Shigofumi - Episode 9

After the big revelations about Fumika's past in episode eight of Shigofumi, this instalment saw her Shigofumi delivery colleague Chiaki get her own episode explaining her back story and the reason for her death.

Thankfully, episode nine didn't take us quite down the path I was dreading in my last entry on this series, but nonetheless it couldn't have been much further removed from the gritty and dark stories of earlier episodes, giving us both a happy ending to the episode and integrating both Mika and Chiaki in the world of the living with nary an eyebrow raised - no matter how popular Cosplay may be in Japan, I don't see two girls with talking staffs dressed in their particular getup wandering around without someone wondering what on Earth is going on. Somehow, rooting this pair in real-world friendships and the like has destroyed too much of the mystery and suggested loneliness of being a Shigofumi, which with it somewhat ruins both the premise of the show and Fumika's earlier feelings of hatred towards people, which have suddenly dissolved entirely since the last episode.

There were a couple of nice moments in this episode, both humorous (the little exchanges between Matoma and Nojima) and more serious (Chiaki lamenting the passing of time without ever ageing and so on), but that aside the change in tone of this series just really doesn't work for me. I still get a horrible feeling that we've now left those darker earlier episodes behind completely and are just running down to a happy ending at the end of the series, but judging by the variances in quality so far you really can't tell where Shigofumi will take us next.