Gugure!! Kokkuri-San Episodes 9 + 10 [ The Fallen Leaves ]

It is a shame to even talk about episode 9 of Gugure!! Kokkuri-san because it is so dull I literally couldn’t get through it for weeks. Comedy is my weakness and a bad episode of a comedy show is basically like shoving Nyquil into eggnog and forcefeeding me through a nozzle. The entire premise is that Kokkuri is afraid he is losing his hair and literally freaks out to the extent the entire episode is focused on it. Normally we see different plots in an episode, but this very centrally seems to go ‘yep, here’s this idea’. Well you know what?

It’s dull. It’s boring. We get it, Kokkuri-san is a middle aged guy and because of that is vain and afraid of being less ‘beautiful’. I was so bored by the end I almost missed the ‘plot point’ that Inugami ran away from home because he feels that no one cares about him. Well, there was one funny thing from that.

No, you know what’s important? Episode 10. Episode 10 was almost essentially so perfect I felt rewarded for every single week of watching it. Why? Even for it’s humor this episode, there is another episode where I feel the heart of the show is visible and it makes me cry furious tears. Furious tears of FEELS.

The story begins as Kokkuri and Kohina are on a journey in order to catch sales on the other side of a mountain. Though the walk is completely tedious and perhaps not worth it to most, they are the joke. What happens is they come across a girl by a tree that still has autumn leaves who is looking for someone, and the episode chronicles discovering who she is.

Kokkuri believes at first she is the spirit of the tree, and they go to town for their sale and at her behest to find this person. They can’t seem to learn anything until Shigaraki takes them to the Tengu of the forest, and they learn something important: the man she has been looking for died a long time ago, and she is a ghost connected to the tree.

What follows I expected to be kind of trite. Oh, the two will reunite in the afterlife or some other crap. No, it’s way fucking worse in a fucking beautiful way you stupid comedy show that makes me cry in the face forever. Shigaraki tries to call the spirit world to channel him but he is blacklisted, only for Kokkuri to try. He can do it, but he has bad news: He cannot summon the woman’s boyfriend.

But you know why? Because the tree, the eternally autumn one she has sat under for decades? He asked to immediately be reincarnated underneath it. I FUCKING CRIED.