"Kyoufu Shinbun" drama: Episode seven(final) recap

 

 Air Dates: August 29th until October October 10, 2020 Saturday nights at 11:40 pm on Fuji-TV

This series also goes by the name of Terror Newspaper and subs were done by HPriest

Main Characters: Setting is the city of Kyoto. Shizuku receives the haunted newspaper every day at midnight and their tragic stories always come true. She's not the only one though to get this Terror Bulletin paper but only the person that receives it can read the stories. Bottom character was introduced in this episode.

Sei Shiraishi as Shizuru Onoda.... Second year student at Chuo University in Kyoto. She's lived in the city with her parents but moved out to her own apartment at the beginning of the first episode. After Shizuru's first night at the apartment she began to receive a 'Terror Newspaper' at midnight each night and quickly her life turned upside down.

Hitomi Kuroki as Utako Onoda.... Shizuru's mother who didn't play an important role in the first two episodes but will from the third show on. 

Eiji Yokota as Kuranosuke Onoda.... The father of Shizuru who ran a coffee shop/mini restaurant but he was killed at the end of the first episode!

Taiki Sato as Yusuke Matsuda.... Shizuru's new friend and he works at Hannari Delivery as a bike courier which is how he met Shizuru.

Yuki Katayama as Momoka Miyazawa.... Shizuru's best friend or up until the third show. She was killed by Yuzuke in the sixth show.

Taro Suruga as Rintaro Shinozaki.... Detective for the East Kyoto police department. He believes Shizuru's story about the cursed paper and is teaming up with her to prevent more tragedies. Shinozaki is also heavily in debt with some loan sharks. 

Manabu Ino as Toya Hirukawa.... The person responsible for Shizuru receiving the Terror Bulletin newspaper. To break the curse he had to send the paper to another person but he's been cursed already as he's 25 year old man who now looked to be over seventy, he passed away at the end of the fourth episode.

Ryotaro Sakaguchi as Tomowo Katagiri/Rei Kigata.... Young man who is Shizuru's neighbor. He lives with his mother and is quite odd but not sure to what extent yet. This character was Tomowo in the first three shows which was an alias, his real name is Kigata who could actually be a ghost as he appears/disappears in a matter of seconds.

Momoko Fukuchi as Harumi Hirukawa.... Toya's sister who is in a wheelchair. She was introduced in the fourth show and at one time she received the Terror Bulletin. 

 

Links to the previous recaps:

Episode one .... Episode two .... Episode three .... Episode four

 Above are the links to the first four shows, will probably refer back to a few details or events though not too many of them so may help to peruse them. So here we are in the final show and have to say the ending was one I was never expecting. That's a good thing as too often 'horror dramas' end up on such an upbeat note but not this series. Kind of wish there was another episode as so many events were crammed into these 43 minutes, at least none were confusing like the events of the fifth show. One minor spoiler before we begin the regular recap is that the top five major characters are all dead by the end of the show! That makes a second season a bit difficult but to an extent our heroine Shizuru is somewhat alive though not a human!

 For much of the last episode no one knew who the owner of the Terror Bulletin newspaper was. It had been Shizuru for along time but she suddenly stopped receiving it at the beginning of the sixth show, not being the 'owner' also means you can't read the future predictions. But at the end we learned Shizuru's mother Utako was the person now getting the cursed paper and was using the stories to lure criminals to their death! That terrified Shizuru to no end as she was almost killed in two of those incidents but in the final seconds of the show was able to sign the Terror Bulletin and become the only person to read the stories once again. This time around Shizuru isn't hiding her abilities as she's heading to the locations of those tragedies and saving victims. In that bottom screenshot above stories change when Shizuru alters the future, that story went from 'Many Casualties' to 'No Casualties'. 

 Shizuru has become the talk of the internet with all the lives she's saved but not everyone is impressed with her heroic ways. One person was the young gal above who was saying some horrendous comments about Shizuru on the internet, the pair met once but the story died there. After that scene the time is now a year later or July 2021. Shizuru has kept herself hidden much to the fury of the detective Shinozaki who has been trying to become the owner of the Terror Bulletin for a long time now. He's in debt to some loan sharks and with knowing future events was hoping to strike it rich investing in the stock market or other companies. Shinozaki had been visiting Utako's cafe often hoping for news on Shizuru which never panned out, Utako knew her whereabouts but wouldn't reveal them to this shady detective. But in my eyes Shinozaki wasn't a bad person but this debt to the loan sharks had changed him. But one day Utako did relent about news from Shizuru and to Shinozaki now all of his problems were about to be solved though in a cruel way!

 Utako had found out Shinozaki was the person who had sent Shizuru those messages n the last episode, they were just coincidences that's where a Terror Bulletin tragedy struck. Such as the top screenshot, Shinozaki was aiming at Shizuru but hit a gangster instead! Utako couldn't reveal that info yet but had given Shinozaki a blank piece of the cursed newspaper to sign which he happily did. However he was the owner of it for about three minutes as Utako had brought with her about fifty old Terror Bulletins, she flung them at Shinzozaki who had no other option but to read them. He didn't know but every time you read an article from the newspaper you age 100 days so just like that he aged almost fourteen years, his body couldn't take it and Shinozaki soon died as an old man. So now Shizuru is back to being the owner of the cursed paper but she didn't know she had lost it for that short spell.

 So of course isn't it time for Shizuru to start aging as she's had the paper for a long time. It is that time and it happened rapidly, in the second to last screenshot that's her with her mother and now Shizuru looks even older, also the splitting image. Shizuru had been wanting to see her ex-boyfriend Yuzuke who is in jail awaiting judgement for the murder of Momoka in the last show. So Shizuru went to visit him pretending to be her mother, it did fool him until the very end when Shizuru said a few private things only the two of them knew about. Not much screen time for Yuzuke in this show as that same night in his cell he was visited by the spirit of Momoka, that spirit still wants revenge for her death and Yuzuke didn't live to see the next day, now three of the major five characters are now dead.

 Make that four characters dead as soon after that visit in prison with Yuzuke Shizuru has passed away due to old age. Though really just 21 years old old she had read so many Terror Bulletin stories she's now at least eighty and died with her mother Utako hovering over her. When the 'owner' of the cursed paper dies the previous owner starts receiving the Terror Bulletin again, in this case it was Utako who also had read many stories which age you 100 days each time, she too passed away a few days after her daughter did. But not until getting a visit from the spirit Shizuru and will explain why a bit further down. It's kind of like musical chairs as now that Utako is dead, now all five of the major characters are deceased, the next person in line to receive the newspaper was Harumi who you can see above. She had started to receive it as a teenager but her brother Hirukawa saved her life at the time by transferring the ownership to him, confused about owners yet?

 Harumi knew all about the Terror Bulletin rules, though frightened at first about getting a 'subscription' to it again she quickly did something very ingenious. Harumi took the paper, which is just one sided, and put it through a printer with the other side being fake vouchers for a free product. She then cut the paper up and handed out the dozen vouchers for others to sign which they did, Harumi is now free of the curse again but now a dozen are receiving the Terror Bulletin? Didn't know that was possible and the person delivering the cursed newspaper was now of all people Shizuru! After her death she appeared at some sort of 'heavenly' place where she confronted the paper's handler Kigata. He told Shizuru a bit about his past, Kigata was once human and had been delivering the paper for decades, would Shizuru want the position? That she agreed to which meant Kigata can now 'live' a peaceful death but we'll soon see everything he said was a huge lie.

 There's only one major stipulation in being a Terror Bulletin delivery person in that you always have to deliver the newspaper to a certain person(s). You can't let any previous feelings for that person stop the delivery or the consequences could be quite dire. Who knows how many copies Shizuru was delivering daily but it was many and this went on for a long time. So long that a decade has passed and now it's the year 2031. There's a college student named Airi receiving the Terror Bulletin and in the third episode Shizuru along with her mother had saved the seven year old girl from being beat by her father, she's now about nineteen. In her state Shizuru didn't know who this girl was but after getting the cursed newspaper for a while Airi realized who the delivery person was.

 Shizuru still looks to be 21 in age which is how old she was when she died so it appears a delivery person never ages. Airi had pleaded with her many times to cease the deliveries, didn't she remember saving her all those years ago? For the longest time Shizuru didn't as it appeared most of her memories have been erased but one day it suddenly popped in to her mind who Airi was! That woman had gone through so much hell as a child and Shizuru realized she needed to stop those deliveries and now(!) as she tore up the latest edition in front of Airi! The girl was saved from the paper's horrors but not Shizuru who was whisked back to that 'dream land' where she had to confront an irate Kigata as she failed to carry out her responsibilities of always delivering the Terror Bulletin.

 Kigata admitted everything he said was a pile of crap, he had never been a human and was the offspring of a Kudan or an evil spirit. He didn't explain his origins completely but I had the slight impression Kigata may have been the unborn child of Shizuru's from 1870! For letting her personal feelings affect the paper's delivery Shizuru must now pay the price which is an eternity in hell. As a petrified Shizuru watched Kigata turned into a hideous creature, many of those screenshots are at the bottom. He grabbed Shizuru by the neck and the last we saw of them was him dragging her away to Hell but that didn't stop the Terror Bulletin as that continues to haunt innocent people. 

 Whew, longish recap of them all but so much was crammed into this 43 minute show. These last two episodes were by far the best and think one more show would have helped so the ending didn't have to be so rushed and more things explained better. Especially the events of the fifth episode and a whole show didn't need to be devoted to the origins of the Terror Bulletin curse. Overall I enjoyed this series more than I expected and will give it a solid rating of 8.6/10, went down .2 because of the fifth episode. But if you like suspenseful and fast moving dramas would recommend this one and it had been a while since I viewed a decent Japanese horror series. Have two more series to wrap up which should be done in about ten days, up next will be another Sei drama and she's becoming a huge fave of mine. That will be another 2020 series titled "Toki wo Kakeru Bando" which was just subbed. It's about a trio of three girls forming a rock band and look for those posts in about two weeks. Sei was in five 2020 dramas and also expect to see another regular post for her in July.