One of the new anime airing this season is called “Bakemonogatari”, which can be translated as “Ghostory” since bakemono = ghost/monster, and monogatari = story. The anime has different characters that it focuses on for a couple of episodes, and each of those characters has something to do with the supernatural. There is, however, a main character named Koyomi Araragi who is a former vampire and appears to try to help the other characters.

In the first two episodes, the anime focuses on a girl named Hitagi Senjogahara who has had her weight taken away by a crab. Most people have probably never heard of this kind of myth/legend, but it is anime so it’s only natural the stories would include Japanese beliefs rather than western ones. Anyways, although Hitagi looks like a normal girl, she only weighs about 5kg due to the crab. She also carries around a ton (I literally mean a ton) of stationary that she uses as weapons, even going as far as stapling Koyomi’s mouth. Thinking that ordinary items that you’d find at school could be used as weapons in such a way certainly adds to the creepiness factor.

Despite being attacked by Hitagi, Koyomi still approaches her to try to solve her problem by introducing Hitagi to a specialist in the area of the supernatural. I won’t tell you how Hitagi fixes her weight (for those who still haven’t seen it), but all of the wordplay when they were explaining what happened to Hitagi really impressed me.

What I also liked about this anime was the animation style. Instead of the regular black lines you would see in other anime, this one has red ones to outline the characters. The colours are also generally either really bright or dark to put more contrast to things, and there’s also none of that “moe” stuff you’d find in anime like K-ON (no offence to moe lovers).

Bakemonogatari is definitely an anime worth checking out if you’re looking for something out of the ordinary, or if you’re really into ghost stories.

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