Episode 112

EPISODE 112

フォーエバー！幽遊白書 (Fooebaa! Yuu Yuu Hakusho)

Forever! Yu Yu Hakusho

First Broadcast: January 7, 1995

Equivalent Manga Chapter(s): parts of chapter 170 (WSJ #27, 1994, June 20), parts of chapter 172 (WSJ #29, 1994, July 4), loose adaptation of chapter 175 (WSJ #32, 1994, July 25)

Summary: Back in the Human World, Kuwabara learns the outcome of the tournament from Kurama.  They meet up with Shizuru and Keiko and head for Genkai’s temple.  With the Demon World now maintaining a peaceful relationship with the Human World under Enki’s rule, the barrier between the two worlds has been taken down.  Hiei is still with Mukuro and her servants, helping save humans who are accidentally sucked into the Demon World now that the inter-world barrier has been removed; he says he’ll return to the Human World when he feels like it.  Kuwabara and co. reach the temple, where Genkai explains that after she dies, they will all inherit her massive estate, which she wants turned into a habitat for demons as they become increasingly common in the Human World.  The gang heads for the beach, where Yusuke suddenly returns.  He and Keiko share a kiss before getting soaked by a huge wave.  Fini.

Anime/manga differences after the jump.

Differences from the Manga

(What's all this about?  Read here)

• One of the major differences between the manga and anime versions is that the manga has several chapters of short, more or less self-contained stories between the end of the tournament and the actual end of the series.  The anime omits most of this, but takes bits and pieces of these chapters to create this episode, as well as parts of episode 109 and 111.

• First is chapter 170.  Kuwabara learns from Kurama how Yusuke and co. all lost in the third round, and Yusuke suddenly returns and explains more about the end of the tournament.  This is where all the information on the tournament’s end comes from in the manga, since it cuts off midway through Yusuke and Yomi’s fight and doesn’t show anything of the tournament after that.  Kurama explains that the barrier between the Human and Demon Worlds has been taken down, and that Koenma has overthrown his father King Enma and taken charge of the Spirit World.  It turns out King Enma had been falsifying information all along and demons aren’t remotely as much of a danger to humans as has been made out.  Demons will now become gradually more common in the Human World.  At Kuwabara’s house, his father explains that to do their part in helping these demons feel at home, they’ll have one stay with them from now on: Yukina.  Having learned that King Enma brainwashed demons to make them attack humans, Yusuke wonders if any of the demons he fought had been brainwashed in that way.  Kurama tells him not to think about it.

• In chapter 171 we see the progress of demons starting to integrate into human society.  Koto, Juri, and Ruka are celebrities now, though people doubt that they’re really demons.  Yusuke has started his own Raman stand, but on the side works as a free-lance investigator in cases relating to demons, just like old times.  Unfortunately he mostly just gets asked for Koto and co.’s autographs.  Keiko however brings him a case of an apparent haunting at her school, and he and Kurama investigate.  They determine it is in fact a human-created hoax.

• Chapter 172 is the one that delves into Mukuro’s past, which I’ve already summarized in great detail in the entry for episode 109.

• Chapter 173 is made up of several short scenes showing what the characters are up to during these peaceful days.  Yanagisawa considers using his Copy ability on a girl he has a crush on, but can’t bring himself to do it.  A tomboy friend of his walks up, and the narrator reveals that they eventually marry, ten years down the road.  Kaito spends his day studying and playing video games, while Kido goes to the movies.  Chu and Natsume continue to spar, and though Chu’s improving rapidly, he’s still got a long way to go before he’ll catch up to her.  Kujo mocks Chu, which makes Natsume angry (maybe there’s hope for Chu after all).  Koto and co. are interviewed on TV, and reveal they all have unrequited loves.  Koto loves Toya, Juri loves Suzuki, and Ruka loves Jin.  Koenma has been feeling down since he overthrew his father, so Botan and Ayame try and cheer him up; it’s implied that Koenma and Ayame have a thing for each other.  Yusuke’s (human) father watches him from afar as he works at his Raman stand.  It turns out she and Atsuko still get together once a month.  Keiko comes to Yusuke’s shop and tries some of his Raman, and Kuwabara and Yukina show up too.

• Chapter 174 deals with a terrorist religious sect, Sei-Sei Shinto, taking over the Spirit World.  They used to be the majority party in the Spirit World, but gradually lost out to Koenma’s moderate faction.  In the distant past when they were in charge they used the Dimensional Cannon, a weapon that can fire across dimensions, to periodically ravage the Human World in the name of curbing human depravity.  They’ve now set that weapon up again, and will fire it if their demands aren’t met.  The Spirit World Special Defense Squad gathers Yusuke and co. and they set off to set things right.  They quickly save the hostages (which include Koenma and Botan) and taking out the terrorists, one of whom is former Special Defense Squad captain Otake.  But Sei-Sei Shinto has rigged the Dimensional Cannon to fire at Sarayashiki City, Yusuke’s home town (they have a grudge against him for the changes he’s helped bring to the relationship between the three worlds).  Yusuke must choose between three buttons: one will deactivate the cannon, one will fire it at Sarayashiki, and one will blow it up, killing Yusuke.  He makes his choice, and…

• Chapter 175 shows Yusuke’s friends attending a memorial service…for Genkai, it turns out.  She’s finally passed away of natural causes.  Genkai has willed them her massive estate to use as a habitat for demons.  The gang heads to the beach, and Keiko learns that Yusuke deactivated the cannon by picking the blue button, her favorite color.  Everyone has fun at the beach.  Fini.

• On the anime side of things, this episode opens with Kurama and Kuwabara discussing the outcome of the tournament.  The manga has them go over this in more detail, noting, for instance, that Yusuke, Hiei, and Kurama all lost in Round 3.  The anime leaves much of this out, both because they showed some of it earlier (in the manga this is all new information), or because things played out differently in the anime version of the tournament (such as Yusuke losing in Round 4 while Hiei loses in Round 2).  In the manga the two are at the library, then go walk through town, where they run into two of Kuwabara’s friends from school.  In the anime they are at the train station, and Kuwabara’s friends show up there.  In the manga they actually run into two sets of friends, the first two boys who mistake Kurama for Kuwabara’s girlfriend, and a pair of girls who ask Kuwabara where he’s going.  As they leave, one girl likewise wonders whether Kurama is Kuwabara’s girlfriend, but the other says he doesn’t have one and thinks it might be a spiritualist friend (Kuwabara has gotten famous at school for his keen spiritual senses).  In the anime, there’s just one set of friends, two girls, who ask if Kurama is his girlfriend.  When Kuwabara angrily explains that Kurama is male, they wonder whether he’s a “new-type” and say Kuwabara’s popular with men too; he even more angrily explains that he’s not into that.

• In the anime, the two then get on a train, where they discuss how Kuwabara’s high school entrance exam went (something not gone over in the manga).  Kuwabara then says it’s been two years since Yusuke left, while in the manga it’s been a year and a half.  In the manga Kurama says Yusuke stayed behind because he wanted to see the tournament through to the end, and enjoys watching other people’s fights.  This, along with how it’s Yusuke who has all the news about the ultimate outcome of the tournament, implies that Kurama returned home after he lost and didn’t see how it ended.  In the anime though, Kurama is present to the end of the tournament and is the one who tells Yusuke (unconscious for a week after his match with Yomi) how things went.  What’s more, the tournament was pretty definitively wrapped up last episode, so in this episode Kurama tells Kuwabara that Yusuke is still in the Demon World because he had some “lose ends” to take care of, rather than that Yusuke is looking after the end of the tournament.  

• In the manga Yusuke suddenly shows up as Kurama and Kuwabara discuss his absence and wonder when he’ll be back, while the anime dramatically saves his return for the end of the episode.  Yusuke’s return is basically played for laughs in the manga, since he just suddenly pops up and Kurama and Kuwabara don’t even notice him for a while.

• Rather than have Yusuke turn up to discuss the end of the tournament, the anime has a scene of Keiko leaving her high school at the end of the day.  Her friends invite her to Shibuya, but she says she has to be somewhere else.  They wonder if she has a date, and when she says no they go on about how she never has a boyfriend.  The school uniform Keiko wears is based on the one she has in chapter 171, which otherwise isn’t adapted for the anime at all.  

• This scene with Keiko of course sets up her big reunion with Yusuke at the end of the episode.  In the manga we first see them together again in chapter 171, when Keiko comes to Yusuke asking his help in an apparent case of haunting at her high school.  There’s no sense of occasion in their meeting, as it implied that it’s been long since whatever reunion they had.  It’s ambiguous what their relationship is following Keiko seeming to dump Yusuke and Yusuke proposing to marry her when he returned from the Demon World in three years’ time.  Near the end of the chapter Keiko actually teases Yusuke for breaking his promise, since he returned earlier than the promised three years.  The two don’t seem to fully reconcile until the final chapter, when Keiko learns that during the Sei-Sei Shinto incident Yusuke decided to press the blue button (a decision with his very life and the fate of Sarayashiki City in the balance) on account of this being Keiko’s favorite color.

• After that we get back to Kurama and Kuwabara, who stop in a train station coffee shop on their way to Genkai’s place.  Kuwabara learns that the Spirit World has taken down the barrier between the Human and Demon Worlds.  He panics, but Kurama assures him that there’s an agreement in place to ensure that demons don’t do anything bad in the Human World.  This is adapted from Kuwabara, Yusuke, and Kurama’s conversation in chapter 170.  They discuss the subject after going over the end of the tournament, as they walk through the city.  Kurama goes on to explain that a large part of why the barrier was taken down was because King Enma was overthrown by Koenma, after it was shown he had been falsifying evidence to make the number of cases where demons hurt humans appear to be dramatically higher than it really was.  King Enma would even brainwash D-class demons so that they’d hurt humans, to justify the Spirit World’s protection of the Human World.  But really, Kurama says, though the Spirit World has continuously cast the Demon World as the bad guys, their “protection” of the Human World is little more than a territorial dispute, with the barrier being less about defending humans than it is about guarding their property.  The Human World is valuable to them as a source of energy, of a kind that humans don’t currently utilize (this ties in to the Dimensional Cannon seen in chapter 174, a Spirit World weapon powered by the Earth’s energy).  Humans are actually vastly more likely to be killed by other humans rather than demons, and genuine cases of demons harming humans have historically been ones where humans hired them to do so.  So all in all, there’s not much legitimate reason to keep the barrier up.  It was actually Sensui’s theft of the Black Chapter video that led to Kind Enma’s forgery being uncovered, since this incident led to a thorough investigation of Spirit World documents.

• But so anyway, the anime only includes the information about the barrier being down and their being a “gentlemen’s agreement” that demons won’t cause any trouble, without getting into King Enma’s forgeries or his overthrow by Koenma.  Also of course, Yusuke isn’t present and it’s just Kurama who explains this.  Shizuru and Keiko then show up, and the group gets on a train.

• On the train, Shizuru read a story in the newspaper about an alien being sighted, and the artist’s rendering of this alien looks suspiciously like Hiei, though he’s supposed to still be in the Demon World.  Kurama explains that Hiei is patrolling the Demon World for any humans who are accidentally transported there, something that happens sometimes now that the barrier’s been removed.  The scene switches to Hiei out on just such a case, using his Jagan to hypnotize the human into forgetting his experience in the Demon World.  The narrator says that as tournament winner, Enki established that humans sucked into the Demon World should be sent home, and patrols to collect and return them were created, staffed by those who lost in the tournament.  All of this is taken pretty directly from chapter 172, except that there Kuwabara and his family (including Yukina, who lives at their house now) are at home when they see a TV report on alien abductions, featuring a picture of an “alien” looking like Hiei.  In the manga the full explanation is given by the narrator, and it’s unknown whether Kurama is aware of what Hiei is doing.

• The episode continues with more material from chapter 172, showing Mukuro’s underling discussing Mukuro’s defeat in the tournament (the reason they have to do this stupid patrol), and how her strength truly compares to Enki’s.  In the manga Shigure is there along with Hiei, Kirin, and some nameless henchmen, and he’s the one who wonders why Mukuro lost, since while Enki was strong he didn’t seem so strong that Mukuro couldn’t beat him, had she given the fight her all.  In the anime though, Shigure committed suicide after losing to Kurama, so here he’s replaced with Zakuro, a character who in the manga vowed to defeat Yusuke and Yomi, but who instead was defeated in the very first round by some nobody.  The anime didn’t adapt that part, so this is the only place he appears in the anime.  In both versions, Kirin explains that Mukuro’s power varies based on her emotions, so at a friendly tournament like that she probably could only put out half her full power at most.  He also says he doesn’t think they’ll see her true power anymore now either, since lately she seems pretty gentle.  In the manga Kirin goes on to say that despite her being gentler these days, she still gets incredibly dark and angry once a year, which happens to be right about now.  This talk leads to Hiei trying to see Mukuro’s full power, and then to him investigating her past and helping her get over her trauma, in his own twisted way.  In the anime though Mukuro’s problems were more or less sorted out when the two fought in the tournament, so Kirin notes that she’s awfully gentle these days, though he doesn’t know why (the implication being it’s all thanks to Hiei).  Hiei goes to visit Mukuro, who says he can go back to the Human World whenever he wants to, but he says that’s for him to decide.  The depiction of Mukuro’s room is likewise taken from chapter 172, though there Hiei’s meeting with Mukuro was far from laid back.

• This whole episode, Kuwabara and co. have been gradually making their way to Genkai’s place, though they don’t know why she invited them.  Once there they meet Yukina, who lives with Genkai now.  Kuwabara has been visiting her often, ostensibly to keep her informed of what’s going on, since everyone else had gone to the Demon World.  Shizuru and co. aren’t fooled, however.  In the manga on the other hand, Yukina actually ends up staying at the Kuwabara household.  In chapter 170, after Yusuke and Kurama update Kuwabara on all the goings-on in the Demon and Spirit Worlds, they stop by his house.  We meet Mr. Kuwabara (as in Kazuma and Shizuru Kuwabara’s dad), who it turns out is quite interested in other worlds, and knows what’s been happening with the Spirit World too.  Now that the barrier’s down demons will become a lot more common in the Human World, so he’s determined to help protect them from any discrimination they might face.  On that note he’s decided to have Yukina stay with them; Shizuru and Yusuke both suggested this (Mr. Kuwabara seems unaware of their true motive in doing so).  As part of the talk on demons becoming more common in the Human World, Yusuke mentions that lots of lodgers are staying at Genkai’s place.  This might be why the anime depicts Yukina as staying with Genkai.

• On that note, it turns out the reason Genkai invited everyone there was to go over what she wants them to do when she dies.  She’ll will all her land to them, and wants them to use it as a place for demons to live.  It’ll probably still be a long time before humans and demons fully get along; her lands are a drive of several hours from the nearest town, making it unsuited for humans but a good hiding place for demons.  It turns out she owns all the land as far as the eye can see, and she wants it left in its natural state.  The group doesn’t like discussing Genkai’s death, but thinks her plan is a good idea. 

• In the manga version of things, Genkai actually dies and the gang reads her will, which contains the same “demon habitat” idea used in the anime.  As mentioned above, chapter 174 has Yusuke taking on the Sei-Sei Shinto terrorists, and staying behind to decide which button to press on the Dimensional Cannon control.  As Yusuke agonizes over his decision, Puu (who stayed behind with him) is suddenly possessed by Genkai, who gives Yusuke her characteristically frank advice.  Yusuke finally makes his decision, and the chapter ends without showing the outcome.  The final chapter, 175, starts with Keiko and co. decked out in dress clothes, preparing for a memorial service.  We’re obviously supposed to think this is for Yusuke, but suddenly Yusuke himself shows up, and it turns out the memorial is for Genkai, who has finally passed away of old age.  This apparently happened during the Sei-Sei Shinto incident, which is why her spirit was able to possess Puu, like it did during Yusuke’s match with Toguro at the Dark Tournament.  The gang reads Genkai’s will (Koenma isn’t present for this like in the anime), then heads to a nearby beach to relax.  Keiko learns that Yusuke ultimately opted to press the blue button (which turned out to be the one that safely deactivated the cannon), simply because blue is Keiko’s favorite color.  Keiko seems touched, and rushes off and playfully dunks Yusuke into the sea.  He does the same to her, and they start playing around in the waves.  There’s a series of close-ups of the cast, with everyone happy (Atsuko’s off at the pony races), after which we see Yusuke’s room.  A photo of him, Kuwabara, Hiei, and Kurama floats to the floor, and a close-up of this makes up the final page of the manga.  The end.

• The anime version, after hearing Genkai’s plans the gang likewise heads for the beach, leaving Koenma behind with Genkai.  As they leave Genkai’s home, Kuwabara stops and looks at the stone stairs leading up the mountain to her place.  He recollects how he and Yusuke climbed these stairs when they went to compete in Genkai’s tournament to decide her successor, and how all their adventures seemed to start from that point.  Of course, this leaves out Yusuke’s trial to return to life and his battles against Hiei and co., but Kuwabara wasn’t really part of all that, so it makes sense that from his perspective Genkai’s tournament was where it all began. 

• At the beach, the group doesn’t discuss the Sei-Sei Shinto incident, since that never happens in the anime.  And Yusuke is still absent, unlike the manga.  Instead they all just talk pleasantries and goof around for a while.  Keiko is left alone standing by the ocean and starts thinking of Yusuke, yelling at him to stop being an idiot and come back.  And, of course, at just that moment he does return.  Keiko tackles him to the ground with a hug and kisses him, right before a big wave rolls right over them both.  Now both soaking wet, they start playing in the waves, and Kuwabara and the others quickly join them.  There’s shots of everyone looking happy, based pretty directly off what’s in the manga, save that Jorge is shown with Koenma, while Genkai is with Puu, and Atsuko is nowhere to be seen.  The closing credits run over these images (followed by a still shot of the gang standing by the sea) as the extended version of the main theme plays.  Finally, Yusuke does the Spirit Gun hand gesture, the screen fades to white, and the words “Forever Fornever” appear.  The end.