Hakaba Kitarou – 05

How awesome. I now fully understand why the previous episode felt so bad and weird. The entire fifth episode was dedicated to explaining the things that happened there, and it provided a wonderful conclusion to a story that started off so horrible. After watching this episode, I completely forgive this series for the disappointments of the previous episode. I’ve said before that I’m a huge mystery-fan, and Hakaba Kitarou knows exactly how to handle it!

The best thing of the episode would of course be the fact that this episode shows a totally new side of the bad Kitarou. It seems that he too was used by Nezumi Otoko. If I understood this correctly, all Nezumi Otoko was after was the part of his head that Neko Musume bit off, but you can only get your hands on it if she’s in hell. However, because of this, bad Kitarou would need a way to return from hell, and that’s why he needed Kitarou’s jacket, which basically was his link to the spirit-world. He got it in the ruckus that he caused when he set off that mouse on Neko Musume during her performance.

In the process, something went wrong, though. I couldn’t pick up exactly what happened, but bad Kitarou ended up on one of the side-paths on his way to hell, and got separated from Neko Musume. Only because of the real Kitarou’s father, he managed to get out of there, into the real hell. Unfortunately, my Japanese isn’t good enough to pick up why Nezumi Otoko ended up on television this episode either, however it was clear that Nezumi Otoko manipulated bad Kitarou to everything, and he betrayed him at one point.

Thankfully, Neko Musume also remains in Hell, even though she did have the option to return. Kitarou may have also been a bit too emo in his lovesickness, but the climax of this episode worked out pretty well because of this, when Neko Musume refused to meet him. Also, it was pretty hilarious to see how Bad Kitarou shaved his head in the end when he turned good. It’s quite impressive that the creators made him go through so much development in just one episode, and actually got away with it. ^^;