That gave new meaning to the term “slice of life”.

After a one-week hiatus which I assume was due to the worsening Coronavirus situation (though I never saw that confirmed) Mugen no Juunin: Immortal hits the ground running.  And slicing.  This series has certainly never been guilty of pulling any punches – it’s ruthless and relentless.  Sometimes that works to good effect and sometimes it’s just exhausting, and here I think it landed somewhere in-between those two extremes.  But at least there was a narrative point to all of it.

Immortal continues to treat us to a series of coincidental meetings between its primary players.  It stretches credulity when characters literally run over each other at random, but at this point it’s a suspension of disbelief thing.  And after the spectacle in the dungeon beneath Edo Castle this level of coincidence barely registers.  Shira is the main driver of events this time.  First he randomly runs into Habaki’s spy pair when they happen to be talking about Manji, and extracts the information as to his whereabouts from them.  He kidnaps Rin (who I think was riding in a separate palanquin) in order to draw Manji out – which of course it does.

Shira was annoying enough when he was just a psychopath – now he’s an immortal (thanks to Manji’s left arm) psychopath, and one who can’t feel pain to boot.  To him that may have seemed like an advantage but the obvious truth is that it’s not – immortality is bad enough in making you careless (as we’ve seen with Manji-san) but immune to pain too?  Shira’s fate is foreshadowed pretty strongly here, though perhaps it comes more quickly than one might have expected.    With Rin cruelly stashed half-submerged in a freezing river, Shira and Manji set about their final battle – and it’s one of the most brutal of the series.

That’s where the Magatsu on a horse comes in, and soon enough he’s drawn into a brutal (though brief) showdown with Shira.  As is Habaki’s assassin, and since neither of them know his new trick he has the drop on them.  I confess I rather like Magatsu – he’s straightforward and principled, probably about the closest thing to a genuinely noble male character in the cast.  That said, though, he does say later that Manji should stay the hero of the story, and that means giving him the chance to land the crucial (though not killing) blow against Shira (thanks to the horse).

Renzo is on-hand too of course – though I’ve never been quite clear on why (or how) he ended up with Shira in the first place.  He doesn’t seem to have embraced Shira’s psychotic worldview – even Shira seems to know this – but is perhaps too terrified to go against him.  He has a chance to help Manji save the drowning Rin but chooses not to (no way she’s really dead though) even before Shira shows up.  I can’t say I wholly blame him – Manji did kill his father, and Rin did lie to him to cover it up.  But if anybody ever needed a push in the right direction, it’s Renzo right about now.  I can’t quite figure out why he’s still in the story but perhaps that will become clear before the series wraps up.

So is this finally it for Shira?  You’d certainly like to think so after being ripped apart and eaten by wild dogs (which is a rather fitting end, when you think about past events).  He’s a bit over the top but if you like the sort of villain who leaves no doubt at to his evil nature, Shira certainly fits the bill.  There are a lot of nuanced characters in Immortal, a series painted in shades of grey, but it’s never been anything but black and white with him.  I tend to think the series can go to more interesting places with Shira out of the way, but I guess we’re about to find out.