One question I’ve already been asked on multiple occasions in 2019 is where Gegege no Kitarou would have ranked on the 2018 year-end lists had it been eligible.  To which I can only give the somewhat fuzzy answer of “I don’t know”.  That’s not me being evasive, it’s just the truth – Gegege no Kitarou would have been (and will be this year) one of the toughest series I’ve ever had to rank.  The reason is straightforward – the gap between its best and worst episodes is wider than with any other 2018 series by a good margin.  It offered for my money the best single anime episode of the year and was superb for long stretches, but went through a pretty extended patch of mediocrity and – frankly – ugliness.

That’s a question to ponder later I suppose, because thankfully GGGnK is still in operation.  And with the Western Youkai arc (which despite its strong finish was on balance a negative for the show as a whole) finished, we’re set to return to more episodic stuff at least for a while.  I think that’s mostly a good thing, as these sorts of tales are ones Kitarou does exceptionally well a good chunk of the time.  And if this episode didn’t rank with the very best of the show’s first three cours, it was right in the wheelhouse – as solid and true-to-form as it gets.

What this ep showed off is something GGGnK does very well indeed – combine black comedy with genuine darkness.  It’s the cavalier way this series deals with really edgy material that strikes you, especially when one considers that it’s nominally a kids series.  The youkai in the spotlight this week is Kasha (Chou, somewhat surprisingly a veteran only of the 2007 series), who likes to dine on mochi and human corpses (surprisingly, not porridge).  Sadly for him, though, Kasha has become old and feeble and can no longer nimbly steal corpses from funerals.  Mana spots him in the process of dragging one home, too weak to lift it, and thus the Gegege youkai are drawn into the story.

A corpse-eater is a pretty dark antagonist to begin with, but this is some really grim stuff – children wailing as their mother’s bodies are stolen right in front of their eyes (Kasha gleefully muses on the delicious flavor their grief imparts on his meals), psycho-killers murdering girls but keeping their fingers, and – most tellingly – pension fraud.  The latter, sadly, is a genuine problem in a county full of elderly people, and the news is full of gruesome stories about adult children like the one depicted in this episode.  We see much of this courtesy of Nezumi-otoko, who sees in the enfeebled Kasha an opportunity to make some easy money.

What’s really interesting is that Gegege no Kitarou basically plays all this for comedy, which while pretty ballsy is still right in-character.  I loved the bit with Ittan-Momen revealing himself as a lech (really, any chance for Yamaguchi Kapppei to do comedy is pure gold), but things really get wild when the body-switching starts.  This is of course a great opportunity for these superb seiyuu to riff a little and enjoy themselves.  My favorites were Furukawa Toshio portraying the horror of the ones who get stuck in his Ratman body, and Shouji Umeka’s spot-on impersonation of Sawashiro Miyuki as Kitarou (after her take on Neko-Musume seducing a very bewildered Kitarou while possessed by Kasha – it was like a doujin come to life).

In the end, the guy who tries to dispose of his dead mother to keep collecting her pension checks certainly gets his just desserts – but Kasha in turn does not (we’ll be seeing him later, presumably).  And in a nice change-of-pace it’s Medama-oyaji (and Mana – clever girl) who ends up saving the day, though just how he was able to pull off that mochi trick I’m not sure (and it would have been fun to see how he would have reacted to having a full-sized body to tool around in for a little while).  It’s always great to have returning series back after the New Year’s hiatus, but that’s even more so with Gegege no Kitarou, which feels like it’s truly back in a larger sense.

ED4: “No.999” by go! go! vanillas