Umihara Kawase, which—if my studies at easyjapanese.org have taught me anything—translates to “Little Girl Blood Adventure,” is a coming of age story about one girl’s struggle with her changing body.
Having experienced her first period, Umihara steals her father’s fishing pole and starts her doomed odyssey back to childhood. She has taken her father’s means to provide a living—his very manhood, from a Freudian perspective—in rebellion against her own womanhood.
Umihara’s journey is dreamlike and her foes represent the sexual awakening from which she runs. She faces fish (representing the unclean vagina) as well as eels (the phallic). It seems fitting then, that the slippery phalluses toss pills at her—a thinly-veiled metaphor for man’s desire to suppress woman’s menstrual mood swings with modern medicine.
By using the fishing pole to battle these creatures, little Umi has already accepted that her only escape from her own unclean nature is a man’s device. We can read her trip into the wilderness is a temporary escape, as she prolongs the inevitable. As a woman, she will always be subservient to man and no amount of grappling hook action can change that. Just like the good old days my dad always talks about.
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