Is it a coincidence that the best episodes of Gegege no Kitarou 2018 more and more seem to center on Mana?  I surely don’t know, but it’s interesting at the very least.  Ironic, too, since Mana is a totally original element of this series whose best moments have usually been its most faithful to the spirit of Mizuki Shigeru himself.

Why should this be?  Well, for starters Mana is a remarkably charming character – at her age and gender she should be a walking trope in anime in 2018, but she’s not.  Mana is cute without it being calculated (not easy in anime) and quite refreshingly childlike in the way 13 year-olds often are in real life.  But she’s also a breath of fresh air because she’s largely immune from the oppressive, dreary tone that seems to have overtaken too many GGGnK episodes of late.  And in her innocence, she tends to be a buffer against the increasing trend towards cultural chauvinism that’s been creeping into the series.

This time around the story revolves around Belial (Nishimura Tomomichi, a veteran of the 1996 and 2007 versions), a western youkai whose powers have been sealed for 150 years, forcing him to live as a vagrant.  The series can’t resist slipping in a bit of isolationist rhetoric – Belial came from Portugal during the Meiji restoration and wreaked havoc in Japan – but he was sealed by the karasu tengu.  That group includes our old friend Koujirou, who’s having trouble concentrating on his training for the same reason that young males of all sentient species usually have trouble concentrating.

I don’t really think anything is going to come of this Mana-Koujirou romance angle – he couldn’t even spit his true feelings out after his master gave his love his blessing – but it was still cute and charming.  Meanwhile Agnes continues to hunt for the ring, and at this point the way it seems to tease her by revealing itself just as she arrives to claim it suggests to me that there’s a guiding hand here that’s toying with her.  Still, give her credit – that trick of restoring Koujirou’s entire village (and good thing for his sanity too, as it was his fault it was destroyed by Belial) was so impressive as to risk being OP.