Jigoku Shoujo – 45

Short Synopsis: One of the strangest episodes yet. Wanyuudo’s past gets revealed when Ai gets summoned to the place where she first met him. Good: I liked the narrative style a lot. The two cases at the same time were confusing, but very enjoyable. Bad: This episode had more freaking fanservice than a hot-spring episode of a harem-anime, and that has to say something! Overall Enjoyment Value: 7.5/10 Whoa, the fanservice, the huge amounts of fanservice. That’s definitely something you don’t expect from a series like this. Almost half of the episode was in a hot spring. While I can understand the small amounts of fanservice that have been featured in the show before, this definitely was way too much. Still, ignoring the fanservice, we have an excellent episode. It’s one of the first in which two stories are told at the same time. One where Ai meets Wanyuudo, near a local hot-spring resort which just opened, and one where Ai returns after 400 years, to carry out yet another grudge. The interesting thing is that these cases are very much related. The first case is about the owner of the hot springs. He refuses to let a girl marry his son, just because he wants him to marry the daughter of another hot-spring owner. The girl becomes so angry about this, since she already carries the son’s baby, and because of this she sends the father to hell. At that time, Ai still worked alone. She used a shrine, for her victims in order to contact her. The straw doll also was just an ordinary straw doll, instead of one of her companions in disguise. You’d wonder why Wanyuudo started to take over it’s role, though. She also used to walk to her victims, since she didn’t have the transportation facility that is called Wanyuudo yet. It does make you wonder, though. At one time, she’s able to just appear wherever she’d like, and at other times, she just has to walk. In any case, during this particular case, she heard a rumour of a Youkai which has been bothering travellers. I assume that she looked for people to help her, and then she finally found what she searched for in Wanyuudo, so she recruited him. Later, she found Ichimoku Ren, in sword-form, like we saw in one of the previous episodes. I’m suspecting that the next episode will be dedicated to how Ai ran into Hone Onna. I think that she also has a small story to share with us. In the second case, the descendant of the girl who was rejected starts blackmailing the owner, the descendant of the boy she was in love with, because she found out that the owner artificially maintains the hot springs, as it dried up long ago. Things are too late, however, and this gets leaked out before the girl can get sent to hell. It’s interesting to see that Ai and Wanyuudo were the first and the last customers in the hot springs. Another interesting thing to note is that at one point, Ai decided to make her victims vanish. In the case 400 years ago, she left the body, boiled and all. That was quite the shock. I wonder what made her decide to do this.]]>