MainEpisode 5
The Women of the High Tower |
[Episode Screencaps] |
This episode focuses on woman working for a company in a large skyscraper. Initially this seems like a story about bullying with the girl Misato being pushed around by her boss who is also looking after her.
Requests are being sent to Jigoku Shoujo on a nightly bases to try and associate her with the company to boost sales. However she never accepts the requests, this seems to be the first introduction of the concept of her not accepting requests from people who do not really desire revenge. I am not sure who it is they are supposed to be requesting revenge on in these requests but I guess it is not that relevant to the plot.
Enma and her assistants do investigate the requests with Hone and Wanyuudou infiltrating the headquarters and Ichimoku investigating a sub-office. One question that comes to mind is whether they are just investigating the requests or do they somehow know that someone is ,or in the near future will be, seeking real revenge. Certainly in later episode they sometimes investigate people who have not actually made a request yet.
As the story progressed it gets blacker and blacker. We find out Misato is being blackmailed for shoplifting and that the company she is working for it in fact involves in murder of its shareholders. Finally we find out that her boss in fact killed her father and it is suggested that Misato deliberately got caught shoplifting to infiltrate the organization.
Following this pattern Misato’s positions gets more desperate and helpless with her being found out and her boss trying to have her murdered. This was very well done in my opinion with her running from the assassin hiding under desks and eventually summoning Jigoku Shoujo quickly from a computer just as the hitman reaches her with a gun.
This episode is the fastest so far in terms of the gap between having the contract explained and accepting the contract. Misato is immediately taken to the other world and given the doll, as soon as the explanation is finished she pulls the string.
When stalking the woman they seem to pull her into a flashback of her past where on discovering her boyfriend with another woman she murders them both. This section was particularly bloody compared to other episodes however the actual murder is not directly shown instead using the eerie technique of turning the camera away and using the sound of the woman being stabbed again and again.
The people involved in flashback turn into her saying things to scare her. There is a nice line where on running out the apartment she meets Hone (who she knows from her infiltration of the company) who asks what she is doing here. When she asks Hone where does she mean she replies the entrance to hell turning into her. Enma Ai's final sending to hell was done in a slightly cheesy way reading her usual lines while flying along next to the building.
The episode ends with a hinting that it may not have worked out all smelling of roses with Misato looking at her mark and replying the words of her boss. She decides that she will enjoy the game as much as she wants and gives a little evil half smile. This style of ending is used in quite a few episodes showing that everything doesn’t work out perfect.
