It’s getting rather repetitive.  Hamasaki Hiroshi’s direction is off the charts, Immortal is great, ho hum.  But the series keeps delivering every week, so what can I do?  Absent one or two modest bobbles where the wholesale editing of the material made the narrative hard to follow, this show has been pretty much perfect.  It’s a seinen to be sure and deals with some mature themes.  But  it strikes me that at heart Immortal is a pretty straightforward (though effective) story thematically.  It’s really the direction that’s making it high art.

One aspect of stories like this is that it can kind of fatiguing to try and figure out who the good guys are.  When you come right down to it, absent a few hardcore psychopaths (like Shira) pretty much all the major players are simply pursuing their own agenda.  Kagehisa Anotsu, the rest of the Ittou-Ryuu, the Mugai-Ryuu – all of them are perfectly justified in everything they’ve done from their own perspective.  Rin is not immune to this – she’s seeking revenge.  It’s a choice she’s made and she’s certainly justified in it after what the Ittou-Ryuu did to her family.

That’s where Manji stands out (even if he’s less the center of the story thematically than Rin).  He makes no pretensions about doing things for the sake of right – he’s a hired sword.  He’s fulfilling the obligations of a curse so he can die.  He’s a free agent, in essence – which is why his obvious emotional commitment to Rin is such a big deal.  The mercenary has chosen a side – he’s basically working for free (though extorting money from defeated zaku is a fringe benefit).  I suspect Manji-san doesn’t think Rin is particularly right or Kagehisa wrong – he just admires her resolve and courage (and there’s the siscon thing of course).

Then we have Magatsu, a character who I really like.  He’s already shown that he has a moral compass – which suggests there’s an element of the Ittou-Ryuu which someone with a moral compass can justify supporting.  He has loyalty (as we’ll see late in this episode).  But at the moment, he’s another guy seeking revenge over a woman.  When he and Manji are attacked by Shira and his hired blades (pea shooters they may be), it’s clear who Shira is really after.  And even after he makes the connection between Magatsu and the young prostitute he slaughtered, he’s still not really interested in Magatsu.

This is a really interesting sequence of events.  Shira cuts off Manji’s hand (he just keeps getting hacked up), and is rather stunned to see what happens next.  Manji leaves Shira to Magatsu to handle, knowing this is what the young man wanted.  Shira is seriously, seriously fucked up.  He’s carved the bones of his severed arm into twin blades, the agony if anything making him even more deranged than before.  But he no babbling incoherent – Shira is totally self-aware, and that’s what makes him really terrifying.

The extended battle between Shira and Magatsu is one of the series’ bloodiest, a real war of attrition between two men who don’t have the luxury of magic pixie worms to heal their wounds.  I don’t know how Magatsu survived those injuries to be honest, but he does – as Manji says – have home-field advantage in these mountains.  That proves to be the difference in their battle, though I thought at first Magatsu’s plan was to take both of them over those falls.  Shira is unrepentantly psychotic right to the end, but my feeling is that the old rule about not seeing the body applies here.  If anybody is a cockroach, it’s Shira.

As for Magatsu, he does survive – and Manji gives him half the money he liberated from Shira’s hired swords to him to get some medical assistance.  One of the many taunts hurled at him during his fight with Shira was that Kagehisa (who’s having an interesting encounter on the road to Kaga) was in trouble, and Magatsu determines that once he’s healed, he’ll go to his leader’s side even though he’s left the Itou-Ryuu.  As he notes that will put he and Manji on opposite sides again – but that sort of thing is fickle in a story like this one, and opposite sides or no I don’t think they’ll ever be enemies again.