Mugen no Juunin: Immortal continues to be the biggest overperformer of the season, a mid-tier expectations series running with the top dogs.  It’s easy to see why this story has proved so appealing for live-action creators, because it lends itself to the sort of naturalistic presentation that Hamasaki-sensei is applying here.  Still, there are things that can be done with animation which can’t be replicated with actors and sets, and the veneer of style the director places over the material makes Immortal play almost like an extremely violent impressionist painting.

I don’t know enough about Samura-sensei’s manga to know whether it’s as episodic as this version of the anime has been, or whether Hamasaki is taking this approach as a means of coping with the insane amount of material he has to cover in two cours.  But if the latter is the case, the shoe certainly seems to fit – there’s no discordance between the narrative structure and the material.  As an “immortal” Manji’s life lends itself to being a series of stories about the encounters he has along the way rather that a traditional protagonist-driven series.

On that note, the river of Manji’s life this week intersects with one who’s followed a similar trajectory for much longer.  Shizuka Eiku (Sakuya Shunsuke, yet another wonderful actor contributing to the magic) first appears as a monk, but Manji smells too much blood on him to believe that’s all Shizuka is.  He proposes an alliance against Kagehisa, despite the fact that he admires the Itto-ryuu’s practical (and bloody) approach to swordsmanship.  It’s Kagehisa’s mortality that’s the problem in Shizuka’s eyes – and it soon becomes clear that mortality is a subject he knows even more about than Manji.

Manji sees no good in this alliance, despite (or perhaps because) of the commonalities he sees between Shizuka and himself.  But in their brief skirmish at a roadside inn, Shizuka infects Manji with a poison which kills the sacred bloodworms which heal his wounds.  The results are truly horrifying – it’s as if all the wounds the worms have healed begin to reopen at the same time.  Surprisingly Rin’s antivenin seems to work (if there’s a backstory behind why it’s sacrificed to the God of pacing) but against his wishes she still rushes out to find a doctor, and finds herself snatched up by Shizuka (exactly what Manji expected).

If I’m honest, I could have done without Rin’s endless crying this episode.  It was about the only thing that didn’t work for me, and it’s not as though she’s helpless – she manages to be very useful to Manji here, and it’s not the first time.  Not that Shizuka didn’t give her plenty to cry about, even if he did spare the baby.  He reveals that he’s been around for over 200 years, “living as a worm” (a more literal self-deprecation for him than it would be for most), and his aim is simply to leave something behind besides the corpses of all the wives, friends and comrades he’s bid farewell to in his long life.

Rin presents Manji with the key question of the episode: between dying without achieving your dream and living forever knowing you’ll never be able to achieve it, which is worse?  The answer seems obvious to me, even if Manji is non-committal.  What also seems obvious to me is that this ended exactly the way Shizuka wanted it to.  He was more than ready to die, and in finding someone in the same boat as he Shizuka found a man worthy of ending his existence.  The question now I suppose is, what happens to the baby?  I could easily see Rin wanting to keep him, but I can’t even begin to list the reasons why that seems like a very bad idea…