Episode 4

EPISODE 4

熱き炎!恋人のきずな (Atsuki Hoono! Koibito no Kizuna)

Hot Flames!  Ties of the Beloved

First Broadcast: October 31, 1992

Equivalent Manga Chapter(s): chapter 13 (WSJ #12, March 11, 1991), chapter 14 (WSJ #13, March 18, 1991)

Summary: An inspector from the Spirit World comes to test whether Keiko and Yusuke really love each other.  Yusuke’s house is set on fire by an arsonist, and Keiko rushes in to save Yusuke’s body.  Yusuke uses the energy he’s collected in his egg to save Keiko from the fire, and in reward Koenma says he’ll restore Yusuke to life.

Differences from the Manga

(What's all this about?  Read here)

• The anime skips over 5 more manga chapters of Yusuke helping random people out.  One of the plot lines from these skipped chapters is Yusuke meeting Sayaka, the ghost of a young girl who spent most of her life bedridden from some illness and died young, leaving her no chance to make friends or have fun in life.  Sayaka’s desire for a playmate endangers a living boy, so Yusuke steps in and gets her to play with him instead, until she feels satisfied enough to pass on to the afterlife.  Sayaka then spends a few chapters hanging out with Yusuke, and goes from seeing him as a big brother to having a childish crush on him.  So in chapter 13 when she learns about Keiko, she becomes jealous and wants to see whether Keiko and Yusuke really care about each other.  Because the anime adapted chapters 13 and 14, which featured Sayaka, but skipped the chapters that introduced her, they had to come up with some other way to introduce her and explain her interest in Yusuke’s love life.  So in the anime she’s an investigator who Koenma sends to check up on how Yusuke’s doing, and she’s interested in Yusuke’s relationship with Keiko because she needs to know whether people will actually be happy if Yusuke comes back to life.  If not, why bother resurrecting him?  To accommodate these changes, the entire opening of the episode is a lot different than the start of the manga chapter, but after that things play out mostly the same until the end of the episode.

• In the manga, the English paragraph Keiko reads out loud for her English class is this nonsensical rant about money.  Or more precisely, it seems like the lyrics to some English song with the word “money” thrown in at random.  Either way, seems like Togashi had money on the mind.  In the anime Keiko reads a perfectly coherent and grammatical English paragraph, but it’s a lot less interesting.

• Another story from the chapters the anime skips over is that Yusuke got to return to his body for one day in order to keep it alive (he’s supposed to do this once a month).  In chapter 13 as his house is on fire, Yusuke remembers that time and tries to enter his body, but it doesn’t work.  Botan says he’d have to wait another 3 weeks before he could go back in.  In the anime Yusuke contemplates going inside his body, but before he even tries Botan says he can’t until his egg hatches.

• Interestingly, in the manga when Yusuke and co. are trying to figure out how to save his body, Yusuke wonders if maybe there’s a spiritualist training in the mountains nearby who he’d be capable of communicating with (“spiritualist training in the mountains” is something of a cliché).  Botan says there’s no way they’d be so lucky.  But actually that rather precisely describes Genkai.  This line is left out of the anime, perhaps because the anime staff knew Genkai would be appearing soon (by the time the first episode of the anime aired, the manga was already most of the way through the Dark Tournament), and they thought it’d look bad for Botan to be dismissing the idea of a spiritualist living in the nearby mountains when there’d be one turning up in just a few episodes.

• When Botan goes to try and contact Kuwabara, in the anime there’s a brief scene with Kuwabara beating up a dummy of Yusuke.

• Right as Keiko’s trapped in Yusuke’s burning house and things are looking hopeless, in the manga Koenma appears and says he can save her, for a price.  Yusuke says Koenma can tell him about the price latter, but that he should save Keiko immediately.  So Koenma takes the karma which Yusuke has been accumulating helping people, and uses it to create a pathway for Keiko to exit with Yusuke’s body.  Botan explains that karma often causes fortuitous coincidences and even miracles.  But since Yusuke used up all his karma, his resurrection will be considerably postponed.  In the anime, Koenma doesn’t appear and it’s Sayaka (in keeping with her anime role as Spirit World investigator) who tells Yusuke he can use the energy in his egg to save Keiko, but if he does he’ll never be able to come back to life.

• In the anime after Kuwabara helps get Keiko out of the burning house, he freaks out when he sees that she’s carrying Yusuke’s body, and Keiko says she’ll explain everything later.  In the manga Kuwabara already learned that Yusuke was coming back to life during the chapters the anime skipped.

• Once Keiko’s saved, in the manga Koenma reappears and explains that the price he talked about was that to save her he’d need to take part of her body.  Yusuke freaks out, but it turns out to just be her hair.  After the fire Kuwabara takes her to his house, where his big sister gives her a haircut (presumably because her hair got burned in the fire).  In the anime there’s nothing about Koenma needing to take a body part, and we don’t see Keiko at Kuwabara’s house.  Instead there’s a scene of Atsuko apologizing to her for all the trouble, especially the loss of her hair (again, presumably via the fire).  In the anime Kuwabara’s sister Shizuru doesn’t appear until the Tarukane story arc.

• In the anime, as Yusuke is despairing about never being able to return to life, Koenma appears and says he’ll return him anyway.  By throwing the egg to save Keiko without even hesitating, he’s proven himself to be a better person than Koenma thought, and might have even more unknown qualities, so Koenma will return him to life to better see what he’s capable of.  In the manga Yusuke isn’t returned to life for a few more chapters, so we don’t get this scene.