Mushishi (2005-2006)

Mushishi (蟲師). The most popular anime you’ve never heard of. Voted one of Japan’s all-time favourite anime and adapted into a movie directed by Otomo “OG of anime” Katsuhiro. If the guy who unleashed Akira on an unsuspecting western civilisation likes it, the chances are you should be paying attention too.

In terms of pace and setting this series was light years away from the juvenile “tits and tech” that anime is known and dismissed for. Mushishi bucks the trend for churning out a string of cheap, gristle-filled and classlessly titillating, pedophiliac sausages. If you ever wonder if all of Japanese society is willing to invest massively in regression, Mushishi could be the cultural red pill that wakes you up to the fact that animation’s association with children is entirely arbitrary and has no intrinsic relation to the artform itself.

And before you don your Smuggy Smuggerson hats and write in, yes we are aware of the irony of berating mass-regression while talking about animation and using “red pill” references from a children’s book and a sci-fi movie.

Factoid: Mushishi was based on a manga series written and illustrated by Urushibara Yuki that was published in Kodansha’s Afternoon magazine from 1999 to 2008.

Mushishi proudly ignores most of the things modern anime is supposed to do. Angry screaming chief? Cheeky, winking, bikini-clad, grenade-lobbing heroine with CGI rendered bouncing boulders of bōnyū? Not here squire.

Leave your preconceptions at the door and allow your heart-rate to settle to the folksy trill of Ally Kerr’s The Sore Feet Song, which acts as the theme song. It’s a brave choice that marks the show from the outset as emphatically non-generic (A non-Japanese, non-karaoke-friendly theme song? What is this, commercial suicide?) and establishes a tone of wandering that perfectly complements the central thread of the story.

Factoid: The Mushishi manga won both an excellence prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2003 and the 2006 Kodansha Manga Award.

Said story involves a spiritual/biological investigator/diagnostician/exorcist named Ginko (the titular “mushishi” or “mushi” specialist). Ginko wanders a beautiful and serenely rendered vision of rural Japan that hearkens back to a bygone but unspecified age in which kimono-clad village communities lived simple, rustic lives and everyone understood their function. The world is awash with elemental, ephemeral organisms called “mushi” that are invisible to all but the gifted few.

Factoid: The animated series consists of 26 episodes and a feature film adaptation was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, which premiered in 2007.

Ginko has a powerful ability to attract mushi wherever he goes and must remain on the move at all times. Once in a while on his travels a rumour reaches Ginko’s ear of someone who isn’t being a perfect cog in the communal machine. A little investigation usually reveals that the aberrant behaviour stems from an infection by parasitic mushi, existing in a realm somewhere between plant, animal and spirit. Sometimes visible, others not. The scale and variety of the mushi on display is startling and invigorating.

Some of the mushi endow their human hosts with extraordinary powers or grant them the gift of rebirth or fertility, but always at a costs and with an unnatural twist. Sometimes Ginko can draw out the mushi and the damage done can be repaired. Other times the rot cannot be stopped and tragedy is inevitable. Each and every tale in the 26 episode run feels deeply applicable to life and society and can quite easily haunt you long after your first viewing.

Factoid: No explanation is offered within the story as to why Ginko wears anachronistically modern clothes, although the author claims it’s a throwback to an earlier character design for Ginko when the show was to be set in the modern day.

Perhaps the show’s greatest achievement of all is its ability to create great drama, tension and horror from these collisions of human and mushi but largely avoiding the temptation to demonise either species. Both are simply trying to exist, survive and reproduce. Neither groups lays an exclusive claim on those rights and characters that claim otherwise are revealed as substandard mushi who lack the powers of perception to see the necessity of peaceful coexistence if not, in some cases, codependence.

It is interesting, perhaps, from a western point of view to analyse the fact that most of the aberrant and unexpected behaviour of the infected rocks the boat and destroys the “wa” (harmony) of the community in question. As such it is Ginko’s responsibility to act as a defender of Japan’s love affair with conformity and to quash both individuality and disruption wherever he finds it, despite the fact that the humans are sometimes quite enamoured of their symbiotic relationships with their mushi neighbours.

Factoid: The series won the grand prizes in the categories of television series and best art direction at the Tokyo International Anime Fair in 2006.

By focusing on human psychology and group behaviour in this way the show avoids becoming a didactic environmental “message piece”, despite its enticing rural backdrop. For the closest comparison try crossing Hugh Laurie’s Doctor House with a Ghibli movie and then throw in a chain-smoking, white-haired, one-eyed protagonist. Now you’re getting close.

Anyway, no amount of analysis or enthusiasm on our part can replace the experience of simply watching the show, so pick up the box-set today. It’s has more imagination than a school of 7 year olds on LSD, is more addictive than MSG cigarettes and is harder to forget than a traumatic childhood clown attack in which you were force-fed ginseng and 5 to 9 pieces of raw or freshly squeezed fruit daily.

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