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Outside the painter's house is a nightmare landscape of smoke and trash. It's the kind of dark industrial world of factories and smokestacks that we see in the manga of Imiri Sakabashira and Yoshihiro Tatsumi, in the comics of John Bergin and the movies of David Lynch: the gray, dismal world of the modern era. But it's not a deserted wasteland; the neighborhood is busy. A guillotine next to the painter's house is running full steam, chopping deformed heads day and night. Afterwards, the heaps of bodies are cremated, and our hero conspires with the crematorium workers to sneak up to the furnace and get a look at the bodies as they burn. ("It's so exciting! The smell of burning flesh…blistered red skin! Dripping fat! Crumbling bones!")
This is not to say that the plotline of the first five episodes is confusing. If anything, it's a carefully crafted story arc. The problem is that there's an entire Aquarian Age universe behind it, consisting of five warring factions: the Arayashiki (users of Eastern magic), Wiz-Dom (users of Western magic), Darklore (ancient mythical creatures), E.G.O. (modern-day psychics), and Eraser (space aliens). While this has the makings of some second-rate fantasy sci-fi amalgam, it all takes a back seat to Kyouta himself. That's why the story itself is easy to follow--it's basically about a guy in a rock band, and his girlfriend--yet the background seems far more complex than it needs to be.
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