GeGeGe no Kitarō

Episode 37

Adele has officially redeemed herself. Ever since last week's reveal that she's been cooperating with Backbeard in order to save her younger sister Agnes, I've been wondering how she was going to manage to pull that off, especially since she's got so much less magical power. The answer, it turns out, is linked to Agnes' decision to go along with Backbeard, wherein she sacrificed the many for the few. That's almost never regarded as the right answer in either anime or the folklore this show draws from, and that means that Adele, who wants to stop the sacrifices like those made by her mother along with simply saving her sister, is the one in the literary right. In folklore, that means that she's also the one who is going to succeed. When Adele asks Mana to help her reach Agnes in the center of Brigadoon, she's doing so with the full expectation that saving her sister and halting the spell will mean her own death; in fact, that she needs Mana to get her over to Agnes implies that she's on the cusp of dying anyway. That means that she's only planning on her end, whereas when Agnes opted to go along with Backbeard she knew that she'd be bringing down the population of Japan with her. It's this selflessness on Adele's part that truly saves her sister and the country.

Not that Kitaro's efforts don't help. As we saw reaffirmed, his spirit hair chachanko is incredibly powerful, able to stop Mana from dying (or even getting injured) after she fell a mile out of the sky, so now that Kitaro has it and his crystalized power back, Backbeard, forced into a physical body, is in some serious trouble. Kitaro handles the hand-to-hand portion of the battle, eliminating the threat that is Backbeard's god-awful loincloth, while Adele covers the more spiritual portion, essentially using the warring emotions of love and anger to defeat the threat. It's an interesting statement, especially since Kitaro's anger infuses his chachanko, and it doesn't feel too out there to assume that his ancestors' own anger at Backbeard and the threat to their home and their descendant is also coming through. That almost makes his anger and Adele's softer emotion two sides of the same coin – something Backbeard didn't even consider. (Could this also be a key to eventually defeating Nanashi?)

And thus this particular story arc comes to an end. Agnes and Adele head off to see the world and make their reparations to Miminaga and the other hantú's memory, and all's well that ends well. The best outcome, though, is that Mana is finally able to visit the Ge Ge Ge no Mori, a gift from Agnes. Back when the two girls were just becoming friends, Agnes kissed Mana's hand in a courtly gesture that Mana was a little weirded out by. This can have a variety of meanings, but is typically meant to indicate respect. Agnes' kiss, however, carries an extra bonus: it has allowed Mana some of the protections and privileges of the supernatural. That's what saved her from Brigadoon and that's what allows her to visit the yokai on their home turf, so essentially Agnes' kiss was her showing how much she liked and trusted Mana, granting her partial-yokai status, more or less. It's the ultimate respect given to a human, and it may just come in handy when Nanashi gets those last two symbols onto Mana's unwitting body.

That's likely to be the ongoing storyline of the next season of episodes, which seems primed to return to the perils of various yokai, with next week's gearing up to mess with Kitaro's and Cat Girl's emotions. Thanks to Backbeard, Nanashi's more powerful than ever, and with his goal drawing closer, he's not likely to hold back much now. Mana's protections are better and Kitaro, Cat Girl, and the rest have fully accepted her as a part of the group (at least, part of the friend group), so it isn't going to be as easy as our resident bad guy thinks. Now if we can just get him to never, ever lick Mana's thigh again…

Rating: A-

GeGeGe no Kitarō is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.