It feels almost as if, having given us a story last week that took a rather rose colored view on the possibility of human-youkai partnership, Gegege no Kitarou 2018 felt it needed to keep the balance with this episode.  It’s not such a far-fetched idea, because the core theme of this series – Kitarou’s painful status as a bridge between the two worlds – hinges on those two extremes being balanced on a razor’s edge.  That’s why Nurarihyon strikes me as a particularly on-point big bad, because his whole raison d’être is exploiting that tension for his own benefit.

I wonder sometimes if Kitarou has a breaking point.  Not the sort of thing we saw this week, which I’d call more a loss of patience, but where he really snaps – where he rebels against all the pressure he’s constantly under and blows up a Shinkansen or goes to hide in a cave for a hundred years or something.  He’s always being asked to arbitrate, make impossible decisions, to choose sides or not choose sides and be blamed whichever choice he makes.  Again, that tension is the essence of this story, but I do feel bad for Kitarou.  He may only look like a kid, but nobody should really have to shoulder all that on their own the way he does.

The question of blame is central to this week’s plot.  A 2000 year-old camphor tree is cut down after a schlimazel named Takumi (Terashima Takuma) takes a selfie with it that goes viral.  Eventually the hordes of millennials streaming in to take their own selfies and trash his land drives the old man whose family has been the protector of the tree for generations (Tani Atsuki) to cut it down.  This royally pisses off the deity of the tree, the Hoko (Ikeda Masaru, surprisingly making his franchise debut), who goes off searching for the human named Takumi and kidnapping bystanders (not all innocent) to turn into… pickles?

It’s Mana (again) who gets Catchick and Kitarou involved, and I can’t say I honestly blame Kitarou for being ambivalent here.  That said I was pretty stunned that he was about to walk away and leave the humans to die in the pickling vat – I mean, most of those people had nothing whatsoever to do with what happened to the tree.  As for Takumi, it’s not totally clear where the narrative comes down on this but I don’t see any culpability there – he was just showing his gratitude to that old camphor for giving him hope every day.  How was he supposed to know what would happen?  I kind of take issue with the old dude, because cutting down the tree seems like a pretty extreme overreaction to me.

As usual, Kitarou gets dragged into the middle of all this whether he wants to be or not.  The Hoko may have every right to be angry, but he can’t be going around setting towns on fire and again, Takumi did nothing to deserve to be killed over.  The ending here is pretty bleak even by this series’ standards – fires burning everywhere, the Hoko sent to the Underworld and Kitarou having to live with the responsibility, and Takumi so wracked with misplaced guilt over what’s happened that he seems to be contemplating suicide.  I see Nurarihyon in full Thriller-popcorn mode in my head.

Also worth noting – stick around for the preview.  Given this series’ history in that area, I look forward to next week’s episode with a mix of curiosity and dread.