This Week in Japan: Four Days, Then We Knew

Last week this post said four days, then we know. We know. Edgerunners 2 is out and the reviews agree on everything except which character is the problem. Bleach airs its last episode Monday. Half of Japan's manga apps went dark on Tuesday night for the same reason at the same time. The Apothecary Diaries movie has a date and a Kenshi Yonezu song. And a hitwoman comic from Square Enix is getting an anime in January. No inventory links this week, nothing connected. The desk section is long, because the desk talked.

Edgerunners 2: good, not the first one

All ten episodes dropped on Netflix at once on October 20. The reviews are in and they rhyme. GamesRadar on the 19th: a worthy follow-up, animation "sublime," Trigger's Night City more impressive and creative than the first season's, the four-protagonist structure ambitious, and it does not surpass its predecessor and is unlikely to be as beloved. Anime Corner on the 21st: a must-watch with incredible action, each storyline needed more time, two more episodes would have helped, and it struggles to match season one's emotional impact because season one "left too high of a bar." Both say watch it. Both say it is not 2022.

Then they split. GamesRadar says Roman, the cinephile with the camera, is the weakest of the four leads, a device for connecting the others. Anime Corner says Roman is the best character in the show and his dynamic with D is the best thing in it; its problem is Weak Kingsley, underwritten, and Talia, hard to like after her introduction. Same ten episodes, opposite answers on the same man. That is the review you can trust: the praise lines up and the complaints do not, which means the complaints are taste and the praise is the show. Real.

Bleach, last episode, Monday

Thousand-Year Blood War Part 4, The Calamity, returned July 25 for ten episodes. Episode 49, "THE BLADE," aired October 19 after the delay, and a visual called "THE STORIES VISUAL, Final Battle" went up behind it. Episode 50 is October 26 and the announcement calls it the series finale. Episodes 49 and 50 were the two pushed from September to October "to improve quality." Twenty-two years after the first Bleach episode aired in 2004, and fourteen after the manga's last arc started in 2012, the anime catches the manga and stops. Does anyone announce a Bleach sequel after this? There is no main-series manga left to adapt, a 2021 one-shot aside. That is the cleanest ending a shonen anime gets. Cool.

The night the manga apps went down together

On Tuesday evening Japan time, October 21, Niconico Manga suspended all services at 7 p.m., Shueisha's MANGA Plus went into maintenance at 9, and Kodansha's Magazine Pocket and K MANGA followed at 10:30, with BOOK WALKER alongside. The ones that gave a reason gave the same one: an urgent PHP security update. The PHP team had published fixes that day for two vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, both rated 9.2, both allowing unauthenticated remote code execution, with Apache mod_php setups the most exposed; CERT-EU and Japan's IPA told everyone to patch immediately. No platform confirmed a breach, and BOOK WALKER said outright it had not been attacked. Most expected to be back by the morning of the 22nd.

The lesson is not about manga. The ones that said why said PHP, and the ones that did not say why went down the same hour, which is its own answer: the country's manga readers lean on the same scripting language, and on the day that language has a bad bug, the comics go offline together for a night. A chapter of The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity was due on both Kodansha apps that night; it waited. Nobody got hurt and nothing got stolen, as far as anyone has said. The infrastructure just showed itself for a few hours. Real.

The Apothecary Diaries movie, December 11, Yonezu on the credits

The Apothecary Diaries the Movie: The Late Lady's Treasure opens in Japan December 11. TOHO Animation Studio, Norihiro Naganuma directing, an original mystery by the novels' author Natsu Hyuga: Maomao and Jinshi go to Binan-shu to look at a concubine's remains that are too well preserved. A companion novel of the same story comes out with what did not fit the film. The theme is a new Kenshi Yonezu song, given in English as "Spring Lights." Crunchyroll has worldwide theatrical rights outside Japan. The first feature for a franchise two TV seasons deep, with a Yonezu single attached. Was there a version of this where it did not get a movie? No. Cool.

MURCIELAGO, January 2027, HIDIVE

Kana Yoshimura's MURCIELAGO, in Square Enix magazines since August 2013, 29 volumes, 2.3 million copies, is a TV anime in January 2027 from Satelight and Staple Entertainment, Matsuo Asami directing under chief director Takashi Naoya, Hitomi Ueda as Kuroko Koumori, with Minori Suzuki and Sumire Uesaka. The premise in one line: a mass murderer becomes the Tokyo police's licensed hitwoman, allowed to kill the other killers. HIDIVE has it exclusively in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Thirteen years from chapter one to an anime is slow for Square Enix and about right for a comic this violent and this unbothered about who its lead goes home with. The audience that waited knows exactly who they are. Real.

On the desk

Anthony answered, so this is his, lightly cleaned. First, a manga he did not buy: "Soul Eater was a manga I found at Goodwill, which I thought was a little overpriced for the condition, and I made a video of it. Said it was goated manga, but bloated, because it was so warped it looked like water damage. What I might do is end up flattening it out, but I didn't get it. If I did go back and see it I might try that and give it a read, even though I haven't watched the anime yet, and I don't have the first one. Okay, so never mind, scratch all that. I'm not gonna read it. I'm not gonna go get it. But in the future, what I could do is flatten it out over a few days. I think that would work." For the record: pressing a warped paperback flat under weight for a few days does work, and that is the first repair tip to appear in this section. It was for a book he left on the shelf.

Second, the loop this post set up last week: "I did see Edgerunners. It's on my watch list. But I have not got myself to do it, as I'm trying to speed run through Fullmetal Alchemist. I'm three days in and about halfway through. I'm enjoying the alchemy and the storyline. All the characters are awesome. So far, Hughes is my favorite, and I love that people still remember him in a great way. I love how loving he is to his family and how much he loved his daughter and his wife. I'm all for that kind of stuff. So far, I'm really liking it, though. Alphonse is such a cool cat. Tough dude for sure. Tough little dude."

He did not say which Fullmetal Alchemist, the 2003 series or Brotherhood, and this post is not going to guess. Halfway in three days is a speed run either way. The verdict, and the answer to which one, next week. Edgerunners waits behind it. Tough little dude.