Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan OVA E04: Confess Your Sins

Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan, Episode 4: At A Confessional

In the (at the moment) final animated OVA of Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan, we get probably the biggest tie-in to the 'canon' stories with Koichi meeting Rohan at a cafe, asking him to use his Heaven's Door abilities to help Koichi speak Italian. This is something that actually did happen in the beginning of Vento Aureo, and it's nice that they managed to tie in 'At A Confessional' to the canon manga. Rohan also reminisces that this was his own trip to Italy as well, which dovetails nicely into the story.

And we get to see some more of Rohan's eccentric 'researches'. Remember, this is the guy that ate a spider just to include some details to make his manga a bit more authentic! After the injuries suffered by his initial confrontation with Josuke that caused his manga to take a hiatus, Rohan ended up taking a vacation in Venice, Italy, and I love seeing Rohan's almost gleeful obsession as he photographs and just tries to get the most of what he could from the vibes of a cathedral and its confessional booth. Absolutely love this more mischievous, devil-may-care attitude of Rohan's, and him entering the booth without permission is absolutely something he would do. We get a pretty nasty smile from Rohan as he realizes that someone else has entered the other side of the booth and is about to give a confession. Rohan wants to hear his story to get some 'authenticity' for his manga, and there's also the not-exactly-wrong statement that the important thing isn't who hears the confession, but that the penitent has done the act of confessing. 

The story of the unnamed confessor begins his story as a youth, being a worker that works overtime to move around giant bags of corn, and he grumbles about his fate of having to work. A beggar comes in asking for food, and the confessor (this is the term the Wiki calls him, so I'll call him that too) gets pissed off that this guy just wants a free lunch while he's working his ass off to get money to buy food. Which... yeah, fair enough, but then the confessor demands that the guy do his work before he pays him with his food (which he proceeds to eat anyway, the jackass). The story really makes it clear what an unpleasant piece of shit the confessor is, telling the guy to take more than a single bag and eating his sub as he's doing so. 

The beggar, predictably, collapses in exhaustion, but gets squished by the bags of corn and gets killed. The ghost of the beggar appears under the confessor's table as he panics, swearing vengeance and stating that he will get it at the happiest day of his life. And the confessor's life became pretty great. His business bloomed, he got a supermodel for a wife, he got a sweet daughter...

And as he and his daughter are playing around with a bag of popcorn, the confessor thought about how "this is the happiest moment of his life". Which, of course, triggers the curse and the spirit of the beggar. The beggar manifests in the confessor's daughter's tongue, which is simultaneously a little bit more grisly and ridiculous compared to just possessing the girl. There's definitely an 'Empress' vibe to this all, if you guys remember the Part III Stand. 

And the proceeding deal is something that reminds me of Rohan's own encounter with the Janken Boy in Part IV. The ghost gets tricked with some of the confessor's wordings, and he decides that he would want fate itself to judge the man fairly. He posits a rule -- do the same game that his daughter was playing, which is to throw the piece of popcorn into the air higher than a lamp-post, and catch it in his mouth, three times in a row. If he succeeds, the ghost will leave him alone. 

And again, there's some typical JoJo 'simple game with high-stakes intensity' that I think Araki missed writing from his Part III and IV stories. The first one succeeded despite the bright sunlight, the second one attracted pigeons but the confessor distracted the pigeons by ripping open the popcorn packaging... but the result of that caused a gigantic flock of pigeons to arrive for the third attempt. There's some insane over-the-top JoJo stuff as the confessor lights the popcorn up in fire with his cigarette lighter to deter the pigeons, but then the sunlight blinds him and he fails, causing the ghost of the beggar to decapitate him.  

...and Rohan is as bamboozled as the audience at what's going on, since isn't the confessor, well, confessing right now? Is it the ghost? Rohan peeks out of the confessional booth to see that the beggar's ghost is still there... but also the headless ghost of what appears to be the confessor, but turns out to be revealed as a servant that the confessor had paid into doing plastic surgery and used as a body double. 

And now, the confessor (who's revealed to be the attendant knocked out by the beggar's ghost at the beginning of the popcorn game) ends up being hounded by two ghosts, being stalked as he walks out of the cathedral. And... again, a pretty interesting story with a somewhat predictable twist, but unlike the characters in 'Mutsukabe Hill' or 'Millionaire Village', you don't really feel all that sorry for the confessor because he's... well, kind of a dick, isn't he? Rohan eventually comments that he has some respect for the man for clinging on to life regardless. 

We then cut to the present day, where Okuyasu and Yukako arrives to comment on the story. There is, of course, Okuyasu's eternal question at everything that goes on in 'Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan' -- is Rohan just witnessing the effects of Stand fighters fighting each other? And since this is the final OVA that I'll be reviewing (I may or may not do the live-action stuff after I finish Stone Ocean), it's pretty interesting to think about. Stands have always been portrayed as having some connection to its user's 'souls', being tied to stuff like Hamon and whatnot. But in the same vein, we've also seen that there are things in the JoJo world that's not necessarily tied to Stands -- like vampire masks and vampires from Part I, the Pillar Men from Part 2, the ghost alley and actual ghosts from Part 4, rock humans and the Wall Eyes from Part 8...

It's easy to just try and classify everything as the potential effect of a Stand, and they very well might be. The Millionaire Village and the 'will of the mountain' might be something similar to Shakedown Street in JoJolion, where a location develops a Stand of its own; or it might just be a supernatural occurrence like the ghost alley. The beggar's ghost here might be a post-mortem Stand like Notorious B.I.G. or Cheap Trick, 'Hermes' might simply be a full-body Stand similar to Love Deluxe or the recently-revealed The Hustle...

Anyway, it's been a nice, short trip watching and reviewing these four episodes. I think my feeling about this episode is similar to 'Mutsukabe Hill', where the story being told is pretty well-done! It's pretty creepy, pretty tense, and pretty 'Bizarre Adventure'. It's just that Rohan isn't really involved, and while that's not really necessary for a story to be good since it's more about Rohan reacting to the story, in the case of 'Mutsukabe Hill' I did admittedly feel a bit bored. In this case, the mystery of the sins of the confessor and how he's going to 'survive' the ghost's game is an interesting enough twist that it works. 

Random Notes:

• Koichi actually did claim that Rohan used Heaven's Door to help him learn Italian during his brief role in the beginning of Vento Aureo. 
• Stone Ocean actually features a very important scene of an accidental confessions being overheard in a confessional booth, in Enrico Pucci's backstory. I wonder if Araki actually got himself into some confessional-booth-related hijinks in one of the many research trips he undoubtedly took all over the world? 
• Man, that confessor with the three spiky hair pointing upwards... he really could've been a character just taken out of the colourful designs of Part V-VI, huh? 
• I didn't realize it, but the OVA actually adds a mole on the neck to mark the 'real' confessor -- the plastic-surgery confessor that played a game with the beggar's ghost is completely lacking the mole throughout the whole scene.