Otaku In Kenya

Jigoku Shoujo(Hell Girl) One Of My fave anime

This anime series is the beginning of an epic story about damnation.
This series can be divided into three acts, like a play, but when the third act closes, the story has just begun. Until the end of the third act, you don't know anything at all about the heroine, even though you've seen her in every episode.

The first act is a long series of terribly similar stories. The moral of every one of these stories is identical, and that moral is: Revenge is not worth its horrible, inherent price.

Many viewers have voiced dissatisfaction after the watching the first two or three episodes. They have complained that there is little characterization of the recurring characters, that the stories are all the same horror story of revenge, and that the artwork, while striking, gets re-used too often. Do not heed them. This series just uses the first act to break down the viewer's resistance.

One-third of the way into the series, the second act begins the real story. The real story centers on the heroine who has been carrying out supernatural justice in exactly the same way for the entire first act. Her name is Enma Ai, and she is beautiful and she is terrible and while her outward manner is calm, there is a horrible disquiet lurking in her large red eyes.

Enma Ai is the Hell Girl, a supernatural spirit or goddess who can be contacted only by those whose hearts are burning with hatred. At the stroke of midnight, those who seek revenge can find her website and enter the names of those who have wronged them.


Those who seek revenge are always the same. They are always suffering terribly, and they are always making the wrong choice. It is not exactly an easy thing to sit through ten or sixteen episodes of horrible revenge stories -- many of those who seek Enma Ai have suffered rape, abandonment, torture, betrayal -- but if you want to see the brilliance of hellfire, this series expects you to look at the faces of suffering -- which are, incidentally, mostly very well-drawn and well-animated.

Enma Ai herself is depicted with an august elegance. Her bearing is much more dignified than her childishly young body. She can take on any appearance, but in her unguarded moments she affects the dress of medieval Japan. The hell she serves is a medieval Japanese hell -- it is the torture-dungeon of cruel Shinto gods with little regard for Buddhist salvation. It is nastily personal hell, and whenever Enma Ai drags another soul into it, the viewer is struck by the fact that her outward politeness cannot entirely conceal her personal, childish malice. This is not a hell of just punishment: this is a hell of personal revenge which sometimes effects justice by accident.


Enma Ai's loyalties are feudal -- she serves and she is served. Her servants are three: a young man, a seductive woman, and an old man. When Enma Ai so wills it, these servant-spirits can transform themselves into straw dolls resembling the cursing-dolls which were traditionally nailed to the trees of Shinto shrines with special nails. She gives one doll, bound by a red thread, to each persecuted person who asks for revenge. If that person unties the red thread, the soul of the persecutor will instantly be dragged down into hell; but the person who sought revenge will be dragged down to hell at death, and will never be allowed to know paradise.

This series depicts a hell that is profoundly unjust, and the viewer may well come to hate Enma Ai for serving such an unjust hell. In the second act, a much more sympathetic set of recurring characters come into play. A journalist and his young daughter begin to investigate Enma Ai. They provide a much-needed moral center to this otherwise nihilistic series. The journalist is mature enough to understand the suffering of life and the inevitability of death. His pursuit inconveniences Enma Ai and her three servants, thus leading inevitably to the third act.

In the third act, Enma Ai can no longer pretend to be a perfectly calm and dispassionate servant of hell. She is forced to reconsider why she obey the terrible mission of vengeance. And in the end, when the viewer has seen what drives Enma Ai to destroy unceasingly, the story has just begun.

Students of Japanese culture will have their hands full with this series. Enma is the Japanese transliteration of Yama, the Sanskrit name of the Lord of Hell. Ai can be translated as "harmony" or "love." Enma Ai is depicted as participating in traditional rural customs and mythological traditions with equal frequency, so the significance when she is shown as piling up flat stones on a riverbank is profoundly Japanese. (Japanese children in hell piled up stones on a riverbank, and were horribly cheated -- but the secret of that symbolism has not fully been explained, even in the second series.)

From a technical standpoint, this series has a number of shortcomings. The first act, lasting for perhaps eight episodes, is too repetitive for most audiences. The series as a whole is morbidly depressing, and yet it tells a complete story, so the viewer is obliged to watch the second season to see the real story. The series sets a high standard with the visually stunning first episode, only to repeat the same images over and over again for the next few episodes.

A few problems exist in the first season but not in the second, e.g.: The opening theme is too vulgarly popular for such a serious series. The three servant-spirits are not given opportunities to characterize themselves. A few episodes seem to have been animated by interns and are far below the standard of quality set by the other episodes. All of these problems seem to have been polished away in the second season, which is titled: "Jigoku Shoujo Futokomori."

A few problems seem to be systemic: the exact nature of hell is not explained for the entire first season. The series leads viewers to believe that hell ought to be other than it is shown to be. Major questions are introduced and blatantly left as mysteries, forcing the viewer to watch the later seasons in the hope that everything will be explained. It may be that these problems will never be resolved, but no story is perfect.

This is not a series that will be enjoyed by everyone. If you are babysitting six-year-old children with a tendency to have nightmares, show them Sugar Sugar Rune and pack them off to bed before you watch this show. If you are watching with impatient young boys who want to punch everyone, show them Kousetsu Hyaku Monogatari, which is a more masculine interpretation of similar mythological images. But if you watch TV with girls and women who often feel that they cannot resort to violence, by all means watch this show. It masters the most difficult part of horror fiction -- it combines the beautiful with the ugly, it draws the viewer in while repulsing the viewer at the same time. In the end, even if you had wanted to look away, you find that you cannot, and your attention is brought to the message of the story.