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(C) Yuki Urushibara / KODANSHA/MUSHI-SHI Partnership
(C) Yuki Urushibara / KODANSHA/MUSHI-SHI Partnership
(C) Yuki Urushibara / KODANSHA/MUSHI-SHI Partnership
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January 22, 2008
by: Serdar Yegulalp
A fifth foray into a universe with its own laws of life, death and rebirth.
Review Hardware Used: Samsung SyncMaster 226BW 22” flat-panel widescreen display; Nero ShowTime 4 running on Windows Vista; Tannoy Reveal studio monitors; Yamaha AP-470 USB 1.1 outboard amplifier
Disc Description: Neither good nor evil, they are life in its purest form. Vulgar and strange, they have inspired fear in humans since the dawn of time and have, over the ages, come to be known as "mushi."
The stories of the Mushi and the people they affect are all linked together by a traveling Mushi-shi, or "Mushi Master," who seeks rare Mushi sightings and uses his shaman-like knowledge of Mushi to help the effected people. What are the Mushi and what do they want?
Features - English, Japanese audio
- Japanese subtitles
- Director’s Interview #8—Coloring
- Textless Songs
- Trailers
- 8 pg. Insert Booklet
- Mushi-shi Art Card
Disc Review
Content: (This section may contain spoilers.)
O Hell! what doe mine eyes with grief behold,
Into our room of bliss thus high advanc't
Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps,
Not Spirits, yet to heav'nly Spirits bright
Little inferior …
—Milton, Paradise Lost
Thus spoke Satan on beholding Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The same sort of envy, or lust, seems to radiate from many of the characters in Mushi-shi whenever they encounter the mushi, the strange organisms that have been the focus of the show. They see them not as forms of life unto themselves, not as things to co-exist with, but as something to be controlled and tamed, put to use, engineered into a solution for a problem that might not even really exist except in your head. And then comes Ginko, the mushi master who’s the closest thing the show has to a hero—if only because he knows better than to assume that life is something you can just shape at will to fix your problems, like putty filling a crack in a wall.
Over the course of the series we have learned that Ginko is hardly the only mushi-master out there—in fact, there’s a network of them with whole libraries and vast tracts of information at their disposal. What sets Ginko apart is his relatively enlightened attitude. He would rather deal with the mushi as things to be coaxed out and sent on their way, not things that have to be exterminated ruthlessly. He also understands, sometimes painfully well, that there will be occasions when a mushi manifests and there will be no easy solution to the problem it presents. There will be days when we are the problem, not them, and when that comes about—well, I quote Milton again: “Hell shall unfould, / To entertain you two, her widest Gates, / And send forth all her Kings.”
In the first episode of the volume, “String from the Sky,” a young woman falls victim to a mushi that dangles like a fishing line from the sky, reeling in whatever prey it can snag from below. Her husband-to-be is stupefied to discover that she hasn’t actually disappeared completely—she’s just changed form, and is still lurking in the house. If he doesn’t accept her as she is (as Ginko tells him), neither of them will be at peace.
“Sea of Brushes,” my favorite episode on the disc, deals with one of the aforementioned libraries of mushi lore, curated by a young girl born with a mushi curse that has left one of her legs useless. The only way for her to undo the curse and not pass it on to future generations is for her to transcribe ream after ream of information about how mushi are to be subdued, and place it in the library. Ginko pays her a visit and discovers, to his surprise, that the girl herself is as much of a library as any of the books she’s created. The way this is visualized is literally wonderful—as in, full of wonder—and ranks as one of the best scenes in the whole series. The scribe and her grandmotherly tutor use chopsticks to pick up sentences that have fled from their scrolls and restore them to their proper locations.
A mushi "librarian" (quite literally) internalizes her work for the sake of other mushi masters.
“Cotton Changeling” delves further into an idea that has been explored in previous volumes (and in the first episode of this disc, too): what happens when human and mushi merge, and take each others’ places. Here, a woman is infected by a mushi that devours and takes the place of her unborn, and she births not a baby but a cottony mass of green that flees and hides under the house. Then, every six months like clockwork, creatures that resemble her son appear and mature with dismaying speed—one after another until five of them show up in succession. Then they fall ill, and it is Ginko’s dismal duty to inform the mother that these “children” are not really hers. What he doesn’t know is that they are not five but still one, and capable of acting in defense of their existence just as any man can act against a mushi.
“Underwater Shrine” gives us an island where the mushi life cycle has further disrupted—or is that enhanced?—human life as well. There, those who die can be resurrected in a particularly strange fashion: their own female children can ingest a pill-like mushi that will allow them to give birth to their own parent. Ginko’s stunned by the way this works and is tempted to stay there himself, but understands all too well how these things work: when life is eternal, it is also forever cheap.
A stunned couple learn that their "child" is in fact a mushi changeling of sorts.
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