Mairimashita! Iruma-kun 4th Season – 13

Hawehya.

Pretty good, thanks.

This isn’t a “season finale” for Mairimashita! Iruma-kun of course. It’s a two-cour (sort of) season as usual. Nevertheless the last episode of a cour often has a sort of term break feel to it, whether the show is actually taking a week off or not (I don’t believe this one is). So it was here, with an ep that felt like a sort of benediction. There was nothing remotely final to it, but it did have an air of summation – tying together what has come before it. This series has an ability to do one-off episodes that’s extremely impressive – ones that don’t really resemble any of the others.

You might say I’m crazy, but I thought this whole “exorcibration” thing was kind of profound. The idea that you thank someone simply for being alive. For being born, and for surviving to be a part of your life. That’s deep, actually. The context is that in the demon world life is both cheap and precious (it’s not a contradiction). So you want to show appreciation for it, and something like an exorcibration – basically a birthday party – is as good a pretext as any. In the old days before modern medicine, they used to say that young children “belonged to God”, because so many of them never made it to age seven or eight. This is along the same lines, I think.

We know Iruma’s birthday is October 4 now. Why? Because Balam-sensei asked. Balam-sensei’s proclivity for touching the students is still kind of awkward, but – even to a human like Iruma – I think in the end he’s pure kindness. He shares the story of how his face was deformed – his own curiosity getting the better of him as a child – to try and frighten Iruma-kun into being less unguarded. He’s incredibly vulnerable in this place as a human – theoretically. In practice it doesn’t seem to work out that way. And guardedness is just not in Iruma-kun’s bag of tricks. Not now that he’s surrounded by folks who appreciate him.

Once Balam notifies Opera, it’s only a matter of time before Sullivan (over) does something to celebrate (three weeks late). And in the Underworld, that means exorcibration. At first it looks like some sort of Satanic ritual but in effect, it’s a whole lot of hawehya. Again, the idea here is to show appreciation to somebody for staying alive. One way to do this, of course, is with gifts – which everyone happily provides (though Kallego-sensei only reluctantly). Iru-bo tries to thank Azz for the first one, but Ali-san stops him. That’s not how this works.

Of course all this would get to Iruma. He’s such a sunny lad that it’s easy to forget just how royally his parents screwed him both over and up. The idea that the people (demons or not) around him appreciate him is not something Iruma is going to take for granted. It really means something to him. Fundamentally, one of the things this show is about is “when good things happen to good people”. For Iruma-kun being kind is its own reward, but the cosmos has finally decided to pay him back for that.