GeGeGe no Kitarō

Episode 41

Welcome to GeGeGe no Kitarō's answer to the Toy Story films. If those messed you up, get ready to be sad about virtually everything you've ever thrown away, whether it's a mug, a flashlight, or a single straw sandal. The episode follows the lives of several everyday household items that belonged to an old man named Isao, among them a single zori, or traditional Japanese straw sandal. The zori belonged to Isao's father, who died when he was young, and when Isao opened a shoe store as an adult, he hung the zori underneath the shop shrine as a good luck charm. When the episode opens, Isao's son and daughter-in-law are moving him out of the shop and his apartment above it, and Isao does not put the zori into the box marked “take with.” Misunderstanding his father's intentions, Isao's son throws the left behind items away.

As you might guess, this makes the zori and his friends believe that they've been abandoned by the man they loved. It hits the zori especially hard, because Isao has taken care of him since he was a little boy. None of the now-living items can accept what's happened to them, making them prime targets for the unscrupulous Rat Man, who of course plans to sell them over and over in order to make money. But what Rat Man fails to understand is that these aren't ordinary yokai – they're things that have been granted a soul after being around and cared for, and they want to be needed and used by humans. That's why they're having so much trouble with the idea that Isao doesn't want them any more – their whole reason for being is to be useful to him.

That makes this a very heavy episode. Zori's pain is palpable, both through the voice acting and the animation, and we know that his anger comes from a place of pain rather than being an actual evil entity. When the teacup decides to stay with a woman who bought him because she loves drinking from a traditional mug, Zori's both sad and jealous, and he truly can't understand why the cup and later the flashlight would find homes while he remains alone. Eventually he attacks Isao's son in his hurt, only to find out that it wasn't what he thought – Isao had never intended for him to be thrown away, but instead given to a folklore museum where he would never be abandoned again.

Simply put, this episode asks viewers to think about a culture where items are disposable and there's more hunger for “new and better” than “old and venerable.” Given that Isao is being taken to a nursing home, we can also read this as being about caring for the elderly among us, but I think that the greater message is that the quest for newness in our everyday items can lead to us forgetting where we came from and how our grandparents lived.

A few years ago, I inherited the care of a museum started by a man who sadly passed away at age ninety-four. His goal with the museum was to preserve the everyday things of life from the mid-19th – the mid-20th century so that people could not only see them, but learn how they worked. Seeing the kids at the end of the episode reverently holding Zori was very familiar to me, because that's how kids (and adults!) look at the hair jewelry, early typewriter, and wooden lobster pots that we have, and nothing is more exciting for visitors than to turn the crank of the old washing machine or use the hand-pump of the 1901 vacuum cleaner. But without people like the man who started the museum or Isao, that wouldn't be an option. And how can we move forward if we don't know where we've been?

Apart from the fact that this is a message we don't see often in children's entertainment, this episode is also a successful emotional journey with Zori. It's one of the sadder episodes, but that the show could get so much sadness out of a lone straw sandal and an old flashlight is a statement about how well-thought-out each episode can be. We may not all have the luxury of keeping things forever (or having a museum to give them to), but that doesn't mean that those things aren't important, which is ultimately what Zori's story seems to be about.

Rating: A-

GeGeGe no Kitarō is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.