I have been jokingly telling my friends "I've been watching Hell Girl. It's the exact opposite of Hellboy. Hellboy is action, nazis, violence, dragons and robots. Hell Girl is horror, psychology, revenge, hate and pathos."
Like a lot of things I have to say about Jigoku Shoujo, I'm not *quite* criticizing it. I liked it. It was enjoyable and interesting. B means "good."
But.
It was slow. Now, I watch anime at breakneck pace, I'll often get through 10+ episodes in a single night, more than that on weekends. Jigoku Shoujo demanded to be taken slower. It was written to be watched as it aired, one episode per week over the course of six months. The mystery percolates well, we find out about Ai and the nature of the Hell Correspondence (Hell Hotline in other translations, but I think that sounds dumb) very slowly, and the show does not bother with fast action. It's a brooding sort of conflict, very much in the way of Japanese Horror, the horror is not about the threat of imminent death, it's about the wrongness of the world, and how that wrongness might just swallow you.
The story doesn't surprise you with plot twists, but it clearly isn't trying to surprise you, the degree of formula used makes that clear. Rather than surprise you, it makes you wonder if this will be the time that things end differently, like any series with a formula, you wonder if this will be the time when the formula breaks down, because it has to eventually.
And all the while there's a degree of wish fulfillment going on: Bad people are being punished in horrible ways. Yes, people had to suffer to justify the punishment, but we are seeing something like justice done, and a certain part of us appreciates that.
Jigoku Shoujo speaks to a strange, somewhat unwanted part of the viewer's desires, and explores that part. Is revenge ever justified? Is one who enables revenge doing good? Doing evil? Should humanity be able to take into their own hands what is not in their hands? The series does not provide a moral or an answer, simply a resolution. As Enma Ai says as the final lines of the series,
"The rest is up for you to decide."
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