GeGeGe no Kitarō

Episode 18

It's kind of a scary thought that there are people who have never seen a watermelon growing. You can see it hit Cat Girl this week when Mana comments that she didn't realize that watermelons don't grow on trees or how big they are, because her family has only ever bought cut melons in bite-size pieces. This is more than a regional issue, like when I had never seen a pomegranate with a stem or the friend who had a pomegranate tree had never realized how low to the ground blueberry bushes are: the underlying theme this week is that migration to cities and the processing of food have led to a generation of people who have no idea how fruits and vegetables are actually grown. (Or where meat comes from, but we'll leave that issue for Silver Spoon.)

In typical GeGeGe no Kitarō fashion, this is handled with a good use of subtlety. Apart from the aforementioned scene with Mana and the watermelon, most of the episode is understated – we see the decline of the mountain village where Mana's family has a summer home in the little things. Cat Girl is helping an old man with his farm while he's injured, and he comments that the fields across the way didn't have someone to care for them when the farmer was unable to; subsequent pans of the area reveal that the old man's fields are pretty much the only working farmland left, with everything else gone to seed. When Mana initially sees Cat Girl working the fields, she's aghast, because how could Cat Girl possibly still be cool and stylish when she's in old work clothes grubbing in the dirt? Even the fact that Mana's family has a seasonal home in the village points to the decline of working rural life – it's a common story where I'm from: homes are bought up by “rusticators” and farming/fishing families move away or become caretakers for summer homes, changing the nature of the town.

Then of course there's the yokai angle. This week's is kawauso, which simply means “river otter” but sounds like it has the word for “lie” in it. Stories of the kawauso tend to mirror those of tanuki and kitsune in that they're tricksters, but this episode takes advantage of the homophone in the name to make him a liar as well. He's currently basically harmless, inventing stories of dead or deadbeat parents and starving siblings to get free food, and in the past, when there were more people around, we can see that he was more a “boy who cried wolf” figure. Mostly what he is now is lonely – with the exodus to the city, he's got fewer people to play with. And he does seem to think of it as playing; Kawauso enjoys interacting with people. He's not meanspirited in any way – in a flashback we see him helping a scared little girl, and this week in one of the show's trademark misdirections he's taken in an old woman who fell from a cliff, not to eat (as is initially implied), but to nurse her back to health.

There's a definite parallel with the Shiro episode here, since once again the yokai in question ends up going to the GeGeGe Forest with Kitaro and his friends. In fact, Cat Girl swiftly interrupts the old woman's offer to stay with her in her house to say that Kawauso can come to the forest with her, because even if he moves in with the old couple, they're, well, old, and in a few years Kawauso will be right back where he started. Humans and yokai can certainly interact and be friends, as we saw in the Sakaiminato episodes, but they have very different lifespans. Cat Girl doesn't want to see Kawauso be hurt in the way Shiro was, forced to say goodbye to the humans he comes to care for. Perhaps more importantly for the overall theme of the episode, Kawauso and Shiro are both yokai living in rural towns that are in decline. Where they once lived in happy proximity with humans, rural yokai are finding that that is no longer possible. Thus the movement away from nature is also one away from yokai, and like watermelon vines, they're becoming something that people simply don't realize exist.

I'm sure there's a folk song about that somewhere. But maybe anime is the better medium to convey the message today.

Rating: B+

GeGeGe no Kitarō is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.