GeGeGe no Kitarō

Episode 20

Even though World War Two was over almost forty years before I was born, it has always been very immediate to me, casting a lingering shadow over my family. I didn't understand until middle school, around the age Mana is in the show, that this wasn't true for everyone. Tying in with the yokai school episode, this week's GeGeGe no Kitarō discusses the fact that children today don't necessarily learn much about the actual history of the war – they know it happened, but not why or how devastating it truly was the world over.

Mana gets a firsthand lesson in that when her great-aunt ends up in the hospital. She accompanies her mother to check on Toshiko, a spitfire of an old lady who asks Mana and her mom to check on the flowers at her house. Upon arrival, Mana is fascinated by the strange red hibiscus-like blooms, so much so that she sends Cat Girl a picture. Almost immediately Kitaro shows up, curious about the yoka plants, flowers which bloom around obon, a holiday honoring the dead. With Mana in tow, they trace the flowers to a remote Pacific island. A logging company is working there, plagued by strange sounds at night. As it turns out, they're the sounds of battle, stemming from the disturbance of the final resting place of the war dead.

Among those war dead is Great-Aunt Toshiko's fiancé. Back at her house, Mana saw a picture of the two of them dated 1942, just before he vanished from Toshiko's life. We could (hopefully) all guess what happened to him just from the date, but for Mana, “1942” didn't mean anything special. Her mother's comment that the war had begun by then seems to just wash right over her, and it isn't until she sees a memorial to the lost on the island that she starts to put things together: these aren't just distant dates and facts, they're actual events that happened to real people. We can see her processing this as she notices the detritus of battle on the island – broken planes, weapons, shattered stones. It really hits her when Kitaro, Daddy Eyeball, and Rat Man start talking about the war, which they all clearly remember; when Rat Man speaks seriously about how awful something was, you really ought to pay attention. The fact that his first reaction when the haunting begins at nightfall is to scream “Air raid!” while ducking and covering says a lot, as does the way Kitaro immediately covers the fire when he hears planes overhead. These are actions born of past trauma, brought back in an instant even seventy years later.

The haunting is as well done as anything else in this excellent show. The sounds aren't deafening but are loud enough to be scary and the shadows of soldiers running look like heat rising from the pavement on a hot day. That's somehow more frightening than solid forms or dark shadows because it implies the heat of living people – people who, as we know from the memorial stone, are certainly now dead. We're given a window to their last moments, and more than scenes of bloodshed, that makes a lasting impression.

For Mana, the impact is even stronger. Not only has she said that all she learned in school was something vague about Japan being invaded by America, she also didn't realize that she knew, much less was related to, someone directly impacted by the war. But when footsteps begin following her as she tries to shelter from the sounds of battle, we realize who it must be – Toshiko's lost lover, the man who never returned to her. Mana and Toshiko have a strong family resemblance, and his spirit must have known who she was. His boot prints lead her to his remains, the source of the flowers Kitaro was searching for – a skeleton with its hand over the unsent letter to Toshiko in his breast pocket, a copy of the photo of them lying next to his other hand where it must have fallen when he died and could no longer hold it.

Toshiko is now ninety years old. The people directly affected by the war are dying, and only the yokai will remain. Mana's decision to make her research project about the reality of the war, about the humans who experienced it, is sending a message to viewers that we can't afford to forget it. As she interviews the elderly and does research in the library, she's encouraging viewers of the series to do the same. Whether you know it as World War Two or the Pacific War, GeGeGe no Kitarō's message is to never allow it to be forgotten.

Rating: A

GeGeGe no Kitarō is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.