Hoozuki no Reitetsu did it again.  I was just reading up on the Genpei War today (general curiosity and nebulous future travel ideas), which has always struck me as one of the most fascinating and tragic periods in Japanese history.  It’s certainly one of the most important, given that its repercussions can still be felt today – it truly did change Japan forever.  Sure enough, it turns up on Hoozuki no Reitetsu.  I continue to be convinced there’s some kind of weird psychic link between me and this series.

This episode was an odd contradiction For one thing, it’s extremely rare to see one story given an entire episode (off the top of my head I can’t remember the last time it happened).  But more than that, it was quite somber and serious for all that it was also often very funny – right down to a rather strangely powerful ending that framed both the series and its protagonist in a quite different way.

The central figure here is Yoshitsune, who of course we’ve seen before in this series.  He’s working with the karasu-tengu at the head of Hell’s police department, which has been getting what seem to be crank calls.  But in fact those calls are from Takiyashi-hime, the daughter of Taira no Masakado, a rebel warlord who was killed when the rebellion he fostered was crushed in the 10th Century.  Masakado himself give rise to all sorts of interesting legends, especially in Otemachi, my old neighborhood in Tokyo, where his pissed-off head is supposedly still roaming about and a major Shine was consecrated to appease it.  His daughter appeared in the famous ukiyo-e Mitsukuni Defying the Skeleton Spectre Invoked by Princess Takiyasha, which helped cement the legend of her as a great demon-summoner.

Well, this being Hoozuki no Reitetsu there’s certainly a good bit of silliness to the romance side of this, with Takiyashi and her skeleton hordes facing off against Yoshitsune and his tengu.  The idea of the two of them as a kind of Genpei Romeo and Juliet has a certain appeal to it, but she’s just kind of nuts and he’s clearly not interested.  There’s another angle to this, though, and that’s a shared history between Takiyashi and Hoozuki-sama – who she summoned and attempted to contract to help her extract revenge for her father’s death.  Knowing Hoozuki as we do, it’s not a mystery how that was going to turn out.

Things get very reflective at the end, though, in a way you just don’t see this show go too often.  Yoshitsune muses on the fact that the afterlife is basically full of curse Gods – those whose lives ended in tragedy and betrayal, resentment and frustration.  Yoshitsune, his faithful Benkei, Takiyasha and her father, and yes, even Hoozuki himself – all of them were betrayed in life.  Yet it almost seems as if Hoozuki had been redeemed in Hell – he has a family of sorts now (Nasubi and Karauri he treats as sons, and Ichiko and Niko may as well be adopted daughters), and a retinue of zany retainers whose existence revolves around him.  One doesn’t tend to think of Hoozuki that way, because Hoozuki no Reitetsu doesn’t usually encourage us to – but it’s a very interesting take on his character nonetheless.