I really liked it. It feels like a novelist's work, with a rich cast and a story that's built intimately around them. I'm looking forward to the third in the promised trilogy.

As before, it's about the tanuki and tengu of Kyoto. (Mostly the tanuki.) Tanuki are shapeshifting raccoon dogs that are proud of being idiots and living to have fun. Tengu are pain-in-the-arse birdmen with a painful amount of pride and scary wind powers.

Oh, and humans are the most common life form in Japan, capable of putting tanuki in hot-pots. They're mostly ignorant and harmless, but occasionally one of them will be aware of the supernatural world. Such humans are dangerous. Season 1 gave us Benten, the elegant, silky-tongued lady who can fly like a tengu and eat your father. This season also introduces Tenmaya, who might have escaped from Hell.

Yeah, that's right. It's a Buddhist hell, with oni, but you still really don't want to go there.

The good news is that this year, we're not waiting half a season for the plot to get going. Professor Akadama's son returns to Kyoto, so the tengu go all tengu on us. (Akadama is the most exasperating old buzzard, but his son's pretty stiff-necked too.) Tenmaya also shows up early. At first he's just mysterious and tricky. When we learn more about him, he'll graduate to being bad news.

What I like about this world is that it's really just about its people being themselves. You can take a break from this show for months and still instantly recognise everyone. (That's not true with all shows. Quite often I'll watch the second season of something and feel I needed to rewatch the first one to kick-start my memories.) You'll get caught up in watching, say, Yajiro sitting at the bottom of his well as a frog. He's trying to graduate from that, but being a frog is habit-forming. It's character-driven, not plot-driven... but by this point, we've met enough unpredictable, dangerous and/or flat-out evil characters to drive a juicy novel.

It's a fantastical world. People can get sucked into shogi tables. There's cool flying bus action again. Ep.6 is mental. This show contains dramatic plot developments, trivial character-based ones and times when the latter turn into the former. There's romance and anti-romance. I think it's one of the year's strongest anime and I really want to watch Season 3, if only to see what happens to Benten.