“The One Behind the Forest Fire” is the kind of episode that a reviewer never hopes for and always dreads, because on its face it isn t vastly different from every other episode of
Yashahime: flat, poorly structured, and kind of boring. This chapter in particular, though, hides an insidious layer of
wrongness that was enough to have me howling and ranting in equal measure. Whether this total breakdown of narrative function and meaning is due to ineptitude or indifference on the part of
Yashahime s creative team, I don t know. All I know is that my seething disdain for this episode can be boiled down to a single line, spoken by Towa, from the end of the episode: