Shigofumi

Anime portraying dark sides of life isn't really my cup of tea. That being the case, were I to choose an anime amongst many, I would probably not choose Shigofumi. But since my brother had got the anime, it'd be a waste not to watch it and I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a shot.

In the beginning, everything seems pretty sweet, with the typical bright colors and cutesy scenes, one of which is of a boy who wants to confess his love to a girl. Despite the appearance of a mysterious girl (and an equally mysterious talking stick) named Fumika who came to deliver a letter from the girl's dead father to the girl's "boyfriend", nothing looks sinister. It all changes at the end of episode one, when the girl stabbed the boy to death because she suspected that he had found out about her secret.

Shigofumi's first episodes are pretty much independent of each other. Each of them tells a different story and presents different characters with different problems. The only thing(s) they have in common are Fumika and the Shigofumi. Shigofumi are letters from the dead, addressed to the living. Consider them as media on which the dead said their last words to a particular person. In character with the dead's person, the letter could be kind or plain or hateful or apologetic.

Considering that Fumika is the one who connects all stories together ever since the beginning, naturally her story--who she is, what her background is, and how she ended up being a Shigofumi mailgirl--is revealed towards the end of the twelve-episodes anime.

As I've mentioned, Shigofumi portrays the not-so-lovely aspects of life like loneliness, desperation, suicide, bullying, child pornography, and child abuse. It's extremely obvious that this is not a show for the children. But if you are an adult and open-minded enough, I'd say that it's really a good thing to watch. Not "good" in a screwed up way, but rather it makes you re-examine some things in life.

My favorite episode is "Tomodachi" (Friends), in which a high school boy's suicide led his father to take hostage of his former class in search of an answer to why his son committed suicide. Nobody can provide an answer, though, since his closest friends were at loss too. The guy who committed suicide, Sen-chan, had had a pretty good life; he's well-liked amongst his peers, he hadn't been bullied or anything, and his family wasn't a broken one. Fumika then made a grand entrance, delivering Sen-chan's letter to Kotake, his closest friend. In it, Sen-chan put it simply that just because one didn't want to die, it didn't necessarily mean that he wanted to live. He didn't really want to die; he was just in the mood to jump, period. This might sound odd to you people, since you can expect yourself to die when you jump off an apartment building, but I understand it perfectly and I think that's why I love this particular episode very much.