Kyoukai no Rinne Episode 5: Hanako-san

Typical little girl ghost haunting a toilet. Except this one has a little history with one of our characters. Hanako is a pretty famous ghost. She haunted a toilet stall in an elementary school, and if you would knock three times, she would appear. And like we’ve seen before with Jumonji, he aggressively exorcises all spirits. As a child, he visited the stall and threw one of his Holy Ashes at her and drove her away from the toilet stall.

Now, she drifted along and wants to get revenge on Jumonji for chasing her away from her home, the toilet. When Sakura gets to school, she sees her entire classroom full of small hadprints. Everyone is astonished, and Jumonji throws one of his ashes and forces the spirit to leave. It flies out of class, coming near Rokudou walking to class. The spirit is a black blob with a funny face, and it’s the same one as the one on the wanted poster Rokudou has for 100,000 yen. So he captures it and runs off. Turns out, it’s Hanako. And she explains to everyone that she won’t pass on until she gets revenge on Jumonji for chasing her out of her toilet stall way back when. And she can’t do that alone, so she gets the help of the black blob spirit, called Toichi.

Rokudou learns from his grandmother that Toichi is a spirit that pays for its services, and we later learn that Hanako never even knew that. And the price she had to pay was herself, being turned into an evil spirit and fusing with Toichi, who is an abundance of evil spirits. Luckily Rokudou comes in time to save her, and he has a trusty scythe with him now. With that scythe, his job should be much easier now.

Well, Rokudou beats the monster. Jumonji then realizes the mistake he made when driving Hanako out of her home. He apologized to her, and Hanako forgave him, then passed on. Jumonji’s ways of dealing with spirits is totally the opposite of how Rokudou deals with them. We saw that in the last episode, and this one. Rokudou may be a rival to him, both in dealing with spirits and Sakura’s love, but sooner or later I think they can be good friends. Jumonji can learn a few things from him. Apologizing to Hanako was probably one step in that, and then later they can probably make a pretty cool duo. But for now, it’s bickering (possible) boyfriends. I hope Sakura can maybe do something too, but for now she’ll be in the background.

And in the end, Rokudou was able to get the 100,000 yen reward, but he used all of the money to pay off his debts. Well, at least he’s done with those. Poor guy needs some money.