Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Night Beyond Tricornered Window, Episode 2, "Binding", now streaming on Crunchyroll.
The years have seen many a iconic yandere in anime, or people who becomes "sick for love." The majority of them are pink-haired women, perhaps because the yandere that started it all, Yuno Gasai, has set the standards for what a good yandere looks like. In Episode 2, The Night Beyond Tricornered Window offers a more subtle kind of yandere, as someone with a menacing and controlling manner, with a much closer resemblance to real-life abusers.
In true BL fashion, Hiyakawa’s possessiveness of Mikado becomes apparent in Episode 2 after the appearance of a potential rival: a psychic named Keita Mukae. Mukae does cold reading as his day job, but his power allows him to exorcise ghosts for real when he needs to.
This is good world-building, showing that there are many others with psychic powers, but they each deal with ghosts differently. This is an important factor when Hiura Erika is introduced in the episode, because she seems to be just as strong, if not stronger than even Hiyakawa. The difference is that her powers include the ability to curse people.
According to Mukae, Mikado’s soul is all “stretchy and loose” which makes him easy for other beings to possess, like ghosts, psychics like Erika or an astral projecting Hiyakawa. This turns out to be a sore spot for Hiyakawa because he doesn’t want anyone else to “enter” Mikado but him. And yes, the sexual innuendos in these dialogues are unmistakable.
Hiyakawa coaxes Mikado into signing a contract with him, which only says that Mikado is willing provide work for Hiyakawa on paper, but it is actually a spiritually binding contract that marks Mikado as his possession. Mikado has no idea what he's done, and only finds out when Mukae tells him. Hiyakawa does not feel bad or guilty at all about tricking Mikado, instead deriding Mikado for working with someone else.
Hiyakawa’s possessiveness is where most of the creepiness in Episode 2 comes from. This is a more effective way of blending horror with BL than the last episode, and is arguably more effective, both in terms of horror and the central relationship. Mikado’s kind but passive personality makes him an easy target for someone like Hiyakawa, who is courteous on the surface but is conniving and dangerous beneath. Hiyakawa’s dialogues and expressions clearly show that he is a yandere character with an unhealthy obsession with Mikado, and he could snap at any moment.
The truly scary part about Hiyakawa is not the way he uses his powers, but the way he gaslights Mikado into accepting his possessiveness as natural, which is exactly what a real-life toxic relationship can look like. While Mikado is aware of what constitutes sexual harassment, but he somehow doesn’t consider Hiyakawa’s actions harassment, perhaps because they are both guys, and Mikado is straight (as clarified at the beginning of this episode), making their relationship even more problematic.
At this point, Hiyakawa behaves more like a villain than the actual villain, and this is no coincidence. Hiyakawa’s power allows him to be fearless, even reckless, Mikado envies and relies on Hiyakawa to chase away his fears, so he accepts Hiyakawa for all his strength and faults. And in turn, this could be the reason why Hiyakawa is so obsessed with him, though there also seems to be something even more sinister behind Hiyakawa's intentions.
Since the horror elements are becoming more relationship-based, the BL elements of Tricornered Window are becoming even more obvious, sometimes to a hilariously cringe-worthy degree. This is especially true towards the end of Episode 2, when Hiyakawa exorcises a ghost from Mikado and Mikado kneels in front of Hiyakawa’s crotch. There is definitely a sense of self-awareness to these BL scenes, so they're actually pretty fun to watch if you don’t take them too seriously.
