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redirected from Main.JigokuShojo

Schoolrooms all over Japan are abuzz with the rumor of the Jigoku Tsushin, a mysterious Web site which can be accessed only at midnight. If someone should visit that Web site and submit the name of an enemy, the Jigoku Shojo (Hell Girl) appears and gives that person a black hex doll with a red string tied around its neck. The Hell Girl also delivers a stern message: Pulling that red string will send the submitter's hated enemy straight to Hell, but in exchange for this "service," the submitter's own soul will be sent to Hell after his or her natural life has ended.

Japanese horror at its cheesy best, this 26-episode anime series (and its 26-episode second season: Jigoku Shoujo: Futakomori [And third season Jigoku Shoujo:Mitsuganae) are a collection of short stories, with each episode revolving around a tortured protagonist who has felt compelled to contact the Hell Correspondence Website on account of some person who is making their lives miserable. Each episode hero must, at some point in the story, make a decision whether or not to take the Hell Girl (formal name: "Enma Ai") up on her offer. The rest of the episode deals with the fallout and consequences of that decision—and the punishment of the hated enemy if the string has been pulled.

At some point in the first series, an over-arcing storyline starts to occur which involves a washed-up journalist and his cute precocious daughter Tsugumi, who seems to have a mysterious psychic link to Enma Ai. Upon learning of the activities of the Hell Correspondence Website, they try to do everything in their power to persuade those who have contacted it to turn from their doom-laden paths of revenge, but by doing so, they may be eventually putting their own souls at risk....

This anime also has the distinction of airing on American teleivison- IFC holds the broadcast rights to the first season of Hell Girl and shows episodes of it in varying timeslots. Check their website for more details.

A Live Action Adaptation also exists, in series form; set within the timeline of the first anime season, retaining the anthology format while notably averting the anime storyline. At a mere 12 episodes, there wasn't much room for them anyway.

No connection to Hellboy.

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This show provides examples of:

• Asshole Victim: Most of the time, if the string is pulled, the target was one of these.
• Little Miss Badass: Enma Ai herself, who takes on the form of a vulnerable young girl clad in either a kimono or a black and red fuku. When angered, she has the power to take out an entire village.
• Badass Grandpa: Wanyuudo. Super strength, martial arts skills, and fire-manipulating/creating powers, if you can look past the fact that he's A sentient, shapeshifted wheel-demon
• Brand X: Everybody uses the Google Deegle search engine.
• Break The Haughty: Several of the people who are vengeance targets go through this.
• Brother Sister Incest: One Squicky episode from the second season revolves around a pair of siblings, one of whom contacts the Hell Correspondence Website to take revenge on her brother whom she feels is deliberately sabotaging her relationships out of spite. However, it is eventually revealed that the real reason he is doing it is because he lusts after her sexually and wants to have her all to himself. He still gets sent to Hell.
• Bumbling Dad: Although he's something of a pathetic loser and a rogue, Hajime Shibata, the journalist, is actually a doting and loving father.
• Butterfly Of Death And Rebirth: Enma Ai's soul, in Mitsuganae, takes the form of a blue butterfly
• Catch Phrase: No doubt Enma Ai's "Ippen shinde miru?"
  • Also her "Kono urami, jigoku e nagashimasu."
• Closed Circle: One episode of the first season has Hajime and Tsugumi trapped in an old asylum by a doll that believes she's her owner.
• Creepy Child: Again, Enma Ai. Her gigantic, unnaturally red eyes and white, expressionless face only add to her eeriness. Kikuri, an otherworldly child introduced in the second season, is — thanks to her purple-sclera eyes and her childish sadism — perhaps the only character in the series even more creepy than Enma Ai. This is understandable, seeing as how she's actually the Lord of Hell, Enma Ai's boss.
  • This Troper actually found Kikuri and Ai to be quite cute and amusing. Although it's limited to when they're interacting with each other, for example one instance where Ai and Kikuri get into a typical "Yes!-No!-Yes!-No!-etc" argument, so Ai reverse-winds Kikuri's spring (she's possessed a wind-up toy right now) so she can't move. When they're on the job though, man do they ever revert back to the Creepy Child trope.
• Dark Magical Girl: Enma Ai.
• Dead All Along: Yuzuki.
• Deal With The Devil: The driving premise behind the series.
• Demon Head: One of Enma Ai's minions has the ability to turn into a flaming carriage with one of these on the side. He serves as her primary form of transportation.
• Disappeared Dad: A Lonely Rich Kid named Nina thinks her father abandoned her...
• Disproportionate Retribution: Seriously, do I have to explain it?
• Emotionless Girl: Enma Ai. She shows very little emotions, but on the rare occasion she does, you're really screwed.
• Enjo Kosai: In the first episode, Hashimoto Mayumi is blackmailed into this.
• Even The Girls Want Her: Ai's companion Honne-Onna. Les Yay with Enma Ai aside, she's so admired and wanted by a bunch of girls of a school where she works at during the Mitsuganae season that one of them tried to send another of Ai's employés, Ichimoku Ren, to Hell out of jealousy, after mistaking them for a couple.
• Family Unfriendly Aesop :Plenty of them, including the lesson Enma Ai herself learns: Don't ever stick out your neck for anyone. You'll just wind up being condemned.
• Faustian Rebellion: Ai and Giles de L'Enfer, alias Hell Boy, who claims to have dragged himself out of Hell through use of his psychic powers.
• Fridge Logic: The climax of Futakomori and much of Mitsuganae.
• Growing The Beard: Each series starts off with the Once An Episode someone going to hell thing, until the main story picks up midway through the series.
• Here We Go Again: All three seasons end with someone accessing the Jigoku Tsushin, even though it looked like Ai was finished being Hell Girl.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Enma Ai herself, when she refuses to transport the soul of a boy whose life situation somewhat mirrored her own. As a punishment she becomes mortal and later dies while trying to defend the boy from violent townspeople.
  • She does it again in Mitsuganae to save Yuzuki from being condemned to hell after she oversteps her authority as the new Hell Girl.
• Hey Its That Guy (the Live Action Adaptation features several actors from tokusatsu series in both regular and one-time roles. Kazuki Kato (Daisuke Kazama aka Kamen Rider Drake), Aya Sugimoto (Queen Beryl), Kanji Tsuda (Daisuke Okubo, the boss of ORE Journal), Masaya Matsukaze (Shun Namiki aka Mega Blue), Kazuhiko Nishimura (Jo Ohara aka Yellow Lion)... the list goes on.
• Hey Its That Voice (Other than Ai's voice below, a lot of seiyuus make guest appearances occasionally as either Ai's client, or those who got sent to Hell. Including Houko Kuwashima, Kaori Shimizu, Rie Tanaka, to name a few. Also, a certain one-shot character voiced by Jun Fukuyama proved to be rather unique that he got brought back on the third season. Lastly, Magic Knight Rayearth fans will take note that Hikaru's seiyuu Hekiru Shiina, after a VERY LONG hiatus, makes a frequent voice work in the third season)
• Hooker With A Heart Of Gold: Hone-Onna. No. Really. She was once a human girl named Tsuyu who was sold to work at a brothel.
• Hikikomori: A female one in the anime, a male one in the live action
• Intrepid Reporter: Hajime Shibata
• I Want My Beloved To Be Happy: One episode features a character who is so in love with the idea of playing the "victim" of this trope, that she actually becomes distressed when the object of her affection rejects the "other woman" and decides to fall in love with her instead. Tragedy soon ensues.
• Kick The Dog: A girl named Miki has two Welsh Corgis and their puppies... The evil, greedy, abusive rich woman the girl keeps house for, Meiko, first kills one of the dogs, then drowns the rest in her bath tub. Miki, who had made the contract with Enma Ai but was hesitant to fulfill it, sends the bitch to Hell immediately as she finds out.
  • A girl named Hatsumi owns a chihuahua and lives in a building with a woman named Shimatani. Shimatani attempts to get Hatsumi's dog kicked out of the apartment, and finally ends up poisoning the dog and causing Hatsumi to fall off a balcony. Yes, she gets it.
  • Let's not forget the veterinary Yoshiyuki Honjou, who doesn't care about treating the animals in his clinic, and eventually allows young Junko's dog to die. Yup, another one who gets sent to Hell for being mean to puppies.
• Knife Nut: Honne-Onna is a skilled knife thrower.
• Mamiko Noto: Ai's voice.
• Mind Control Eyes: Tsugumi Shibata, when she "synchronizes" with Enma Ai
• Minor Injury Overreaction: One episode features a playboy movie director. In the end, he's sent to hell by a guy that he accidentally dumped coffee on early in the episode.
• Moral Event Horizon: Ai Enma burned down her home village and killed everyone inside it. And no, that is not the Moral Event Horizon I'm talking about, at least when you compare it to everything else that goes on in the series.
• Musical Nod: Sakasama no Chou, the opening theme from the first season is used as a ringtone, bowling alley music and on a billboard for the single in both Futakomori and Mitsuganae. NightmaRe, from Futakomori, gets used in Mitsuganae as well.
• Nakama: Ichimoku Ren spent an episode considering how their group is like a family. And in season 3, Ai Enma reiterates their group as such to Yuzuki.
• Narm: Some of the third season's getting sent to hell process falls into this territory.
• Nightmare Fuel: Third season, when Yamawaro gets fungus-juice applied to his back, which then grows a patches of mushrooms on his back. May also be counted as Squick.
• Parental Abandonment: Tsugumi Shibata, the journalist's daughter who has a psychic link to Enma Ai, lost her mother Ayumi in an accident, although notably, the circumstances surrounding this death have a large role to play in the first series' denoument. Enma Ai herself suffered through the deaths of both of her parents. And their tragic murder was explored in a flashback episode. It was revealed at the beginning of the second season, that the parent's souls were being held hostage by the forces of Hell in exchange for Enma Ai's cooperation as one of Hell's agents of vengance.
• Offing The Offspring and Self Made Orphan: Meiko Shimono killed her parents to inherit her fortune. Later, she killed her son so she wouldn't have to share her money. She ended up sent to Hell by Miki, a schoolgirl whom she forces to work as her maid, whose dogs she drowned.
  • Also, at the end of the first season, Enma Ai tries to convince Tsugumi to send Hajime, her father, to Hell, by using the memories of her mother Ayumi's death. She fails, though: Tsugumi rejects the deal and Ai leaves her and Hajime alone.
• Once An Episode: Someone goes to Hell. Most of the time.
• Onsen Episode: Episode 19 of Futakomori. Also gives some detail into Wanyuudou's past.
• Paparazzi: Hajime Shibata used to work with one, Inagaki, who frames an innocent guy and his father. Predictably, Inagaki ends up sent to Hell by his victim.
• Pyrrhic Villainy: Literally. No matter how much better your life becomes after you send someone to Hell, you will be joining them soon enough. And you get a cheerful mark on your chest to always remind you of this.
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Enma Ai who is over 400 years.
• Reincarnation: It is implied that Hajime is a reincarnation or distant descendant of Sentarou, a boy Ai cared about during her life, forming part of the driving force for the climax of the first season.
• Ret Gone: Records of the past few years of Yuzuki's life begin disappearing. Turns out she's been dead all this time, and this life is a complete illusion.
• Screw The Rules, I Have Supernatural Powers!: After Yuzuki becomes the new Hell Girl, she immediately attempts to use her powers to take revenge on a woman who had unjustly sent her best friend to hell, not even bothering to listen when Ai's former helpers try to warn her against it. If she had waited one more second she might've learned that this was exactly the one thing she was NOT supposed to do. Would it have stopped her anyway? Debatable.
• Soul Jar: In the third season, a girl named Yuzuki Mikage becomes one for Enma Ai through Demonic Possession. Eventually she becomes Ai's successor.
• Stringy Haired Ghost Girl: Ai sometimes verges on this trope.
• The Unfavorite: With a really creepy twist. See the main article.
• Twenty Minutes Into The Future: Mitsuganae takes place in the year 2024.
• Wangst: Yuzuki Mikage does some internal wangsting midway through the series. She's justified in this because she's being used as a Soul Jar by Ai Enma and she's unable to do anything about it. Oh, and she's going to be taking Ai's place soon.
• Why Do You Keep Changing Jobs: To keep up with their next client.
• World Half Empty: You can go to Hell for pissing someone off. Even if they are overeacting or are crazy.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: This is essentially the entirety of the third season, and a good amount of the first and second seasons.
• You Cant Fight Fate

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