should be a woman passed out at the entrance of the temple yard. He tells Doumeki to get an ambulance but do not go with the woman. After that, Watanuki tells Doumeki to bring over his best liquor as payment for some protective charms Watanuki is about to create.

After hanging up, Watanuki thinks about the woman and the fact that wishes involving human desires are the most troubling, but he is no better than the woman considering his own desirous wish to see Yuuko-san again.

Thoughts/Review: I gotta say that despite the very chatty nature of the chapter with Watanuki giving that extended speech and the lengthy conversation he had with the woman on her desires, I rather enjoyed this chapter. One thing the chapter showed is how much better Watanuki is getting at his craft. CLAMP have been revealing this to us in different ways over time but this time seemed almost like icing on the cake. Indeed, I thought of how Yuuko-san might have handled this case and the way Watanuki did it was much the same without making him Yuuko.

When Watanuki is shown to have the butterfly (Yuuko-san’s symbol) in his eye, I wonder if that was just symbolic or if it is actually there. With CLAMP, you never know.

I had been expecting CLAMP to possibly shift to a more action oriented style for xxxHOLiC now that the series is being published in a shounen manga. There still might be more action down the road but this chapter was very much classic xxxHOLiC, only without Yuuko-san or Watanuki’s childish outbursts. As such, I’m rather hopeful for more of the same but to also have some adventures to boot, just like before.

Himawari-chan got a name-drop but nothing to suggest when Watanuki talked to her. It could have been recently or it might not have been. I do wish we’d see her again. I wonder why CLAMP is hiding her.

Do Moro and Maru have an ability to track Mokona inside the house? I know the two girls are special creations but I got the feeling that when Watanuki asked them about the location of Mokona, Moro and Maru were tracking Mokona and in doing so could “see” that Mokona had been reading manga before playing games. I may be reading too much into that as the girls may have simply been remembering what they’d seen Mokona do and when they came outside, they’d witnessed Mokona playing games.

Speaking of Mokona, I laughed out loud when Watanuki ordered that Mokona had to clean the bathroom as payment for the liquor Doumeki brought over. I guess the idea of some small “puff-ball” critter cleaning a bathroom is funny to me.

CLAMP only put out 44-pages this month unlike the previous two months with their 48-page check-in. With so many pages per chapter, I’m thinking that we should see four xxxHOLiC volumes released per year rather than the standard two that most monthly manga’s produce.

So, as I said, an enjoyable chapter for me despite its lengthy exposition.