BUT YES, MITARAI! I LIKE HIM! lolĢ0) When was the first time you ever seen this series? Whoops, this turned into a comics drawing ramble. There’s a lot of great texture and layering going on too, and the bulk and sense of volume/density of water of Mitarai’s creatures really come through. The comic panels for the entire fight have this very memorable, overriding sense of a constant background of rain and night, like a deluge, and the water effects are all rendered so well. The setup reminds me of rainy night ghost stories, and has a great mood to it. It’s one of those fights I don’t mention very often BUT I SHOULD because it’s SO WELL-DONE. It opens with this little sequence of Kuwabara and his friends walking in the rain after having their time of their life at a concert and talking about heading out for some karaoke - when Sawamura suddenly disappears. His first appearance, the rainy night battle with Kuwabara, is a really fantastic one. His territory power is pretty cool too, although it’s a good thing he’s not anemic. I like the colour palette the anime gave him too, lots of yellows with a splash of blue. I really like his design! I personally find it so freaking hard to come up with interesting short hairstyles for male characters, and his is a really good one of a style that I have never really seen much anywhere else.
Mitarai Kiyoshi! Again, I still agree with pretty much everything I said in 30 days from a story perspective, so let’s talk about his character design lol. Her face is usually partly obscured in shadow.) (I don’t have the original Japanese to compare it to, but IIRC the official English manga translation is extremely watered down on Raizen’s description of her.) But that’s why the first time I ever saw her appear in the anime, where her design is a very conventional Japanese beauty, I was like, “…HUH?” (In the manga, she’s not really drawn that ugly either, but it’s harder to tell. She was the first person to ever stare at me with such a glare of contempt.” LMAO. There is absolutely no sign that on her side, she was nostalgic about him at all the story hints at the opposite, in fact: that she may have fully severed attachments to the material world.Īlso another thing that I found very compelling is that in the manga, in the Taiwanese edition in any case, Raizen describes her as (paraphrased): “A physically weak, pale, gaunt, ugly woman with the scent of a sorcerer, but I loved the look in her eyes. Raizen dreams of a reunion in reincarnation before he dies, but this never happens. But it’s made very clear that Raizen was the one who chases her, that he begs her for that one night, that they never speak of a future nor meet again. But there’s little to no indication of how tied she was to him - her story completely separates from his after their one meeting, and there’s a strong sense that her character is very much independent from him, which is something pretty amazingly hard to pull off considering she only appears in the narrative because of that single night he has with her. I am complete garbage and a waste of existence.” And is motivated into ascetic reform for the rest of his life to try to become worthy of her. You’ll die and you’ll still be garbage.” and Raizen is like, “Whoa. And she’s like “Who the hell are you? You’re garbage. Raizen is carefree and high on doing whatever the hell he wants to do, which is basically just eating humans for fun and fighting and causing trouble, then he meets the woman of his dreams that he never could have imagined: a corpse-eating Buddhist shaman whose body is a complete wasteland of poison and disease so that she can make antidotes to save others. In a number of ways she tips both the manic pixie dream girl and the Japanese yamato nadeshiko tropes on their heads. I really like both the idea of the character and also the execution of the character. And what an awesome (in the truest sense of the word) ripple effect her existence has made all the way through 700 years. She only appears in one scene, a flashback, but what a presence and figure she cuts. Yusuke’s human ancestor/Raizen’s lover the kudakusushi is only really ever identified as “onna” (woman), and Raizen never reveals her name - if he ever even knew it, since he seemed so impressed and cowed by her.
So I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about a really badass female character who is rarely discussed. And I still agree with pretty much everything I wrote before. In 30 days of yu yu I talked at length about Genkai. Even Togashi’s most stereotypical ladies have nuances to them that make them that much more atypical, that much more multi-dimensional, that much more real, than a cookie cutter trope.
Yu Yu Hakusho has a very strong female cast, and I love so many of them for so many different reasons.
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