GeGeGe no Kitarō

Episode 25

Stare at your smartphone too long and you'll be cursed. This week's GeGeGe no Kitarō takes on cyber-bullying, albeit not as impressively as elements of episode seven did. Possibly because this story has a few more fish to fry than just the consequences of attacking someone online – it's also giving us more insight into Nanashi, the mysterious yokai who we now know to be using Mana as some sort of awful vessel as well as bringing us Kubire-oni, a yokai born from a human who committed suicide and now encourages the same in others – or in non-Kitaro mythology, simply strangles people. All in all, this is one of the darker, more disturbing episodes, but it doesn't quite manage to achieve the heights of episodes seven and twenty, which more smoothly blended scary with poignant.

The root plot for this week is that Mana sees a group message about how annoying she is that wasn't meant for her eyes. (Or was it? Cyber bullies can be just as sly as regular ones, and Karin may have meant to put Mana off balance.) When Mana tells her friend Miyabi about it, Miyabi goes beyond suggesting that Mana download a new app called “the curse app;” she takes Mana's phone and does it for her. Reluctant but unable to say no, Mana enters Karin's name into the app—and then soon hears that Karin has fallen and sprained her leg. Shortly thereafter, Karin's phone mysteriously downloads the app and tells her to enter two names unless she wants the curse to rebound back onto her – she puts in Mana and Miyabi. I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she suspected them of having cursed her in the first place, but experience suggests instead that this is just another way for her to lash out at her initial target, Mana; Miyabi's an easy second because she's Mana's friend. Meanwhile Cat Girl has heard about the curse app and has informed Kitaro, and not a moment too soon – before Mana even knows what's going on, her phone is filled up with retaliatory downloads, each based on a person who has cursed her.

While Kubire-oni is largely at fault here, using the internet to stretch his hair tentacle-like into peoples' phones, and Nanashi is also an instigator, encouraging Kubire-oni in order to better make Mana his vessel, the real message here is one that is all too down-to-earth: cyber bullying is a real problem, especially for kids. When bullies broke my arm back in the 90s, they had to be careful about who was around to see what they were doing; today the anonymity of the internet allows bullies to be much less circumspect and to feel much more invincible while destroying their victims' confidence, and maybe even lives. That this episode opens with someone hanging themselves while vicious texts come in on the phone lying beside their kicked-over chair makes the point of how bad this can get. Kitaro and Cat Girl saving Mana and her friend from a similar fate only underlines just how wide-spread the issue has become thanks to the curse app – and should make us question how many people they couldn't save.

By the end of the episode, Mana is more worn than we've ever seen her. She's been through hell and the fact that, despite everything that happened with her phone symbolically following her around as she tries to escape it (representing the inescapability of online interactions today), her smart phone is right there on the bed beside her, next to her pillow where a teddy bear might be, and noticeably more within her immediate grasp than her actual stuffed toys. The specific curse app may be gone, but the threat is not – and now that Mana bears another one of Nanashi's marks on her body, her experiences may render her more vulnerable than ever.

Rating: A-

GeGeGe no Kitarō is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.