Ushio & Tora

Episode 22

There are many opposing forces at work in Ushio & Tora. Good versus evil is just scratching the surface. This episode was all about opposites: east versus west, science versus sorcery, drama versus humor—each side vied for a role in this episode's massive melting pot.

The first struggle of the episode was an internal one for Tora. Twenty-two episodes in, Tora is still making excuses for why he hasn't eaten his favorite human, Ushio. There was none of the usual banter in the pair's battle as Tora drew first blood and taunted Ushio where it hurt. “There's no way you'll taste good when you're this weak,” Tora concludes with his flimsiest excuse yet. It takes a chance encounter with one of the show's best ensemble characters, Akiba, for Tora to come back around, as he placates the yokai by repeating his earlier words back to him. But as Tora and Akiba work together to save Ushio from an increasingly scary situation, there's still a very silly scene where Akiba smooches Tora on the lips. As the show's tension mounts, the story still finds room for comedy, giving Ushio & Tora a refreshingly consistent feel over its more than twenty episode run.

Kirio represents another battle of opposing forces at work. Despite the destruction of the Hakumen no Mono avatar in the last episode clearly being the work of elderly Oyakume, this bratty grade schooler has managed to create a rift in the priesthood. While the old priests know better, the young priests are siding with Kirio, who wants to abandon the Beast Spear and give everyone a mass-produced Elzaar scythe like his own. It's clearly a representation of the eternal struggle between tradition and modernity, a generational divide between old and young. Since Kirio antagonizes Ushio, we already know who's going to win. In the show, Tora and Akiba quickly learn that the Elzaar scythes are low quality trash, and it should be simple work to smash a few hundred and remind the young priests what's really important, even if the version of this struggle against Kirio isn't quite so simple.

There's another duality at work in this episode's choice of monsters. Usually, Ushio and Tora battle yokai, supernatural beings who can be subdued with holy weapons and mystical powers. Today, however, the monsters are “synthetic organic creatures created by sorcery and chemistry.” They're not naturally occurring spirits like yokai; they're man-made. We discover that Kirio's father figure, Inasa, was a priest who became fascinated with Western sorcery, and this fascination corrupted him. It seems like all bad things come from the West in Ushio & Tora. The Hakumen no Mono is from the West too, and Tora came from further West in his more demonic days. This time, the modernity that Kirio evangelizes comes from the West. This episode has started to replace the show's tradition of supernatural fantasy with science fiction—instead of spiritual beings, we've got lab-grown monsters. So it's a little too convenient that our heroes don't have to change their tactics in order to shred them to ribbons just like yokai. This negates the newness of these monsters, and “The House of the Whisperers” might as well just be the usual haunted house.

Ushio & Tora is exciting and tense while still being original and funny. However, this episode had a chance to commit to a completely different nature of conflict and ended up with more of the usual good versus evil instead. It's still an entertaining show, but I'm disappointed that this episode didn't take the opportunity to raise the stakes.

Rating: B

Ushio & Tora is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Lauren writes about anime and journalism at Otaku Journalist.