Jigokuraku – 05

「侍と女」 (Samurai to Onna)
“The Samurai and the Woman”

As the results of the patron poll trickle in, I’ll keep tabs on the candidates – Jigokuraku certainly being one of them. I’m still moderately invested here – it looks good, has a fine if derivative premise, and some of the characters are quite interesting (plus, the OP is a banger). The more it indulges the thoughtful side of its personality and the less the graphically violent side, I suspect the better I’m going to like it. And this ep was a fairly palatable mix.

Genji telling Sagiri to go home and get knocked up was certainly direct and to the point. As with so much else about it the gender politics of Hell’s Paradise are a bit schizoid, but at the very least there are three female characters in prominent roles (and I knew immediately that Nurugai was a girl, even if poor dim Tenza didn’t). In the end it’s a moot point as Tenza and Nurugai are in the process of demonstrating that one can’t just leave this place, but Genji and Sagiri aren’t to know that so what she decides on the subject is quite relevant.

Nurugai seems unique among the crims in that she, as far as I can see, has done absolutely nothing wrong except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s a member of the Sanka tribe of mountain people, and like the Burakumin caste to which Sagiri belongs, the Sanka are a very real group in Japanese history. And like the Burakumin they’re still discriminated against to this day, despite the caste system being legally abolished. The fact that Jigokuraku chooses to highlight members of two such groups is a solid point in its favor as far as I’m concerned, because generally speaking “good” Japanese people don’t talk about such things, in order to preserve the illusion of racial purity.

At this point it seems likely that those two will join forces with the Gabi-Sagi-Yuzu-Senta group. And despite them theoretically having to be enemies in the end, at some point it’s going to become irrefutable that the whole Shogunate plan makes no sense and is basically irrelevant. As far as what’s actually going on with all these weird “malformed Gods” and plants that used to be people, for the moment we have no answers. But the questions are interesting in a sort of low-rent Togashi way, and all of the above taken together gives Jigokuraku a decent foundation to build on.