9:00 AM. Sunday morning.

Obon is obviously a big holiday for a series like Gegege no Kitarou, with its “graveyard undokai” and underworld fixation.  The episode this one will immediately draw comparisons to is “Ghost Train” (#7), and there are similarities.  But in fact, the 2018’s previous Obon episode was “Memories of the Youka” – not just its finest episode, but one of the best of any anime this decade.  And, I would argue, this ep has more philosophically in common with that one (and with the spirit – no pun intended – behind the Obon festival).

The idea behind this week’s episode is that a living human can be exiled to the Underworld.  I would have assumed this to be a highly unusual occurrence, as I’ve heard no mention of it in this mythology (and rarely in any).  In this case the living human is a young man named Kakeru, a lowlife pretty crook who jacks cars and holds up convenience stores at knifepoint.  Kakeru is played by Ishikawa Kaitou (who as Rinne should certainly know something about the Underworld), and while it’s initially a bit jarring to hear a current “it boy” in a major GGGnK guest role, Ishikawa is a good actor and he soon enough draws us into Kakeru’s nightmarish existence.

Putting one in mind of “Ghost Train” it’s Kitarou who drives Kakeru to his destination, and there’s one other passenger on the bus, a salaryman played by Ishikawa Hideo – it would be a great story if Hideo was Kaitou’s real father, but alas he’s not.  It’s pretty clear right from the beginning that something more than meets the eye is going on here, though I confess I didn’t guess the big reveal about the second passenger until just before it happened.

I have to say, the first ten minutes or so were some of the most unpleasant and brutal anime I’ve seen in a long time.  Kakeru slowly ages and turns into a ghoulish figure, and in particular the sequence where he steals a hunk of meat from a demon only to have it turn out to be a dead human – and then vomits it up and re-eats it several times in a Sisyphean nightmare – is incredibly disturbing.  There’s even a giant spider (Takatsuka Masaya) who actually looks like a hellish version of the Catbus from Tonari no Totoro.

I really didn’t think this story was going to go anywhere redemptive whatsoever, but the salaryman’s presence changes the dynamic in a big way.  He offers Kakeru a helping hand, a willing ear, and a message of hope that seems totally out of place in this literal Hell.  Eventually a seeming opportunity to escape arrives in the form of the thread from Akutagawa’s seminal tale “The Spider’s Thread”.  And while the thread itself is – as in the original – a mirage of temptation, in this instance it’s also a genuine opportunity for Kakeru to redeem himself.  Which indeed he does.

It’s important to remember that the idea of Obon is that the deceased have a brief window of time where they can visit their living loved ones.  In that context, for Kakeru’s father to have done this makes perfect practical and symbolic sense – from beyond the grave (indeed seemingly from Jigoku itself) he’s found a way to connect with the son he never knew and to offer him a chance to escape the eternal fate which claimed his father.  It’s an episode that bears re-watching I think, because knowing the truth changes how we see it.  And I think the moment where the father argues that “there’s always someone watching over you” is especially poignant.  How he managed to claim this chance I don’t know, but in doing so I think he shows that it’s not only Kakeru who deserves a chance at redemption.