Re-Kan! – 13 (Fin)

Yamada’s Brother’s Impression of how high school girls should dress in the Summer. Actual bust size may vary.

Re-Kan! wraps with a multi-stage slice-of-life episodes, starting with a trip to a theme park (or is it amusement park? I believe Amaburi pointed out the difference). The usual gang of Amami’s classmates come, and Yamada’s often inappropriate brother also tags along.

Finally, Kana and Kyouko surprise Amami by inviting any and all of Amami’s ghosts friends who want to come. Amami also meets a new ghost, or rather an old one who helped her reunite with her dad when she got lost at the park as a small girl. In return, the ghost girl asked Amami to come back one day with her friends. Amami may have forgotten, but she still honored the request, and fun is had by all.

From the theme park the gang has a sleepover at Amami’s place, complete with dinner, fireworks, Old Maid, and the guys sleeping out in the yard, per propriety. (The episode cuts to their classmate Yoshida several times, not participating in all these boilerplate summer activities so he can presumably draw a manga, unaware he’s missing out on some great material for said manga).

Narumi isn’t as scared of spending the night in Amami’s ghost-filled house as she thought, but she still can’t sleep. Turns out no one is asleep, but only resting their eyes, but before they can agree to pull an all-nighter, Narumi dozes off thanks to Amami holding her hand, the same way Amami’s father used to hold hers when she couldn’t sleep.

With that fun-filled Summer day, Re-Kan comes to a close, proving you can stay upbeat and heartfelt in a supernatural anime and still deliver creative, consistent laughs, both of the high- and low-brow variety.

Re-Kan! – 12

Hibiki is lost and anxious without her sixth sense, and it puts her in the nurse’s office, and eventually she stops coming to school altogether. When her living friends pay her a visit, her dad says she’s still processing the shock, and doesn’t want to face those she worried so much.

Narumi doesn’t give a hoot what Hibiki wants, as long as its so selfless it hurts her. When she hears Hibiki isn’t eating, she whips up the same tamagoyaki he and Hibiki made for lil’ Yuuki way back when (nice continuity!); a recipe she knows to be Hibiki’s mom’s. And then she jams it down Hibiki’s throat.

Enough’s enough; Narumi’s not going to let Hibiki stop living just because she can’t see or hear the dead anymore. She drags Hibiki out of her gloomy house to show her that the good she’s done stretches far beyond the dearly departed. I for one love how the other friends sit back and let Narumi do her thing; she’s always had the closest bond to Hibiki, tsundereness aside, and it’s great to see her in action.

Narumi and Hibiki cross paths with numerous such people Hibiki helped connect with their departed loved ones, and had a positive impact on their lives, from the teachers who married and are now expecting, to the Kogal’s mother and the crabby old man. But those were just coincidences, Narumi really wanted to show what making those eggs for Yuuki did; he’s now a tough, happy little brother to his baby sister Kyouka, whose name means “echoing song” and shares a character with Hibiki’s.

Narumi’s well-made point is that with or without her sixth sense, Hibiki has formed countless bonds with people in her life, including Narumi herself, who sticks with her even though the sixth sense frightened her. Just because she may have lost that sense doesn’t mean she should give up or despair, because she remains connected to those people whose lives she touched, as well as those she can no longer see or hear.

About that…after joining hands with Narumi as she drilled this point home, the clouds broke and all of Hibiki’s ghostly friends return to her side, along with her living friends, who are glad Narumi manages to get the job done.

While the explanation for this is a bit cloudy, it would seem Hibiki’s mom returned to that spiritual realm where she watches over her daughter, and managed to revive the plant that either represents Hibiki’s life, sixth sense, or both. Meanwhile, all the ghosts completed their transition back to the living world. The whole thing, it would seem, was temporary.

But there’s nothing temporary about the effect Hibiki’s selfless, caring, kind-hearted acts has on her own life: she was never alone as she feared; her connections with the living and dead endure. It’s a triumphant scene to see such a huge ground assembled around her, and while it might have been interesting to see her accept a life without her sixth sense, I really don’t mind that she got it back, either.

Re-Kan! – 11

The Moon Festival has come, and Hibiki is excited because her dad finally found her mother’s handmade decorations. She invites her friends to her home to decorate the tree, eat her special tamagoyaki, and write down their wishes, which she says have traditionally always come true in her family.

That’s made clear when her wish to have friends is pretty much redundant. Her other wish, written on a very old piece of paper, because it’s an old wish, is one her living friends can’t help her with…but her ghost friends believe they can: meeting her mother. It’s a perfectly normal wish for any girl who has never met her mother, yet Hibiki thinks it’s selfish. Nevertheless, RCS and Kogal travel into the spiritual plane of her mind as she sleeps to try to make it happen.

There, they find a spiritual Yuuhi, who has been watching over Hibiki her entire life through a mirror in a washitsu, and tending to a morning glory plant that is connected to Hibiki. The plant withers if Yuuhi leaves this room, which is why she’s never been able to fulfill her own wish to hold her daughter.

RCS and Kogal, along with Ero-Neko and all of Hibiki’s other ghost friends, arrive at Yuuhi’s room to take over for her temporarily so that she can see Hibiki. The scene where the mother and daughter finally meet and embrace is the most moving and powerful yet in a show that’s been full of them. Such a simple wish, fulfilled at last. As Hibiki falls asleep in her mom’s lap, her dad peeks in too, happy the two women in his life were finally able to connect.

But when Hibiki wakes up the next morning, not only is Yuuhi gone, but all the other ghosts in her life as well. It would seem that the morning glory plant represented her sixth sense, which Yuuhi had been tending all her life, and even the combined spiritual power of her friends wasn’t enough to make up for Yuuhi’s temporary absence, and the plant died.

While Hibiki has lost her sixth sense and thus all her ghostly friends, the fact remains she has a solid group of living friends. The preview for the penultimate episode hints that it will be their turn to help her get that sense back, if they can.

Re-Kan! – 10

Amami & Co. are now second-years, which makes them senpais for the first years, and they all seem to be looking forward to meeting new friends and mentoring juniors. The only problem is, Amami’s ghosts are scaring all the new girls away.

Yamada first suggests Amami change her image, which leads to Amami impersonating her friends; her faux-tsundere impression of the True Tsundere Narumi being the funniest. But that doesn’t work, because it’s the ghosts scaring the newbies. Then Yamada suggests they change the image of the ghosts, which leads to some funny roleplay but does nothing to win the first-years over.

A week passes, and Makoto invites Amami to sew plushies with her, resulting in Amami’s teddy bear and Makoto’s creepy zombie dude being possessed by spirits. The teddy is merely Roll Call Samurai, but they’re never sure about the zombie, only that he wants to act out the manga where his likeness originally came from; a manga made at school that Makoto fell in love with.

Thanks to Umbrella Girl, Makoto gets the “bridge to heaven” in the form of a rainbow. This act is only semi-serious, with the melodrama being stamped out by Kana, Kyouko, and Narumi, who find the whole thing very silly.

With time running out, I was wondering if they were going to put any serious effort into getting the first-years to understand Amami’s situation. Amami may have plenty of friends in her class, both living and dead, but it’s the first-years’ loss to stay away from Amami.

That’s why it’s nice to see two of them who ran away before come to Amami seeking a photo, with ghosts in it of course. No plan of action was necessary, only time for them to understand there’s nothing to fear, and being Amami’s friend has a lot more benefits than drawbacks.

Re-Kan! – 09

The mystery of who Amami is making a very specific kind of handmade chocolate for, and why, isn’t all that mysterious. But as always with Re-Kan, the emotional resonance, not the mystery or animation, did most of the heavy-lifting, and succeeded admirably.

Not only that, as we watch Amami’s activities through the lenses of both her living and dead friends, all of whom have fairly reasonable theories, I felt the episode kept things in doubt long enough for the final twist to have some impact.

Working with the info we’re given from the start, Amami is going to make a traditional Japanese sweet, the recipe for which she learns from the kindly wife of a grouchy old humbug who infests the park scaring the Valentines-crazed youngs away.

The episode staves off the last piece of the puzzle with the use of editing and camera angles to keep the wife’s status up in the air until Amami finally presents the chocolates to the husband, at which point we see he is a widower.

Yet again, Amami did a favor for a ghost who couldn’t do it herself: make chocolates for her still grieving, lonely husband. She also doesn’t disappoint the ravenous Yamada or her friends by offering all of them chocolates, so everyone wins!

When the grumpy old man is alone again, he polishes off the whole box of chocolates, and realizing his departed wife is still there beside him on some plane or another, thanks her, his heart having been lifted from the gloom. The final shot that tracks from him sitting alone on the bench to the shadows of both him and his wife, was quite lovely and affecting.

Re-Kan! – 08

Teachers in anime are usually portrayed as single, miserable, and resentful of the youth that surrounds them, but Re-Kan! is a trend-bucker, so in its world, two of the teachers at Hibiki’s school, Moriya-senpai and Kimura-senpai, end up getting married. They’re a very cute couple, and both the guys and girls are super-excited.

Around the same time, however, a new ghost appears before Hibiki, one unlike any other she’s encountered before. This is the ghost of a very young girl who can only say one word: “Morya.” The Samurai concludes something is tying her to the living world, but she can’t seem to remember what. Yamada suggests they give her new memories to make up for the one’s she’s lost, but first they have to teach her to talk properly, which everyone, even Inoue, gets in on.

In the cold open that sets the bittersweet mood of this whole episode, we see her and a boy of the same age in adjacent hospital beds. The boy turns out to be “Morya” or Moriya-sensei, who Hibiki brings to the girl to play with for a while. There, he remembers that he used to give his carrots to her in the hospital, but now he can eat them himself. He’s grown up.

While spending the night with the motherly Hibiki, the girl finally remembers the rest: she loved Moriya and he her, and they promised they’d meet again when they grew up. She was sicklier than him and couldn’t keep her promise, but she still loves him. With her memories restored, she’s able to pass on, which she does in the arms of Hibiki.

Hibiki, along with Inoue and the others, had grown quite attached to the little girl as they taught her how to speak properly and played with her. For Inoue, she’s another example of a ghost who she didn’t have to fear; and more to the point, a ghost that needed help that she wanted to help.

They’re sad to see her pass on, but in doing so inspired the friends, starting with Yamada, to look more closely at the bonds they share and spend as much time with one another, making new memories as they go forward. This Re-Kan! was another poignant, earnestly-felt triumph, exploring the bittersweet nature of loss, love, and life with grace and dignity.

Re-Kan! – 07

Hibiki’s ridiculous generosity and utter inability to say no to a ghost is taking its toll and  burning her out, so her friends stage an intervention on the streets, insisting she needs a break from her supernatural drudgery. They head over to her house, which while not a Gothic haunted mansion, could certainly pass for that house in Kwaidan with a few minor tweaks.

Hibiki’s dad concurs, and produces a pair of sixth-sense-sealing glasses her mother used to wear when she needed a break from ghosts to, ya know, eat or sleep. I like how this story subverts the standard anime glasses girl trope. Sure, they make her look even more adorable (and more bookish), but they also fundamentally change how she interacts with the world. Simply put: all contact with that which most people cannot see or hear ceases. It really is like a vacation.

But the urge to take them off and sense of who’s floating around her—and more importantly, the urge help them—is strong. So Inoue makes a very childish threat: if she takes off the glasses, they won’t be friends any more, and it works; Hibiki keeps those puppies on like her life depends on it.

Her sidekicks Roll Call Samurai and Kogal don’t like it, but they’re big enough to realize Hibiki could use a break. But when the little sister of a boy Hibiki is playing with goes missing and it starts to get dark, Hibiki desperately needs more sets of eyes to search for her.

Hibiki makes a very difficult phone call to Inoue, who is studying and absolutely scared shitless by Hibiki’s foreboding ringtone. Hibiki seems ready to accept the end of their friendship, but Inoue assures her not to worry. If it’s an emergency, it’s fine to take the glasses off. Hibiki does, and show us yet again how handy it is to have an army of the dead at one’s disposal.

The balance of the episode is a New Year’s shrine visit by the whole gang. While I miss Glasses Hibiki, I loved how she lets spirits vote on what she wears, and the fact Inoue got drunk and loose-lipped on Amazake, and her friends decided to get her to open up.

To their disappointment, her response to almost every question is “Nana!”, so ingrained is her love for her late gran. Hibiki, not wanting to do anything untoward, simply asks Inoue if she’ll be friends with her in the next year, for which Inoue offers a more sober tsundere response of “I suppose.”

We finish things off with a fun little brawl between the incorrigible Ero-Neko versus Samurai and the Killer, who are sick of the cat’s sexual harrassment, as Kogal watches with enthusiasm.

P.S. Like Hannah with Food Wars, I’ve taken over Re-Kan reviews from Zane in order to even out our workloads. -Preston