Even here, at the back end of the series, the final six episodes that chronicle Mayuko's emotional, psychological and residential fate, the denizens of the Enohana Bathhouse continue to accept NieA, a cancer to their pocket books and their collective sanity. However, director/writer Takuya Sato offers no apologies for NieA's scurrilous behavior, nor does he deliver unto her karmic restitution for the pain and suffering she's caused. Sato depicts NieA as a fact of life, an abrasive force that acquires a level of comfort in its predictability. NieA undergoes no transformative epiphany, achieves no redemptive feats - her malice isn't even imbued with the kind of underlying charm that makes Oscar the Grouch, and for that matter, Snow White's Grumpy, so palatable. NieA couldn't be any less endearing if she had single handedly developed the social philosophy behind the Third Reich. Approaching salvation, NieA decides to provide a meal for her reluctant benefactor at one point in episode 10, but this moment of altruism is short lived and belies the solipsistic demon within - the demon that no one can forgive, except perhaps a Japanese audience that prides itself on its capacity to forgive.

But, of course, NieA isn't the focus of the show. She is merely a lens through which to view Mayuko, a girl with high ambitions and a strong intellect who allows her worries to eclipse her achievements. If NieA stands for anything, it's the embodiment of Mayuko's worries (as I've speculated in earlier reviews) - and if Mayuko can accept NieA as she is, she can accept life as it is and move forward with a renewed confidence. In fact, NieA's entrenched despicability is a necessary gauge by which to measure how Mayuko is able to overcome her depression, the cathartic joy of the show balanced precariously on Mayuko choosing to break out of her plodding routine. When NieA disappears in episode 11, it seems as if, symbolically, Mayuko's albatross has been severed at the rope. But, rather than being relieved, Mayuko is consumed by this loss in her life, and it isn't until NieA returns half way through episode 12 that she regains a sense of completion, as masochistic as this piece of her life is. Venturing to establish a point to this, I believe that, with the treatment of NieA as a necessary evil so to speak, Sato underscores his idea that the tapestry of life isn't something from which you can remove the unfavorable pieces. The key to Mayuko's redemption - at least in her own eyes if not in my rational, far less forgiving, eyes - is adjusting her life to fit harmoniously with NieA's aberrance. The change must happen with Mayuko, not NieA. Which, essentially, renders NieA a structural tool rather than a fully fleshed character.

Sato paints a beautiful portrait of non-clinical depression, capturing the unyielding malaise that accompanies any kind of transition or growing period for a young, disillusioned idealist - and he supplements this concept tonally by planting a sense of loss at the core of most of his characters - Momo Enohana has lost her husband, Kitomi has lost her youth, Karita has lost his wife, Chie has lost her mother, Mayuko has lost her father. Cutting across this grain, Mayuko does have the unconditional love and affection of her mother, a presence that Sato decides to depict as a nameless, faceless, distant nurturing force that we only experience as a faint voice on the other end of a telephone.

But most importantly, Mayuko learns to appreciate the world around her rather than strive for that continually recessing light at the end of the tunnel. She learns to see her life not as a series of transitions, but as an experience in and of itself.