It’s not the fault of any one adherent to the genre that stories like this tend to have very similar themes.  The samurai code (it only came to be known as “Bushido” in the Edo Period), for all that it gets romanticized by some, was pretty brutal.  And, frankly, reprehensible in many respects by modern standards (and even enlightened medieval standards).  Pointless death is at the very heart of it, like it or not, so historical dramas of the type manga is so proficient at tend to focus on pointless death.  They take many forms, but revenge is most commonly at the heart of these stories.

Dororo, Vinland Saga, Doukyonin wa Hiza (OK, I made that last one up) – revenge has its bloody fingerprints all over the best anime of 2019.  Immortal is nominally the story of its titular character, who must kill 100 evil men for every good one he killed to be freed from the curse of immortality – but that’s more repentance than revenge.  It’s really Rin whose arc is the spine of the series, as I’ve noted before, and her revenge journey is about as straightforward as it gets.  Hell, when you’re being lectured about it by your target, you know you’re not holding any secrets.

Two things have been clear for a while here.  First, Anotsu Kagehisa is more than the villain Rin has conjured in her mind.  And second, Rin is ill-suited to the path of revenge.  She has far too much compassion for this to stick – it’s simply not who she is.  After her chance (I guess) encounter with Kagehisa in the mountains they end up traveling together after he defeats (but doesn’t kill) a band of swordsmen from the Shingyoutou-ryuu, a rival sword school that was originally supposed to merge with the Ittou-ryuu.  Kagehisa makes Rin promise to abandon revenge whatever happens between them, which is almost comical in a way.

There’s a lot of intrigue to this whole Shingyoutou-ryuu/Itou-ryuu feud, which has seen the suicide of the former’s leader and his daughter and was apparently engineered by the shogunate.  It seems that perhaps the Ittou-ryuu became too powerful for the shogunate’s comfort, and this was a setup to make them targets of a rival (and get Kagehisa killed, no doubt).  He knows the game is afoot and is desperate to get back to Edo, but the attackers from the Shingyoutou-ryuu had apparently soaked their blades in manure in order to make sure even if they “lost”, Kagehisa would be crippled.  And he’s come down with tetanus, a terrible disease in any time which eventually robs you of your ability to speak.

Let me just say, I’ve spent a little time in Gifu Prefecture, where this episode takes place, and it’s huge.  And remote – so remote in fact that by legend some of the defeated Heike survivors of the Genpei War headed to its remote valleys like Shirakawa (visited by Rin and Kagehisa here), where they could escape Genji attention for centuries.  But hey, not only did Kagehisa and Rin meet up, but Manji, Magatsu and Makie all end up reuniting just as the next Shingyouyou-ryuu ambush strikes.  I guess the relative paucity of roads in those days makes such things slightly less implausible but even say, the timing was certainly impeccable.

Makie – now selling her body in order to raise some extra money to pay her debts to Kagehisa – remains an utter badass.  And between she and Magatsu Manji hardly has to fight here, really – though the brief conversation between he and Maki over the nature of the men she’s screaming for him to kill is a fascinating one.  All of these people are in the right from their own perspective – Rin, Kagehisa, the Shingyoutou-ryuu – but surely they can’t all be right, and since everyone’s right is different the code dictates that they all have to try and kill each other.  It’s such a fucking waste, seriously – but then, I guess that’s exactly the point of Immortal (and so many other series with which is shares a common template).