In accordance with my usual policy of not burying the headline, that was by far, far the best episode of Jigokuraku so far for my tastes.  Not even close.  I’ve never found any episode of this show bad, but my attention has tended to drift at times.  It’s been inconsistent, often displaying a split personality.  There have been plenty of good moments, but no episode has engaged me in its entirety at anything close to the level this one did.  There was a whole lot of Jekyll and very little Hyde.

If one were to quibble, they could accuse this ep of being a bit of an infodump.  And yes, there was a lot of new information lobbed at us, but I feel as if it happened pretty organically.  And it made sense within the parameters the story has set up.  One one front, the two Aza brothers do battle with the beautiful nymphs who were sucking face in the forest – who reveal themselves to be considerably more than that.  And on the other, the Gabimaru party meets a young girl on the edge of the seemingly deserted village in the mist.  She has a protector who looks like an ent on too much keto, and is possessed of a strength which belies her size (and according to Gabimaru, is more than physical.

Lots of names here, starting with the ent – he’s Houkou (Chou).  The girl is Mei (Kohara Konomi), who seems not to have the gift of speech (but probably understands it).  Gabi leaves the others to deal with Houkou while he chases down Mei – who’s something of a ninja herself – in the forest.  We never do get to see Yuzuriha’s ninjitsu (neither does Senta), but Houkou regenerates from whatever they did to him.  As for Mei she breaks down wailing when Gabi trusses her up in a tree, so Sagiri steps into the good cop role and lets her maternal instincts take over.

Eventually Houkou offers to take the others to the village and spill the beans on the elixir in exchange for the return of Mei.  The others are understandably skeptical until he offers the prospect of a bath, which wins Yuzuruiha over.  He lives in an old hut full of Taoist artifacts, and says he has for over a thousand years (which is how long the village has been deserted).  More names are dropped – Soshin, the low-level monsters the group have already met.  Tensen, the indestructible guardians of the interior where the elixir lives, currently disposing of the Aza brothers.  All these are Taoist terms, Senta says, implying that the whole island is a product of Taoist mythology.

Perhaps most importantly, the elixir of life is called Tan, and is distilled from the humans defeated by the Tensen and tossed into a pit for the flowers to consume them.  This seems to be what happened to the Aza, though it’s too early to declare then definitively doomed.  From Houko’s perspective, there’s no harm in telling the humans this because they’re effectively dead already.  And there’s likewise no harm in feeding them and letting them bathe – something Sagiri turns into quite a ritual when it becomes clear that Mei has never been shown how to bathe properly.  Perhaps Mei’s growing attachment to Sagiri (and possibly even Gabimaru) will cause Houkou to amend his view towards them.

I really enjoyed that bathhouse scene, especially the part where Gabi was flashing back to being looked after by his wife the day before their marriage.  It was beautifully staged, and had more emotional heft than anything we’ve seen so far.  Yui refers to herself as Gabimaru’s strategist, which for some reason I found quite moving.  To oversimplify things, for me Jigokuraku seems to waver between Hunter X Hunter and Monster Hunter – and this episode was very much inclined to the former.  The more often that’s the case going forward, the more engaged I’m going to be.