Pet is one of those stories that draws you in by seeming to be one thing at first—only to turn out to be something brutally, disturbingly different.
Based on a manga series, Pet starts off by introducing two young men, Tsukasa and Hiroki, who are employees of a very special company.
Tsukasa, dark-haired and serious, is the more mature one, while the blond sunny-spirited Hiroki depends on him like an annoying little brother.
They have psychic abilities that allow them to enter the minds of others and change their memories. In the first episode, this is seen as a cool sort of paranormal trick. But as the story progresses, the dark side of what they do quickly becomes obvious. Basically, Tsukasa and Hiroki and others like them are hired soul-killers.
Every memory in a person’s mind can be changed by these “crushers,” as they’re called by the Company, including turning cherished remembrances of a loved one into memories of violence and emotional abuse. What one person did to you can be switched to another person in your mind, thus altering your thoughts, feelings and attitudes, and your course of action towards the person you’ve now been made to believe abused you in your falsified memories.
The Company is an underground criminal enterprise. It’s a little unclear, but the nominal head of the Company appears to be Japanese while the real power resides with a Chinese gang, the Chen Group.
The paranormal ability to enter others’ minds and crush them is the result of older crushers training young children, usually orphans or otherwise vulnerable children from bad family situations.
One of Tsukasa and Hiroki’s fellow crushers is Satoru.
Satoru is taken in as a child by Hayashi, an older crusher with the Company. Hayashi becomes a surrogate father figure to him, as well as to a young Tsukasa.
When the Company tells Hayashi that he has to give up one of the boys, he lets go of Tsukasa and remains with Satoru.
Hayashi has a gentle air, with sort of an aging hippie peacefulness to him. When he disappears from sight, both Satoru and Tsukasa are told that Hayashi is in China, whereas in actual fact he remains in Japan, holed up in a tiny flat.
When Hayashi reemerges from hiding years later, Tsukasa, now a grown young man who has missed him as desperately as Satoru has, ostensibly drives Hayashi to see Satoru, all the while waiting for the older man to show him the affection that he used to. But Hayashi, in a lapse of sensitivity, can only talk about Satoru. Where is Satoru? Is he all right? Are you really taking me to him?
What unfolds next is the start of Pet’s darkest plot twist. Tsukasa’s carefully controlled personality crumbles before our eyes in slow motion, leading to tragic consequences. In a world where one’s reality can shift without warning, where psychic attacks can alter the memories of every relationship you ever had—Hayashi is made to recall that Tsukasa, too, is a crusher.
The visuals in Pet are amazing, particularly when the crushers enter a person’s mind and are swept up into their dream/nightmare landscapes. The animation in those scenes is fluid and filled with startling images, like hallucinations given form.
Pet is a dark exploration not only of abuse of power in general, but more specifically abuse of power over children. The fact that of all the young crushers it’s Tsukasa who breaks, when from the beginning we’ve seen him as the strong one who can hold himself together, only brings home the lesson with more force. A child never forgets.
