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Episode Title: Maidens with Black Hands
First Air Date: April 6, 2001

Episode Synopsis

After receiving a mysterious E-mail inviting her to "make a pilgrimage for the past," the renowned assassin Mireille Bouquet travels to Japan to meet the solicitor of the cryptic message. Upon meeting up with the letter's sender, Mireille confronts the young woman, who answers her queries by opening a pocketwatch that plays a mysterious melody that seems to distress Mireille. Afterwards, the young woman quickly bolts in to the confines of an abandoned construction site, where Mireille promptly pursues her.

Perched atop a construction beam, Mireille finds the enigmatic girl staring silently at the mysterious pocketwatch as the sun quietly sets in the background. After quietly proclaiming herself to be "Noir," Mireille and the unreadable young lady are quickly ambushed by gun-toting men in black suits. After repulsing their assailants, the young girl known as Kirika Yuumura leads Mireille back to her home and tends to her injuries. After telling Mireille what she knows of her story, Kirika asks Mireille to help her search out the truth about the secrets locked away in her obscured past.

Cast

English:
Mireille Bouquet - Shelly Calene-Black
Kirika Yuumura - Monica Rial
Japanese:
Mireille Bouquet - Kotono Mitsuishi
Kirika Yuumura - Houko Kuwashima

Music

  • Copperia no Hitsugi (Coppella's Casket) - (TV Edit) Opening Theme
  • Les Soldats - Music played during the recitation of the Noir oath.
  • Romance - Opening scene; Mireille rides through Paris; returns to her apartment.
  • Mélodie - Attachment played on mysterious e-mail. Music played by the pocketwatch. Music played as Mireille chases Kirika through the construction site. Music played during Mireille's flashback to her youth.
  • Canta per Me - Music played from when Kirika leaves school to her initial confrontation with Mireille. Music played during confrontation with black-suited gunmen. Music played during Kirika's flashback.
  • Salva Nos - Music played while Kirika cleans house on the black-suited gunmen. Song played during next episode preview.
  • Kireine Kanjyo - (TV Edit) Ending Theme.

Notes

  • Why doesn’t Mireille have a French Accent?
    • Because, contrary to what a lot of fans seem to think Mireille is NOT French. She is Corsican, the daughter of aristocracy, no less. Why is this a big point? Because Corsica has its own language, which is actually more related to Tuscan than French, and has its own peculiarities. During the casting process I procured samples of Corsican and realized that it sounds so different from either French or Italian, that to have an actress do an accurate accent would be to invite misunderstanding by viewers who weren’t familiar with Corsican… which, I imagined, was almost every North American viewer, since I’d only briefly heard of Corsican myself prior to starting my research for this show. As an example of how using an unknown accent can be a problem, when the Patrick Swaysey film THE BIG EASY came out back in the mid eighties, many people complained about the “outrageous and bizarre” accent he affected for the part, since at the time the Cajun accent was practically unknown outside of the deep south. However, by today’s standards the accent he used seems quite mild, especially when compared to that used by certain TV chefs. Therefore, to eliminate this problem, I made the logical assumption that since having a strong regional accent would be a liability for a professional assassin anyway, we would assume that Mireille simply speaks any language she has fully mastered like a native.
  • Why is Mireille’s name pronounced the way it is?
    • See above. We assumed that Mireille would pronounce her own name the way it would be pronounced in Corsica.
  • Why are the kids at the school speaking Japanese rather than English?
    • Because it’s meaningless babble to Mireille. Remember, Mireille went to Japan to find Kirika on a moments notice. As Kirika chose to contact Mireille in English via e-mail, we assume that, at this point in the story, that Mireille doesn’t understand Japanese very well… if at all. (And, likewise, we can assume that Kirika doesn’t speak Corsican fluently.) On the other hand, Mireille and Kirika both DO understand French, English and most of the other major European languages quite well, so when they’re in a crowd we opted to dub those voices with the appropriate accents.
  • So, what language are Kirika and Mireille speaking to each other in then?
    • English. That’s the language that Kirika uses to contact Mireille the first time via e-mail, so logically that is the language that they both have the most optimum mastery of. And it is the universal language of business, after all.
  • What kind of gun are the black-suited gunmen carrying?
    • The black-suited Soldats assassins, who appear from the very beginning, all carry the SIG PRO2340--the latest model handgun made by the Swiss maker SIG. With the premise of the Soldats in mind, European guns were selected for them, but it is interesting to see in the later half of the series that the higher ranking the member, the older the gun he carries.


    Noir © 2001 Ryoe Tsukimura - Bee Train - Victor Entertainment, Inc.