If nothing else, I suppose being without Gegege no Kitarou for two weeks (at least one of those absences was for the Tokyo Marathon, which was cancelled for obvious reasons) prepares one for the series ending this month.  And I didn’t like it one bit.  This series has been a staple of my Sunday evenings for two years and I like that routine.  It sucks that it’s going to end, but two years is certainly a good run for any anime.

It’s ironic that anime’s most topical TV series (it barely let a holiday slip by unobserved) should end up airing its most poignantly topical storyline wholly by chance.  It certainly couldn’t have been planned, but the apocalyptic tone of this episode could hardly have been more fitting.  People all over Japan and the world are staring at what feels like dystopia barreling down on them – agonizingly in slow motion – and while Japan is better at dealing with this sort of thing calmly than almost anywhere, it’s still an emotionally devastating experience.

It’s certainly no exaggeration to say that this storyline is what Gegege no Kitarou 2018 has been building towards for its entire run.  This is the ultimate test of Kitarou’s way of being – “childlike and naive”, as Nurarihyon calls it, the only way forward?  One can focus on the allegorical side of this all they like (Mizuki-sensei knew exactly what he was doing) but purely from a character standpoint alone it’s powerful stuff.  Kitarou and Nezumi-otoko are each caught between two worlds in their own way – those ways are quite different, but I think it’s that shared experience in part that draws them together.

I’ve always liked the stories that focus on the bond between these two, because it’s arguably the deepest and most important in Mizuki’s mythology.  We can only guess at just how deep, but Nezumi-otoko’s observation that he’s known Kitarou longer than Sunakake-baba or Konaki-jijii gives an idea.  When Backbeard officially begins the Second Great Youkai War by going God-Warrior on a major swathe of Tokyo as Nurarihyon looks on, smirking, it’s only natural that Ratman should dig up his pot of escape funds and book a ticket on “Toei Airlines” to “any other country”.

If it were anyone else, I’d have suspected Kitarou said “as long as I know you’re safe that’s enough for me” because he knew it was the best way to get Nezumi-otoko to stay, but Kitarou is so earnest that I believe he meant it.  But stay Nezumi-otoko does, and once he learns Kitarou intends to try and strike an alliance with the nationalistic and racist prime minister (I thought this series was fantasy?), who’s just gotten her anti-youkai bill passed at last, he figures he can be of real use.  But she’s too far gone to be reasoned with (her speech equating hate to falling in love was truly chilling), and not for the first time Kitarou’s faith in the humans is sadly misplaced.

This is all Nurarihyon’s doing of course – stoking this hatred is his modus operandi, and it doesn’t matter if he kills humans or youkai in the process.  Backbeard is basically a weapon in this fight – albeit a weapon of mass destruction – and nothing more.  I don’t even think Nurarihyon wants to wipe out humanity, really – I think he just wants a return to a perpetual state of war between youkai and humans.  But my instinct is that he’s going to regret having taken Nezumi-otoko into his ranks, because Kitarou has had more influence on him over the centuries than anyone seems to realize.

I think we can say with a measure of confidence that Kitarou isn’t really dead, so that doesn’t amount to much of a cliffhanger with two episodes left.  But Nurarihyon isn’t really the sort of enemy you defeat by powering up and taking them down in battle.  He manipulates from the shadows and lets others do his fighting for him, and because the nature of his evil is so rooted in his philosophy, he represents a greater existential threat to Kitarou than anyone else.  As such, it only seems fitting that he should be the series’ final boss, and it’s going to be interesting to see how (and if) Kitarou manages to defeat him.