Bethel Anime Club

Episode 3 and 4 Synopses:

Episode 3 (“Tender Horns”): “When I covered both my ears, my forehead swelled up and four horns grew.” The speaker is Maho, a young boy with—yes—four skin-covered horns on his forehead, two small and two large. As the episode opens, he is listening to the sound of lava…

Ginko has arrived at a small village deep in the base of the mountains, so sheltered by its landscape that on snowy nights when no wind blows there is such complete silence that sound itself appears to vanish. The nominal head of the town, an elderly woman named Shirasawa, has called Ginko to investigate a mysterious phenomenon that is afflicting the villagers: sudden deafness, always starting on these completely silent nights, and always occurring in only one ear. Ginko tells them that the culprit is Un, a snail-like Mushi that eats sound. When its environment is entirely silent, it is often driven to take refuge in the human’s inner ear; its presence does not damage the ear, but the Un eats all the sound that the human would normally hear and thus the effect is deafness. Ginko seems to solve the problem easily by finding the nests and driving the Un out of the village, than curing the villagers by pouring a mysterious concoction in their ears: salt water. (The Un really are like snails: they hate the salt so much they leave immediately.) It seems like it’s been a good day’s work for Ginko, but Shirasawa tells him that there’s one more, special case: her grandson, Maho, who is deaf in both ears and has also… well… grown horns.

For Maho, the problem is not that he can’t hear anything: far from it. He can hear a vast cacophony of jarring, whistling, cawing, shrieking, whining, glistering, and ululating. He says that these sounds come in from his horns and drown out the everyday noises. Ginko identifies this as an incredibly rare Ah, a type of Mushi that coordinates with the Un: it eats silence, and when the Un have taken up residence in someone’s ears there is no quieter place that that person’s head. But the Un also like to communicate, it seems, and thus they put out their own ears (the horns) to tap in on the Mushi chatter. It’s not their fault if the host can hear it, too. Ginko knows of only one other case of Ah infestation, and the treatment was a failure: everything was tried, but the host became exhausted from the constant noise and died at the end of the winter.

By lighting a special incense, Ginko is able to reduce the noise that Maho hears enough to have a conversation with him. It seems that Maho is listening to the sound of all the Mushi in the world, and it’s literally driving him mad. He tells Ginko of his mother, who suffered from the same disease. Just before she died she put her hands firmly over his ears, and said something very important. Very important, but Maho can no longer remember what it was; every time he tries, the noise increases beyond endurance. Ginko asks Shirasawa about this and she tells him that her daughter died at the end of the last winter, just like the woman in Ginko’s story. A day before her demise, she said that the sound had finally gone away—and it made her sad, and lonely.

As Ginko ponders treatment methods while sitting on the roof (naturally), he sees Maho heading out on his own for a walk and, being the super-responsible caretaker he is, lets the kid go. This turns out to be a bad idea, because it begins to snow and Maho is very late. Ginko heads out to find him, ruminating on silence, until he sees a cave with a glimmer of light. There he finds Maho… along with an absolutely enormous nest of Un. Reasoning that this many Un must have an Ah among them, he searches until he finds the Ah, and (to Maho’s shock) lets it enter his ears. Carefully mouthing the words, Ginko asks Maho to place his hands over his (Ginko’s… dang, I hate constructing a sentence like this) ears. Pop! The Ah actually explodes, leaving mucus all over Maho’s hands.

Finally Maho remembers what his mother said when she put her hands over his ears: “Can you hear it? This is the sound of your mother… when I feel so scared I could disappear, I listen to this sound.” The Ah’s weakness, Ginko explains, is the sound produced by living organisms: exterior sounds the Un will intercept, but the Ah can’t do anything if you press your hands to your ears and listen, very closely, for the rumble of your body: the heartbeat, the noise of the muscles in your arm working, yourself. It’s a noise that sounds like lava. Maho tries it, his Ah bursts, and his horns fall to the ground, silently.

As Ginko leaves he takes the two larger horns as a reward—they are very rare items, after all—but he leaves Maho with the two smaller ones, telling him that the new, quieter world might be frightening. Maho accepts the gift but says that, if he is ever scared, he can simply listen to the sound of the lava inside him.

Episode 4 (“The Pillow Lane”): “A Mushishi?” “My name is Ginko.” Ginko is talking with a rather aristocratic-looking swordsmith and his wife. The swordsmith has been having prophetic dreams, and Ginko explains that this is because of Mushi that live in those dreams: unless they are controlled, they will breed ceaselessly. Ginko gives the swordsmith medicine, and says that he will return when the medicine’s about to run out.

“You must not converse with someone talking in their sleep. For those are words from the riverside of the underworld.”

Less than a year later, Ginko returns and is shocked to find the town in ruins. The swordsmith, Jin, is waiting for him. He looks like he’s been through Hell. Jin accuses Ginko of being a trickster, and then tells his story.

At first things went wonderfully for Jin, his wife Kinu, and their little daughter Mayuki. [Holy cow! Another one! I guess we need to start counting Mayus...] Jin’s dreams are almost salvific: they locate a water vein, enabling the villagers to extend the fields, and they predict a landslide, saving the lives of the people in the area. The fact that the frequency of the dreams is increasing doesn’t seem bad at all… but Jin is becoming frightened. He tells Kinu that whenever he has a prophetic dream he feels like he has caused the event to happen; he is not a savior but an agent of destruction. Kinu tells him he is wrong, he has been sent to liberate everyone from the agony of incertainty, he is blessed. But… a tsunami that Jin failed to predict hits the village, and Mayu is killed. Jin and Kinu are crushed, and the villagers (illogically, but naturally) blame Jin for the disaster.

What happens next is truly horrific. Jin has a nightmare about a green illness that consumes all the villagers, and the next day it happens: beginning with Kinu, their bodies are covered with a mold-like substance that “breaks them down like mud.” Be very glad I am not giving you a picture of this. The ones that were closest to Jin died first.

So did Ginko trick him? Why did he tell him that the Mushi only gave prophetic dreams? Because, Ginko says, these are not Mushi that Jin can ever be rid of. They are the Imeno no Awai, and they will stay with their host for the rest of his life. They live in Jin’s dreams, and when they are too crowded they will emerge and make those dreams into reality. But Ginko has never heard of a case of such scale and swiftness; it seems that somewhere, there is a road that the Imeno no Awai are using to get into Jin’s head. If Ginko can find that road, and close it off, he can control Jin’s dreams.

He almost doesn’t get the chance: Jin attempts suicide by swallowing all the medicine at once. As Ginko attends his sickbed Jin begins to talk in his sleep. “Kinu… Mayu… forgive me.” Ginko tells him that he’s at no fault, and neither are the Mushi: both are simply living their lives. There is nothing to be forgiven. But Jin rambles on: he says that he is watching flocks of geese flying through the valley. Suddenly, Ginko can see the dream as well: they are flocks of Imeno no Awai, thousands of them, flying through Jin’s dreamscape. In his dream, Jin sees Kinu and Mayu, who also tell him that there is nothing to forgive, and then his own sleeping form, with Ginko watching over it. In the panel by his head, a fire is burning, and in the blink of an eye, that fire leaps onto his pillow and into reality. Ginko tosses Jin out of the house, waking him up, and begins to look for water; but Jin has figured out the path the Mushi are using, and he won’t have it. Grabbing a sword, and ignoring Ginko’s cry to stop, he slices open his pillow. Moments later, blood begins to pour from his own chest and he collapses, wondering why.

But Jin does wake up, once again saved by Ginko’s medicinal knowledge. Ginko explains that the root for the word “pillow” (makura in Japanese) means “the storehouse of the soul,” the place where the spirit rests while the body sleeps. (This is a genuine Japanese folk belief.) It can also be the Imeno no Awai’s resting place, and it is their path. By destroying it, Jin has lost something very precious to himself—for since the path is also closed to him, he can never let his soul rest. He can never dream.

The final part of the story is told in voiceover: some time later, Ginko hears about Jin’s end. He began working as a swordsmith again, but something was different. He never slept, afraid that something terrible would happen; and gradually, he lost his soul. He went mad, and began wandering out into the road and swinging his sword wildly; in the end, he stabbed himself.

For the first time in the series, Ginko must accept the fact that he has, by withholding information and trying to keep an already-dead man alive, failed.