It’s not the first time I’ve made the observation, but in terms of sheer volume of really good anime Gegege no Kitarou 2018 is putting up an impressive marker.  Not all of its 69 episodes have been excellent, obviously, but an awful lot of them have – which is rare for a series which airs for this long.  And it’s been a hell of a run recently, too, with a handful of benchmark eps airing in the last couple of months alone.  And no two of them the same.

That in fact is one of the things that most impresses me about this series – it can excel in so many different ways, with such a wide breadth of tone.  I haven’t generally been that impressed with the Isurugi Rei/Four Treasonous Generals episodes, which have been a mixed bag.  But this was easily my favorite Rei episode thus far.  Likewise traditionally-plotted stories don’t tend to showcase this series at its best, but this one absolutely did.  It’s a keeper.

The general in question this time is Ibukimaru (Furuya Tooru).  Of course Furuya-san has been in a bunch of GGGnK incarnations but then, he’s been in almost everything over the decades.  And frankly, it’s apparent from the first lines he utters as Ibukimaru that we’re in the presence of seiyuu royalty here.  He brings tremendous gravity and depth to the role, and a real sense – even as we’re being told that Ibukimaru is one of the most evil youkai in history – that there’s more to him than meets the eye.  It was when Ibukimaru sardonically noted to Kitarou that if it was humans’ discretion to destroy nature, then it was his discretion to destroy their creations that I knew we were dealing with an interesting chap.

Given what we know – that Ibukimaru burned an entire domain a thousand years earlier and that he’s kidnapped Mana – it’s easy to assume the worst.  As it turns out, though, he only wants Mana because of her spiritual power – the first time her lineage has factored into the plot in quite some time.  He’s trying to locate the body of his wife, Chihaya (Yamazaki Wakana). so he can reunite it with her head – the head that was all that was left behind by the army that destroyed the village he fled to with her at his side when his father refused to accept their love.  That father was Shuten-doji, one of the most infamous youkai in Japanese mythology, and Chihaya’s body lies at the bottom of the reservoir created by the dam her spirit is haunting.

Ibukimari is a fascinating figure.  Before he met Chihaya he was certainly an accomplice to great evil, and the massacre of his village doesn’t justify the actions he took afterwards.  But he doesn’t pretend otherwise – he’s quite sanguine about the Karmic debt he carries and quite willing to return to Hell (or go with Rei) once he’s filled the task he set out to do.  When he gives his warnings to Kitarou and Rei after he does so (my God, what a delivery by Furuya) you get the sense they damn well better listen – because he may be the one being who can lecture the both of them with total authority based on experience.

The truth is, Ibukimaru is really of no interest to Rei once it’s clear he wasn’t the youkai who destroyed Rei’s village, so returning him to Enma-daio is no sacrifice on his part.  But while not the droid he’s looking for, Ibukimaru’s denial narrows the list of candidates down to one – Tamano-no-mae, the nine-tailed fox.  Tamano-no-mae is one of the biggest of the big in Japanese (and Chinese) folklore, and a frequent antagonist across the decades in Gegege no Kitarou.  I suspect she’s going to prove way more than Rei can handle…