Short Synopsis: A woman who once divorced from her husband has no other choice than to live with him, after being unable to move most of her body. Their daughter gets negatively involved in this.
Good: Whoa, even though it was the usual formula, the antagonist this time totally made up for it! The father also was amazing. This also was one of the few episodes at which I didn’t need Memento in order to fully understand it. 🙂
Bad: The episode was amazing, but the usual formula did remain.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8.5/10
This definitely was one of the best episodes of Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori yet! I can’t believe how touching the antagonist became! We first get the illusion that she’s an incredibly old hag. The main character’s mother has never been enthusiastic about her, and she kept giving her the cold shoulder when she was young. Then at one point, her mother divorced of her husband, abandoning him and their daughter. Then, years later, she comes back. Most of her muscles are unable to move and the girl and her father now have to take care of her. The only problem is that her mother turned into an incredible bitch. She only yells and complains. Especially to her daughter. This was one of the few times where I actually wanted to see a person to go to hell.
But then the history of the mother became clear. Boy, did that change my view of her. The girl isn’t her own daughter. At one point, it seemed that she could never produce a baby, so her father looked for another woman to have a child with. This worked, and the mother only had to watch this happen. It’s no wonder that she’d hate her child this way! Not only that, but none other than her father was responsible for her ending up in that state.
By this point, her father also gets an even more amazing role, when he has to choose between his daughter and his wife. He clearly knows that his ex-wife bring great trouble to his daughter. She can’t even spend proper time with her boyfriend. I can SO imagine that it must have been a VERY difficult decision to send his ex-wife to hell, for the happiness of his daughter. That really was beautiful!
Seriously, I do hope that the last couple of episodes of Jigoku will be just as good as this one. It’s great to see that the creators managed to make a very interesting case out of a usual formula.]]>
Jigoku Shoujo – 44
