Gurazeni – 06

Watanabe Ayumu’s other baseball anime checks in with another solid insider episode this week, this time touching on the rather interesting topic of socializing between members of opposing teams.  And off-field behavior generally, which is certainly a rich topic in a sport that’s been blessed with some of the strangest and most colorful characters around.

Not for the first time, it strikes me that Bonda-san’s obsession with salaries (this time around, “multipliers”) is not entirely healthy.  Most innocently it’s a sort of superstition, and ballplayers are justifiably legendary for being superstitious creatures.  But he lets it get into his head too much – if he was the sort of fellow that would use stuff like that to get angry at the opponent, it might be a good tactic for psyching himself up.  But that’s not Bonda.

Baseball used to have a lot of notorious partiers, too, but that has indeed changed a lot with the current generation.  “Carnivores” have become “herbivores”, and non-smoking ones too, though neither is really Bonda’s preference.  After watching a quartet from the opposing team inhale a grotesque amount of meat (no vegetables), beer and cigarettes, Bonda and Sibuya-san end up at a club in Ginza (these are not prostitutes, just for the record) where they run into a visiting player, Sekiya-san, who’s the only one in NPB that’s the most dreaded multiplier of all – he makes 180 million, 10X Bonda’s salary.  He’s a regular – “drops at least a million” on every visit – and offers to pay for Bonda and Sibuya’s tab (they refuse).  And if all that weren’t enough, Bonda sees Sekiya just arriving home while he’s out running at 8:00 the next morning.

That it will all come down to the lefty-batting Sekiya vs. Bonda in a critical late-game situation is a given – even Bonda acknowledges it.  This is the most fascinating, scientific and exciting at-bat of Gurazeni so far – and Bonda wins the battle with a “front door” slider on the sixth pitch (Sekiya never swings the bat).  But equally interesting is the not so-obvious importance of refusing to accept Sekiya’s hospitality at the hostess club – that debt would have been inside Bonda’s head when he was throwing those inside pitches.  Pro athletes have to worry about stuff like that, because sports is about the mind as much as the body.  It’s great to see Bonda succeed in the clutch – and hopefully start to think of himself as something more than an 18 million Yen bit player.

Gegege no Kitarou (2018) – 07

Make no mistake about this: in a different season or maybe even on a different day, I’d probably blog both these series on their own rather than in digest form.  The 2018 version of Gegege no Kitarou has impressed the hell out of me (pun intended). Not only is it excelling at telling stories – and lots of different types of stories at that – but there’s some marvelous animation and direction happening too.  I’ve never bought into the myth that Toei doesn’t do great animation anyway, but this edition of Gegege no Kitarou flies in the face of that lie.

For all that it gets little discussion in English and laughably low aggregator scores (though it does decently on Anime Planet, a site whose audience seems to have more varied tastes than MAL), Gegege no Kitarou remains an institution in Japan.  This version gets excellent TV ratings, but what’s really interesting is that it airs in a flat-out kids slot (though Hunter X Hunter 2011 did too before the “Chimera Ant” arc, of course) – 9:00 on Sunday mornings.  As this week’s incredibly morbid and graphic episode shows, this is a series that’s never been afraid to broach dark subjects –  and bullying and suicide certainly count.

The subject of Karma is obviously central to Buddhism, and as such central to the mythology that underpins this franchise.  The story of the company president who berates and bullies his staff is not at all far-fetched, and you know as soon as you see the “special” train to Tama Cemetery that things are going to take a dark turn.  Kitarou’s role as the “conductor” though (Neko Musume is on-board, too) is a fascinating one (he’s also hanging around friend-style with Nezumi-Otoko again).  This train ride to Hell is a masterpiece – you really experience what this bastard is experiencing, and there’s some fantastic cinematography here as well (I love what’s happening outside the train especially).  In its own way this is almost as impressive as the Ghibli-esque Episode 4.

This kind of story is all too real in modern Japan – companies and presidents like this do exist, and workers are driven to suicide by them.  But the real kicker of the episode is the ending, which beautifully ties back in with the intro – and the girl who’s called in Kitarou about the photo she took of a man being pushed to his death by ghostly hands.  Kitarou’s message to her is utterly chilling – what goes around does indeed come around.  And if hell companies are part of the Japanese cultural fabric, so is school bullying – often ending in the same tragic way.  As Kitarou says, this is way more scary than youkai.  There are no punches pulled here, timeslot be damned – like the 0:42 to Tama Cemetery, this is a dark ride.