Movies: Mushi-shi Vol. #3

Or so it seemed, anyway. With the third disc Mushi-shi delves
a little more deeply into Ginko himself — how he came to be like this,
and why he makes the decisions he does. The second episode on the disc
(#12 total) deals with explicitly Ginko’s origins. His name was once
Yoki, and his family was killed in a landslide which he barely
survived. A woman named Nui, herself a mushi-shi, takes Ginko in
(however tentatively) and educates him about the mushi in the forest
around them — especially the mushi that dwell in the pond and cause the
fish there to only have one eye. Yoki himself has seen mushi on and
off, never quite certain if they were real or simply his imagination,
but what he sees in that place he soon finds impossible to ignore — and
the more he learns about why Nui is in that particular forest (and near
that particular pond), the more he is compelled to dig until all of
Nui’s secrets are revealed.

That revelation marks him for life,
and by the end of the episode we now have some inkling about why Ginko
wanders as well. It’s not just that mushi follow him and make trouble
for others, but for him to put down roots means to develop attachments
to that many more things that can be lost. (Moreover, from that point
on in the show, every time we look at Ginko we wonder if his cigarettes
and low-hanging white forelocks are meant to be a kind of homage to his
mentor.)

The third volume of Mushi-shi gives us the first in-depth hints so far into Ginko's past, and also into what makes him truly tick.The
other episodes are no less wonderful, even if they are entirely in the
mold of the show as we came to know and love it to begin with. “The
Sleeping Mountain” places Ginko near a mountain where another mushi-shi
is reputed to be living but has recently gone missing. Ginko is able to
use the mushi themselves as a kind of extension of his nervous system
to find him, but the man he finds has deeply questionable plans for the
mushi aggregate that entwines the whole of the mountain. He wants to
control what he finds there (even if his intentions are good), but
Ginko knows all too well something as primal as the mushi can only be
tapped into, not employed so selfishly. The way this episode comes full
circle — especially through the opening and closing shots — underscores
something else I love about the show as a whole: how it finds beauty in
everything it sees.

“One-Night Bridge” involves a girl who fell
from a chasm-spanning rope bridge years ago and somehow survived, but
is now strangely soulless and distant. Ginko correctly guesses the girl
has been infected by a mushi — a rope-like mushi that, not
coincidentally, also creates a bridge that spans the chasm one night
every several years. The girl was planning to run away with a young man
and lead what she believed to be a happier life with him, and the young
man has felt increasingly guilty about what he engendered. What he
cannot accept, however, is that the girl he loved simply does not exist
anymore, and that he has been laboring under a dangerous delusion.

In
“Inside the Cage,” Ginko finds himself trapped in a strange forest that
seems to lead those who venture in there around in circles. It’s a
mushi-trap, and what’s more Ginko finds a man and his wife and child
who have become ensnared. Worse, it falls to Ginko to explain to the
man that his child is the result of an unnatural union between his wife
and a mushi in the form of a bamboo tree.

The more I watch this show, the more I realize just how timid and
uncreative many anime are — how they’re willing to settle for violence
and phony spectacle instead of showing us something really new and original. Mushi-shi shows us something new and original, not just once but again and again, and I cannot say that for any other show now running.