Episode 16 – Sword of the Demon Hunter

Time for… an iyashikei story? It seems far from obvious – I was expecting an episode to build on all the plotting from last week, regarding the political turmoil in 1860s Edo. Instead, this episode feels like it will be a mere interlude, as Jinta ends up in an “alternative” married life created by a monster of the week. But the show hasn’t lost its knack for twists. The end suggests that the experience will change Jinta permanently, while the “monster” turns out to be a guardian angel.

It’s a benign surprise, recalling the twist in the show’s first cour involving the ramen restaurant owner and his daughter, Ofu. Whereas their story had echoes of the time-bending “Urashima Taro,” this new episode explicitly invokes a different tale, of “Urikohime,” where a demon kills a human girl and wears her skin. But Jinya’s newly appeared wife, Yunagi, points out that, like any strong story, you can find all kinds of meanings in it. (Hands up if you’re thinking of The Summer Hikaru Died.)

By the episode’s end, Jinya has taken the story as a metaphor for his situation and how he’s striven to bury his true self. Fairy tale characters are often de-powered when they’re called by their true, hidden names. How sweet that Jinya ends up asking Yunagi to call him by his true name, the “Jinta” who was lost back in the first episode.

Of course, most non-Japanese viewers won’t know the “Urikohime” story. However, the Jinta/Yunagi story falls into a more recent tradition of stories where characters get a glimpse of their paradise (think of a certain mountain cabin in Attack on Titan). If this episode were truly formulaic, it would have had Jinya married to a resurrected Shirayuki, and it would have also fallen into wish-fulfillment banality, serving both characters poorly.

Yunagi is a far more interesting figure, especially as we’re kidded into thinking we “know” she’s a villain, with her repeated claim that she hates her infant daughter. This wittily ominous motif turns out to be Yunagi’s reverse-psychology game with Jinya and us. The image I’ve chosen is from near the episode’s end, conveying Yunagi’s non-human nature with light elegance. (The monstrous fox at the start of the episode is adequate, though it’s upstaged by its fireballs.)

Like Makoto Shinkai‘s your name., the episode invokes the magic of twilight. The most beautiful moment has dusk filling the riverbank while Jinya says “Thank you” and remembers the people he cared for who are dead or lost. The music, too, is terrific at this point; it might be a “nothing” track in isolation, but it’s exquisitely placed to fill the heart.

It’s instructive to see that books about ghosts and goblins were all the rage in 1860s Japan, long before the Western writer Lafcadio Hearn collected such stories into his 1904 book Kwaidan and sent them out into the wider world.

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