Episode 99

EPISODE 99

忘れ得ぬ記憶・誕生の時 (Wasure-enu Kioku・Tanjou no Toki)

Unforgettable Memories! A Time of Birth

First Broadcast: September 24, 1994

Equivalent Manga Chapter(s): chapter 159 (WSJ #14, 1994, March 21)

Summary: While Yusuke trains with Hokushin and the rest of Raizen’s followers, Hiei spends half a year fighting hundreds of Mukuro’s A-class underlings to get stronger.  To join the ranks of Mukuro’s elite fighters, he fights Shigure, the surgeon who gave him his third eye, which he needed to find his sister Yukina and the keepsake Hirui Stone his mother gave him.

Anime/manga differences after the jump.

Differences from the Manga

(What's all this about?  Read here)

• Chapter 159 starts with the first of Hiei’s flashbacks to his past, which leads to Hiei waking up and talking with Mukuro.  The episode starts by showing Hiei walking through some icy landscape, interspersed with him remembering his past.  Though everything in this episode-opening flashback is taken from the manga, the scene cuts off early (before the detailed explanation of Ice Maiden society) and it’s all repeated later in a scene that more closely follows the manga flashback, so this early flashback could be considered filler.  Anyway, following the flashback we see that Hiei’s sitting in Mukuro’s fortress like in the manga, so apparently the shots of him in the icy landscape are from some point in the past.  So he’s dreaming of a time when he reminisced on his past, or something.

• After that is the episode title card, followed by the narrator summing up the situation with Yusuke and co. and the three kings.  This seems to serve as a last episode recap (which this episode doesn’t really have), but it then leads into a new scene of Yusuke fighting Hokushin and the other monks.  Yusuke gets his ass kicked and Hokushin suggests that he take it easy, but Yusuke is mad that they’re all still holding back against him.  He wants them to fight like they mean it, otherwise fighting them won’t make very good training.  In the manga, following Yusuke’s first disastrous attempt at fighting Raizen we don’t see anything more of his training until just before Raizen’s death, at which point Yusuke is strong enough to easily defeat Hokushin and the other monks all at once.

• After that is another anime-only scene, this one with Mukuro and Kirin.  Notably, we see that Mukuro’s base is a gigantic insect-shaped structure, while this isn’t revealed in the manga until after Raizen’s death.  What’s more, we get to see Kirin (Mukuro’s No.2 man), who in the manga is only introduced as part of Yoda’s little slideshow on the three kings and their No.2 men during the Kurma/Yomi chapters, and doesn’t get an “on-screen” speaking role until after the tournament ends.  Anyway, Mukuro is apparently watching Yusuke’s progress and saying he doesn’t know when to quit (either that or she’s talking about Hiei, it’s not quite clear).  She then asks Kirin how “he” is doing, and after some confusion Kirin assumes she means Hiei, the demon she brought from the Human Realm half a year ago.  Hiei’s spent all that time fighting against 500 of Mukuro’s A-class demon underlings, and may be dead by now.  Mukuro asks Kirin how long he’s been her No.2 man, and he says about 250 years.  In that case, Mukuro says, she probably ought to have sent 1,000 A-class demons to fight Hiei (apparently she’s really desperate to train a better second-in-command).  The manga doesn’t specify the number of A-class demons Hiei fights, and also isn’t exact about how long Kirin’s been Mukuro’s No.2 (he only says after the tournament that the prior No.2 was killed about 100-200 years ago).

• This leads to a scene of Hiei fighting off the last remnants of the aforementioned 500 demons, firing a Koku-Ryu-Ha to take out a bunch at once.  The survivors try to attack him as he falls asleep as an aftereffect of using the technique, but he manages to kill them all with his sword before nodding off.  Various black-and-white images from Hiei’s past then quickly flash by; not scenes from his birth and early life, but mostly just stuff from earlier in the series.  Interestingly though, these images include Hiei and Kurama fighting Yotsude, the villain from the manga side story depicting how Hiei and Kurama met, which never received an anime adaptation.  This leads back to the scene of Hiei walking through an icy landscape, and then another look into Hiei’s birth and early life.  This flashback scene is the one that more closely follows the one from the start of chapter 159, so you could consider this point as when the episode first gets into manga material.

• In the manga the narrator (or perhaps Hiei, it’s unclear) explains that Ice Maidens who give birth to male offspring all “immediately” die.  Hina, the mother of Hiei and Yukina, is then spoken of in the past tense by the other Ice Maidens, so it seems a safe bet that she’s already dead at this point.  In the anime though the narrator only says that Ice Maidens who give birth to boys always die, without giving any timeframe, and Hina is shown as still alive when Hiei is thrown from the Land of Glaciers.  The anime depicts her as looking a lot like Yukina.  In the next episode, Hiei says that apparently Hina committed suicide shortly after giving birth, which is information we don’t get in the manga.  The manga makes it sound like Ice Maidens who give birth to boys naturally die as a result, as opposed to them committing suicide.

• Mukuro says that the warrior she’s bringing to fight Hiei (Shigure, as it turns out) is one of her 77 elite fighters, and probably about equally strong as Hiei.  In the manga she adds that this guy is also the weakest of those 77 fighters, a nice little prick to Hiei’s ego that the anime leaves out for whatever reason.

• During the flashback to how Yukina gave Hiei her keepsake Hirui Stone, she mentions that she kept it from Tarukane by hiding it in her stomach.  In the manga she then quickly adds that she made sure to wash it thoroughly, so it’s totally clean now.  The anime leaves this out.  It also has a little mini-flashback within a flashback showing Tarukane torturing Yukina.

• Shigure has a rather intricate character design, and while Togashi always makes him look pretty good, he tends to suffer in the anime, often looking a little off-kilter.