Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we arrive at the end of a long and fascinating journey, as we explore the final episode of The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. Over the course of its run, Fujiko Mine has explored the politics of sexuality with a frankness and maturity I’ve elsewise never seen in anime, excepting the more adolescence-focused analysis of Utena. The show has swum through the nuances of femininity as an ideal, sexual agency as a weapon, and the ever-pressing strictures of society with grace, and beyond that, it’s done it without ever feeling the least bit didactic or slow. Beyond anything else, Fujiko Mine has always been fun, never compromising on either its intellectual perspective or its love of adventure.

The show was frankly at its best in its episodic vignettes, where Fujiko was better able to push back against the world’s fetters. But I’m told this final arc ends with a bang, and am eager to see what Okada and Yamamoto have cooked up. For the last time, let’s return to The Woman Called Fujiko Mine!

Episode 13

“It is a prison of sexiness from which she cannot escape.” As ever, this opening does a remarkable job of compressing this show’s entire narrative into its monologue and imagery. This time, I’m struck by how it seems to frame Fujiko’s embrace of thievery as almost a replacement for her initial captivity by the Count. She is still desired, still wrapped in the finery of others, and still at risk of being caged, but all of those conditions are now defined on her own terms. As a result, she is still trapped on a greater level, as she is still defining herself in relation to the Count

With this last two-parter named after the show itself, our attention is drawn to the specificity of the phrasing: “A Woman Named Fujiko Mine.” “A” woman, not “the” woman, as Fujiko Mine is more of a category than an identity

As Fujiko confronts the count, Lupin addresses her from the monitor room. Though he’s more sympathetic than the Count, our view here reminds us that Lupin is fundamentally idolizing and redefining her in much the same way, as his view of her is also obscured by a monitor

“Your puppet strings have been cut. A woman who acts like a puppet is no fun. Show us your own strength, Fujiko.” I like the precise degree of interference we’re getting from Lupin here. It’d be unsatisfying for him to outright save her from her fate, and it’d also ring hollow if she just suddenly overcame her fear of the Count, so having him provide the encouragement for her to seize her own strength feels like just the right degree of assistance

“I will end my nightmare here and now!” Good to have you back, Fujiko. It structurally made sense that she’d fall into despair and dependence for a portion of this final arc, but confident Fujiko is just so much fun that it was hard not to miss her

The Count is actually a dried corpse, and Fujiko’s foot lacks the brand she remembers receiving as a child. Curiouser and curiouser

Lupin is forced to flee the monitor room, after more of that hallucinogenic dust sends Jigen into a frenzy

Zenigata urges Oscar to remember his pride, which is possibly the worst thing Zenigata could say to him right now. Oscar’s desperate grasping for some kind of “stainless honor” was both his drive and his undoing, forcing him to deny his own nature in order to remain close to the ideal he’d admired. Asking him to remember his pride is essentially just asking him to remember how far he’s “fallen”

Of course, Zenigata wouldn’t be the man Oscar fell in love with if he said anything different

OH MY GOD GOEMON. “In order to perfect my swordsmanship, I wished to discover who you truly are. And I have… you are… my girlfriend.” This series’ treatment of Goemon is fucking amazing. Yes, he is an under-socialized weirdo who truly believes he’s a samurai – but in a world full of actual predators, Goemon’s cosplay chivalry is actually oddly charming

And then Jigen and Goemon square off, each of them entirely certain the other is an owl man, each of them equally complicit in an entirely pointless battle. Yamamoto’s hand at the wheel provides such a refreshing recontextualization of all these classic action tropes. In most anime, this fight would be treated with absolute seriousness, as if these two men fighting is the most important thing in the world. In Yamamoto’s hands, it’s emphasized as pointless and then gleefully ignored – a smirk from the camera, emphasizing how the reigning fascinations of boys’ media are ultimately pretty silly stuff

The park’s secret tower has no stairs, and its interior walls are lined with massive letters that glow in sequence to create words. It seems like this may actually be the Count’s original “Fujiko Mine,” as it begs for forgiveness from “Papa”

Yep. At the top of the tower, an emaciated woman lies in a bed, with computers constantly relaying the messages of her eye movements

“Almeida was performing experiments designed to test memory alteration through intense brainwashing.” This explains how Fujiko could have literally died at some point in the past, if her memories were then implanted into the current Fujiko. The “ghosts” of Lupin’s earlier investigation are becoming a bit more explicable

Yep, this woman in the bed is actually Dr. Kaiser’s daughter, Aisha. “A” Fujiko Mine indeed – it seems like the Count created a replicable ideal of Fujiko Mine to implant in any number of girls

Back in the pointless battle, Jigen pulls off some seriously ridiculous gun trickery, as he throws and then grabs his own gun while firing in order to put an unexpected spin on the bullet. Yamamoto may know this stuff is silly, but she also knows that fun things are fun

So it was Aisha who sent the order to kill Fujiko, and who is now desperately apologizing for offending the Count. The only agency she could manage was attempting to kill her replacement, and retain her position as the Count’s caged bird

This production’s art design style lends itself so well to these greyscale flashbacks; so much of the texture and shading is built into the linework that you don’t need color to create any sense of depth or differentiation. Frankly, a lack of color actually lets you appreciate the delicate linework even more clearly; no surprise then that the opening embraces a greyscale aesthetic as well

“He sought to create a ‘holy maiden’ of his own.” Presumably the perfect convergence of Madonna and whore, built for man’s satisfaction, but still an emotional innocent. Like that painted lady, drawn up to satisfy the urges of men, but still with the mind of a child. A perfect fantasy of control and non-personhood, with his doll’s “holiness” ultimately just implying a vacuum into which he can force his own desires. For most of human history and for many people still, this empty, accommodating ghost is the feminine ideal

And of course, having already been contorted into his “perfect form,” Aisha chose to continue the experiments even when Almeida died. His vision lived on through the trauma he inflicted on his victims

Oh man, such a good match cut here. We jump from Aisha’s desperate, denying eyes right to Oscar, making explicit the ruin that society’s demand for specific performances has wrought on each of them. Neither Aisha nor Oscar were ever given a chance to express their own identities, and now both of them seek only destruction, having long ago abandoned any hope of disobeying the systems that made them

Even without the conditioning, Oscar can easily relate to their song about “the woman everyone sees in their dreams”

Aisha implanted other girls with her memories in order to seek a possible future for herself, but all of her subjects ended up killing themselves, still trapped in the cage of the Count. Only Fujiko, who came to their estate as a maid, survived the treatment

Aisha was initially happy to see a woman living a fulfilling life even with her memories, but when she realized Fujiko had only achieved that by locking away her memories, she grew furious. Fujiko was now just another reminder of her own broken nature

In fact, the Count’s memories weren’t even responsible for making Fujiko a thief – that was all her, and she’d actually visited the mansion in order to steal a valuable gem. I love to see this, a firm refutation of her identity being in any way defined by the Count’s grasp

“I’ve always been stealing and having sex. Regardless of the fake past foisted upon me, I’ll always be myself.” Ahhh, what a wonderful refutation of a potentially disappointing conclusion. “Fuck your brainwashing, I love sex and stealing because sex and stealing are awesome”

“That’s the woman named Fujiko Mine.” And here, at last, comes that ownership of identity attendant to “the” woman

I see. And the last person left to fulfill Aisha’s wishes was Minerva, her mother. She’s pretty nimble for such an old lady

Free from her mother’s influence, Fujiko gives Aisha a taste of freedom before her body fails

And we end on a classic Lupin moment, as he embraces both the visual look and comedic tone of classic Lupin, leaping for “Fujiko-chan” only for his car to disintegrate beneath him

And Done

Ah, what a ride! I’d heard some ambiguous things about this show’s conclusion, and so I was delighted to see it so deftly avoid all the traps I was concerned about. “Fujiko’s persona is actually just a reflection of the Count’s influence” would have been a thematically disastrous point to end on, and this episode did precisely the opposite: it affirmed that Fujiko’s choices are her own, and that no one can claim ownership of either her body or her identity. At the same time, the weight of both trauma and society’s expectations was still emphasized throughout, with the twin narratives of Aisha and Oscar demonstrating the difficulty of seeking true freedom. A searing yet graceful punchline to Fujiko’s tale, and a finale that clearly affirms this production as one of the great works of anime!

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