That was one hell of a year of anime, so I guess it’s only fitting that it ended with a trip to Hell.  If I weren’t in travel mode myself I’d be sore tempted to do a kind of faux series review post here, because it certainly feels like an ending for Gegege no Kitarou 2019 – and a triumphant one at that.  But I’ll stick to the matter at hand, which was a pretty balls-out finale for the on-again, off-again Nanashi arc that’s spanned this reboot’s entire first year of production.

There was so much event this week, but most of it was plot-driven – the sort of stuff that doesn’t beg a whole lot of deconstruction.  I was certainly pleased to see Nezumi-otoko – whose villain side has very much been in ascendance this past cour – get a hero moment for a change, as the preview suggested he would.  I didn’t see the connection coming, though – that Nanashi was, like Ratman, a youkai-human half-breed and as such, someone whose resentment was easy for Nezumi-otoko to decipher.

Mizuki Shigeru was fond of saying that Nezumi-otoko was the character who made the plot move, though we haven’t seen those words taken quite so literally as they were here very often.  Nezumi’s scolding (and a little choking) does the trick, though one can hardly blame Kitarou for losing his mojo, having just seen both his father and best friend seemingly destroyed.  Kitarou is indeed the only one who can stop giant baby Nanashi, and it quickly turns into an inside job. I’m not sure Kitarou expected to find what he did in there, but it certainly figured that Mana would be at the heart of everything.

I was somewhat undecided about where this turn of events was taking the story, but I think they pretty much pulled it off by making the details most interesting than they appeared on the surface last week.  I quite liked that Mana’s rage was not so much at Neko-musume or the youkai in general – it was at herself for having did what she did.  Hating the youkai for killing her mother is really just Mana’s way of coping with what she’s done – deep down even she knows that Catchick was deceived, and may even suspect that she was herself in the matter of her mother’s death.

Nanashi as a giant baby was not my favorite development, but again, I think it’s largely redeemed by the fact that the writers actually gave us a reason for it that made sense.  There are details of this I still don’t quite get, starting with this one – if the woman in Nanahsi’s memories (his mother, presumably) was murdered by the pitchfork anti-haafu mob, how can Mana be her direct descendant?  Did she have a child before these memories (with someone different than the youkai we saw), or did she actually survive?  And where does that leave the literal birth of Nanashi himself?

“The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference” – maybe this is a quote you’ve heard a thousand times and dismissed as Hallmark pap.  In actuality, it was originally said by Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who became a peace activist and Nobel Laureate.  And this fits in very much with Gegege no Kitarou’s (and Mizuki-sensei’s) devoutly anti-war perspective (and don’t think that half-breed stuff isn’t a condemnation of Japanese racism either).  As absurd as the whole giant baby thing was, the way it played out here actually made a sort of sense.  And the importance of a name to a creature like that is certainly understandable.  Fighting hate with compassion – it’s a hard sell, but right in-line with this mythology’s history.

So what name did Mana give Nanashi?  It sure looked like she said “Kitarou” but that would be a somewhat ill-omened gesture.  As for the return of Neko-musume, well – let’s just say that those of a sensitive nature are advised to avoid summer Comiket.  I don’t know how long she’s going to stay that way, and I don’t know if there will be consequences to the forest youkai going to the underworld to petition Enma Daiou to let them have Neko-musume back (next week’s preview suggests there might be).  But it was a pretty epic way to bring a pretty epic year of Gegege no Kitarou to a close – now let’s get the next one started.