The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube 2nd Cour

Nube is a grade-school teacher with a demon hand, which he uses to protect his students from all sorts of evil creatures. Nube fights everything from urban legends and aliens to mythological creatures, all whilst trying to catch the eye of his crush and fellow teacher.

Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube 2nd Cour is based on Takeshi Okano and Shō Makura 's Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube (Jigoku Sensei Nube) manga. The anime series is streaming on REMOW's It's Anime YouTube channel and Amazon Prime in the U.S. on Wednesdays.

In Japanese folklore, flipping over your pillow isn't just something you do when one side gets too hot. According to various legends, a flipped pillow can mean that your soul, which departs the body when you're dreaming, can't return. Dreams were the original isekai experience, and a flipped pillow could make it a one-way journey. When you put all of that together with a yokai known as makuragaeshi (pillow flipper), it makes for an interesting storyline to kick off the new season of Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube.

The show's foray into another world is actually a great way to pick back up. It reminds us that we've been away from this story and characters, because when Kyoko wakes up and looks distinctly older, it takes a minute to realize that this isn't just a case of not quite remembering her character design. She really is twenty-six all of a sudden, and she's just as surprised as anyone, because the last thing she knew, she was in the fifth grade. She has memories of graduating college and starting work, but none of it feels right…and no one seems willing to tell her what happened to her, or where Nube is.

It's an excellent use of the uncanny long before the yokai ever comes in. There's always a question of whether or not something happened to Kyoko to cause her to forget rather than there being a supernatural explanation, because some days it really does feel like you were ten just yesterday and now you're suddenly an adult and have no clue how you got there. As she sees all of her old friends apparently living their best adult lives, she feels even more out of place, and again, that's a really real feeling. What Kyoko's experiencing could easily be just a metaphor for her anxiety.

Of course, there really is a yokai involved, and Kyoko is, in fact, in the wrong timeline. But as with the best episodes of the first cour, this is done so that the characters' emotions are the centerpiece, with the supernatural serving merely to enhance them. Deep down, Kyoko may actually fear growing up and growing away from her friends, specifically Hiroshi. She may worry about losing touch with her teacher or not being able to fulfil her dreams. The makuragaeshi sent her to another world, but maybe he wouldn't have been able to without her specific fears in the first place.

The art does an excellent job of aging everyone up (though Makoto looks a bit off), and it manages to be unsettling without resorting to any genuinely scary imagery. I also appreciate the constant reminders of the sealed box, which serves as a visual reference to the folktale of Urashima Taro, the man who released the years sealed inside a box and aged instantly. Kyoko's box serves the opposite function: it contains her ticket to the past, so to speak, although it still carries her lost time. Since makuragaeshi tales date back at least to Urashima Taro, it's a nice bit of historical framing. All in all, I'm thrilled to have this show back – it always manages to surprise me in a good way, and I can't wait to see what it does next.

We've all had those days when we're forced to wake up at some ungodly hour, in order to trudge to some workplace or educational establishment, where our heart just isn't into whatever our assigned mandatory drudgery of the day happens to be. Days when we think to ourselves, “This wasn't what I dreamt of doing when I was a kid.” I don't know about you folks reading this, but I'm certainly not a time-travelling astronaut who fights dinosaurs with laser cannons. I'm not living the dream. And that's why adult life sucks.

Last time she checked, poor Kyoko was an eleven-year-old elementary school student. Now she wakes up to learn she's twenty-six, still living with her mother, no longer wears her hair in pigtails, works in a supremely sucky telesales job, and the imperiously demanding Dr. Tamamo is her boss! It doesn't help that all of her old schoolfriends seem to have fulfilled their dreams. Previously miniature Makoto is now a towering, handsome lawyer and playboy, while Miki is married to Kyoko's beloved Hiroshi, and they have triplets together! No wonder it seems like this adult Kyoko's in the middle of some kind of psychotic break. The last time she felt she truly lived was in fifth grade. That's not even peaking in high school levels of sad; it's several levels below.

Of course, this being Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube, Kyoko realizes there's got to be a supernatural explanation for her feelings of disconnection, it's not a sudden attack of existential zillennial angst. Why won't anyone tell her where Nube is, though? (Admittedly, it's perhaps a little odd for a woman in her mid-twenties to suddenly become obsessed with the whereabouts of her elementary school teacher, but Nube's a special case.) It turns out Nube was horribly maimed by the Byakko white tiger spirit while protecting his students many years back, and Kyoko is horrified to learn from Ritsuko (who now seems to be caring for her former colleague full-time) that he uses a wheelchair and can no longer move or speak. The hopelessness in Kyoko's heart reaches a crescendo, and as she cries for the umpteenth time this episode (adulthood is hard, kids, everybody cries sometimes), her tears magically revive Nube's demonic hand and somehow his ability to speak. He tells her what she wants to hear – she doesn't belong in this world, she's been sent here as a prank by a shitty little yokai who gets kicks from confusing innocent sleepers, sending them to parallel worlds by flipping over their pillows.

This broken version of Nube musters enough demonic energy to send a grateful Kyoko back where she came from, where she's overjoyed to be back in the prime of her young life, surrounded by friends, and glomping onto her confused teacher, who's surely worried about suspicious onlookers reporting him for inappropriate touching. (As a sad indictment of our modern world, Nube doesn't feel able to hug Kyoko back; he can only accept her one-sided natural affection.)

It's a little bit of an odd choice to start a new cour on this particular story, as most of the episode is laser-focused on Kyoko, with only adult versions of most other characters cameoing during the future/parallel world scenes. I had to look at a wiki to remind myself who some of them were. Still, it's an effectively emotional story, lacking in subtlety, but that's not what I come to Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube for. I expect fun, supernatural, humorous stories with a slightly gory twist, and this episode delivers.

I really enjoyed the series' first cour, and this is absolutely not the right place for new viewers to start. Hopefully distributor REMOW keeps the episodes up on YouTube for longer than a week this time, though I've recently learned the show now also streams on Amazon Prime in the U.S., plus Samsung TV Plus and VIZIO WatchFree+, as apparently those are real streaming services that exist, that I haven't just made up, honest. Any interested reader should go check out the first thirteen episodes before proceeding with this.