Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan OVA E02: Bleeding Love

Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan, Episode 2: Mutsukabe Hill

This one is a bit more different. While "Millionaire Village" features Rohan in both the ghost story and the framing stories, Rohan isn't really featured in the main story of Mutsukabe Hill, and only really gets involved near the end. 

The framing story begins when a different editor, Minoru Kaigamori, talks to Rohan about his recent manga, finding out that Rohan is flat-out broke. This follows up on the anime-exclusive scene of Rohan talking to Koichi and Okuyasu about his living conditions in the previous episode. Rohan talks about how he spent all his money buying up several mountains around a certain mountain, and despite his editor's skepticism, Rohan claims to have seen the yokai with his own eyes. 

And a chunk of the story is told with Rohan as the narrator. A wealthy heiress of an estate called Naoko Osato was having a relationship with the gardener of the estate, called Gunpei. However, the fact that Naoko had an arranged marriage meant that she ends up calling off the relationship with her boyfriend during an argument. Demanding that Gunpei leave just as her father and fiancé arrive outside of the building, Gunpei hugs Naoko and she shoves him, knocking Gunpei to a bag of golf clubs. One of it pierces Gunpei in the head, killing him instantly. 

What follows is a rather horrific sequence as Gunpei's corpse keeps bleeding blood -- even unnaturally so, with the corpse shriveling up and spurting blood long after the heart stops beating, and even when Naoko has covered up the wounds with bandages and stitches. There's a bit of a tense situation as Naoko's fiancé asks to be let in, and Naoko keeps coming up with excuses as she panics over killing Gunpei. She rolls up Gunpei in a carpet and stuffs him on top of a cupboard, before pretending to clean the room when she's actually drinking the blood that flows out from her wound. 

We then flash-forward through Naoko's life. She married Shuichi, but keeps Gunpei's body in the attic. Gunpei's corpse keeps producing a fixed amount of blood that Naoko disposes of every day, and she also continues to have an obsession with the corpse.

And then we finally see Rohan, who went off to Mutsu-kabe Hill, after meeting Naoko and reading her life experiences through the book. Rohan wants to witness Gunpei directly, and goes to the area. A little girl talks to Rohan, and as Rohan talks to her, she trips and falls and apparently dies when she bashes her head against the rock. Rohan recognizes how bad the situation looks if the real estate agent arrives, but also realizes that the girl is Gunpei and Naoko's child. Rohan is ready to run, but realizes that the corpse is going to literally 'haunt' him, as it starts moving towards Rohan even as it disintegrates. Rohan uses Heaven's Door to try and understand what's going on, and then just scribbles in an order -- that the girl will not be able to perceive or remember Rohan Kishibe. We get to see a terrifying jump-scare as Heaven's Door's effect dissipates, and the yokai screeches in unholy terror before reverting back to her 'little girl' form. Unable to perceive Rohan, she skips away. 

Rohan then gets confronted by the rest of the Part 4 cast (this scene is original to the OVA), namely Koichi, Okuyasu, the still-nonspeaking Josuke and Mikitaka! Mikitaka gets to be his usual alien stuff, and Rohan asks Mikitaka if he's an alien... and of course the anime cuts away to Rohan's final epilogue narration before we get to see if Rohan confirms this with Heaven's Door.

And... yeah. A rather spooky one, and this feels like something from a Junji Ito short story collection. I mean that in the best way! This adapts one of the earlier "Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan" one-shot mangas, and I do wonder if some of these earlier stories were originally meant to just be about the horror stories with Rohan being even more tacked-on than the other issues? Anyway, pretty spooky stuff.

Random Notes:

• ...I really should've done these spooky episodes on October, huh? 
• Tamami ("The Lock") and Akira ("Red Hot Chili Peppers") briefly show up to ask Rohan for his autograph, and Rohan uses coffee flicks to sign his name and draw a picture of Heaven's Door on them. 
• Rohan had to sell off his Sailor Moon figurines, his Rurouni Kenshin comics and his Led Zeppelin CD's -- all explicitly named -- in order to buy the mountains. Rohan also identifies that there are other ways that mangaka can irresponsibly spend money other than supercars and video gaming basements.
• I was about to say that 'blood isn't that easy to clean off the floor', but I suppose this is supernatural blood. 
• Was it really necessary for Naoko to strip to her underwear? And she somehow manages to roll up Gunpei's body and get dressed during the time that Shuichi opens the door. 
• The real estate agent that Rohan talks to is original to the OVA and they added him probably to give some sense of tension that Rohan will be 'discovered'.