Week 3 Summaries
Episode 5 and 6 Summaries:
Episode 5 (“The Traveling Swamp”): Meet Adashino-sensei, Mushishi’s second reoccurring character: he’s a doctor and an avid collector of Mushi-related artifacts. As the episode opens Ginko is selling his finds to the monocled man, and proving himself capable of driving a hard bargain. Both the green sakazuki and the broken horns go, but after their sale Ginko sits back and looks pensive. He asks Adashino if he’s ever heard about the dying form of the Liquid Mushi. It’s a swamp—a swamp that travels. Ginko tells his story:
As he was making his way towards Adashino’s seaside village, Ginko repeatedly ran into suspiciously similar-looking swamps: seemingly every valley had one, but each time he looked back from the crest of the next hill the swamp would be gone. Finally in one of these swamps he saw a very odd sight: a young woman stepping out of the water, wearing a fine wedding kimono, holding a fish in her hand, and with hair so green it was as if it had been dyed in the swamp.
At first Ginko couldn’t get her to respond to him, but finally she asked him a simple question: “is there anything in this direction?” Ginko grinned and answered with another question: “this isn’t a normal swamp, is it?”
No, it wasn’t. The swamp was traveling, seeping in and out of the ground in different locations, and the girl was traveling with it. She wouldn’t tell Ginko why, but since she answered his question Ginko told her that the only thing in the direction she’s going is the sea. The girl seemed happy about that, and ignored Ginko when he pointed out that she won’t be able to follow the swamp any more if it reaches the sea. Ginko relaxed her by telling her a story about the Suiko, a liquid Mushi that turns anyone who drinks it transparent and, eventually, melts them into pools of water. The girl was intrigued enough that she told Ginko she’d never been afraid of the swamp: she was swimming in a river and, caught up in the flow, she saw a green thing moving through the water. It took her in, and when she awoke she found herself in a swamp in the hills. Her hair had turned bright green. She was sure that she died, and that the swamp brought her back; she wanted to follow it, because it’s the only thing she has a connection to.
That evening, as Ginko slept, the girl thought back on the events before her dive: a flood destroyed much of her village, and she became “the wife of the water God.” It’s impossible to tell in the flashback whether she volunteered or was “chosen;” what’s important is that after her mother dressed her in her wedding kimono, she was given a noble send-off as “the gracious one who saved the village from the flood” and she jumped off a cliff into the tumultuous river. She truly has nothing but the swamp left to live for.
Then the swamp began to swirl, and Ginko woke up just in time to see the girl preparing to dive with it. He asked her to wait, he still wanted to test the swamp, he still wanted to talk to her; but she simply turned around and thanked him for telling her so much. She will continue living in the swamp, until she turns to water and becomes a part of it. She wants to die. Ginko cursed himself for not realizing that the swamp is the dying form of the Suiko, and redoubled his speed on the journey towards Adashino. On his way he remembered what the girl said to him about the swamp: “it told me it was okay to live.”
Adashino tells Ginko that there is an old story in his village of an enormous green thing that came out of the river and died in the sea. In fact… he seems to remember a map… The two go into Adashino’s basement and dig up a map of the underground waterways in the area. Sure enough, the swamp’s progress follows one of the veins; it’s been using the waterway to travel. When they find a map of the area drawn several hundred years ago, they discover that the swamp is following the old path of the river—but fortunately, everything comes together at the river mouth. All they need to do is put a net at the river’s mouth, and they’re sure to catch the girl.
Adashino conscripts a bunch of the villagers, who don’t have much to do anyway since for some reason all of the fish have disappeared. As they wait for the swamp to appear, Adashino asks Ginko why he is so desperate to help this mysterious girl who has no desire to be saved. Ginko tells him about what it’s like to be a human and a Mushi at the same time: it’s painful, a living death, a sort of endless fading. Ginko wants to spare her that, because when he last saw her, so carefully wearing her wedding kimono, he thought that there was nothing more tragic than this woman who didn’t understand what it was she wanted.
The river begins to surge, and in a flash the dying Suiko flows through the net. It leaves a beautiful wedding kimono behind. Apparently Ginko has failed again…
The next day the sea is absolutely swarming with fish. They have come to feed on the body of the dead swamp, and as some of the fishermen haul in their catch they come across a startling thing: an almost-transparent girl, sleepily breathing the water. It is the girl that Ginko was trying to save. She is put in a bed and begins to revive; the villagers celebrate her recovery because she’s the one that brought the fish. But as soon as she wakes up, she begins to weep: after the swamp made it to the sea, just as it began to die, she felt a sudden terror at the prospect of merging with the swamp, an instinctual revulsion at what that process would entail for her. However, at the same time she never lost her great sorrow that the swamp was dying—and the conflict she saw in these two emotions nearly tore her apart. Ginko smiles when he hears this, and tells her that the Suiko has lived many hundreds of years. She got to go with it on its final journey: rather than weeping, should she not be glad that she was able to take such a remarkable trip?
Ginko has a talent for cheering Io (for this is what her name finally turns out to be) up. She decides to live in Adashino’s village, the place where the swamp died, by her own power. The swamp told her to live. So she’ll live.
As Ginko resumes his journey, he makes an interesting discovery: in each place the swamp surfaced during its journey, it left a smaller swamp: the next generation of Suiko. Life endures…
Episode 6 (“The Herd that Drinks Dewdrops”): “The sun will rise and set today. The flower that bloomed in the morning wilts at night. The sun will set today and rise again. Flowers all around will bloom. But, they are different flowers from yesterday.” With this cryptic incantation, one of my favorite episodes of Mushishi begins. Ginko is being ferried by a boy named Nagi to an island where some strange things have been happening. The island is barren and rocky, and it’s only accessible once every month, at the spring tide. Nagi is in love with a girl on the island named Akoya, but something has come between them—something that must have to do with Mushi.
It seems that the island supports a fairly large population for a place with such meager resources, and the hardships of life there are only increased by the draw for so many people: the “Living God,” who can cure even the most virile of diseases. The Living God is actually a miraculous person: it’s always someone from the ruling family of the island, and within six months after each Living God dies a different Living God is found. The Living God cannot speak, and barely seems conscious, but each day something miraculous happens to its body: it withers and grows old in an instant, and each night it seems to die. When it dies it releases a strange scent, and those who inhale this scent are gradually cured from all their physical ailments. In return, the island population must make many offerings of food and goods to the Living God, to the extent that they are barely able to feed themselves. Some of the islanders see in this system justice and an expression of faith; Nagi finds exploitation and lies. For the current Living God is none other than Akoya, and Nagi remembers the time she was just a normal child. They were great friends, but Akoya always seemed sad. She only smiled when Nagi told her that someday he would take her away from this poor island. One day, during a spring tide, Akoya’s father came while they were playing and said that he had something important for Akoya to do. He took her away, and the next time Nagi saw her she had become the Living God.
Some time after this, Nagi was picking plants when he overhead a conversation between Akoya’s father and another member of the ruling family: someone else had been cured. How wonderful it was, they said, that people could be cured with nothing but hypnosis—Akoya hadn’t been the best child, but she was surely serving her family well now. Nagi tried to expose the lie behind the Living God to the rest of the islanders, but he failed and was expelled. If anyone found out that he was back, he (and probably Ginko) would most likely be killed.
“It seems I’ve come to a troublesome place,” groans Ginko after Nagi has shown him around. But the boy is passionate: he wants the Mushishi to examine Akoya and to heal her if he can. Ginko agrees and the two sneak into Akoya’s room on a day when public viewing of the Living God is not permitted. Ginko discovers a mysterious Mushi living in her nose, and asks Nagi if there are any others with Akoya’s symptoms. There are: a small group of people that have been isolated on a rocky cape. They are praised as those whose faith was so strong they drew closer to the Living God, but Ginko finds that they all have the same Mushi inside them. Ginko asks if there’s some place that can only be accessed during a spring tide, and it turns out that there is: a cave at the tip of the cape. The Ginko finds a large number of rats that have been similarly affected, and after a long series of dissections he finds a method of driving the Mushi out.
By tapping a pin into Akoya’s forehead, Ginko cures her. She is glad to see Nagi, but for some reason she seems incredibly sad to have been released from her state. She tells them how, when she became the Living God, her father presented her with a beautiful morning glory and invited her to smell it. As soon as she did, she changed. It’s only three days until the next spring tide and Akoya agrees to pretend to be the Living God until then, when Nagi can expose her father and take her away forever. But the next day Ginko finds her sitting by the sea and looking very unhappy. She can’t bear it, she says– she can’t bear the weight of the future. When she was the Living God, every day was a completely new experience, and every night was restful beyond imagination. Each hour seemed completely new and fulfilling; her thoughts couldn’t keep up with all of the experiences that kept flowing into her. But now each day is only the continuation of the day before; life drags on and on into a future that ends, not at the sunset, but at some indeterminate point far in the future. How can she cope? What should she do now that she has time for thought? Ginko tells her that she was probably living in the Mushi’s timeframe: the Mushi in her nose had a lifespan of only one day; each night it died and left a child that would live out the next day. As a shorter-lived creature it had a different sense of time than humans do, so when Akoya’s human senses lived in the Mushi’s time, she experienced the kind of life she described. But Akoya is not comforted.
Finally the day arrives. Ginko and Nagi head into the cave to retrieve one of the flowers, but Akoya is found out by her father. He swiftly discerns what is going on and heads for the cave with a small gang of men to get another flower and to kill the two outsiders. He corners Ginko and Nagi underground, in the cave of morning glories that bloom in the darkness, and the two are forced to run deeper into the cave as the tide rises. Meanwhile the desperate Akoya finds a group of islanders and pleads with them to save Nagi; shocked to hear the Living God speak, they do as she asks. Ginko and Nagi are rescued at the last moment, but the islanders find Akoya’s father and, seeing that he has one of the flowers, beat him to death. Ginko and Nagi surface as Akoya weeps over her father’s body. “I killed him,” she says, and she snatches the morning glory in his kimono. As Nagi watches in horror, she deeply inhales. “If I’m over there, I can survive.”
Ginko stays another month to finish curing the people on the cape. Some of them are grateful, and some of them choose to return to their old state. Nagi is caring for Akoya, but he admits that he no longer knows what he will do. Now that he has nothing to plan for, now that Akoya will be a Living God forever, what can he live for? Ginko suggests that he just live normally: find a way to enlarge the cave so that the islanders can fish, look after Akoya, just live. After all, he has a practically infinite amount of time ahead of him…
June 26th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Why I Love These Episodes:
Oh, wow, I love these episodes. “The Traveling Swamp” was the episode that first made me fascinated with the character of Ginko. In previous episodes he’s shown up, done his thing, and left. Most have actually been more related by the “guest star” than by Ginko; we’ve seen his work, but we haven’t really gotten inside his head. Here Ginko opens up and reveals something fascinating: he really, really cares. At the episode’s beginning, as he sells his items to Adashino, you think that you’ve finally figured out why he does what he does: money, prestige, and his slightly obvious general narcicism. He wants to be a savior without the sacrifice.
Except then he tells his story, and although your opinion of his general nature doesn’t necessarily change, you suddenly have a motivation for his actions in this episode: he loves the green-haired girl in the swamp, in a manner that seemingly goes against his nature: unselflessly, caringly, without control. Like many elements of Mushishi (which is a show that works almost entirely subliminally), it is impossible to say exactly how you see that he loves her so much. It is something in the joy he takes in telling her about the Suiko; something about the way he smiles at her; something in the hollow falseness of his protests, when she leaves, that he hasn’t tested the swamp yet.
But when Adashino asks Ginko why he is trying to save Io, Ginko does not talk about his own reaction to her; it would have been very easy to say, “there’s something I like about her,” and leave it at that. No, Ginko speaks of Renzu and her future in the Mushi world, and the fact that Io does not understand the fate that awaits her. He speaks of feeling pity and sorrow when he saw her; he speaks of her not as a lover, but as one who loves. (If you see the difference: it is not that he is attracted to her per se, but that he wants what is best for her: the Agape model of love.) And when Io turns out to be alive, Ginko’s joy is immediate and obvious; but although he does run to her side, he does not embrace her, or hover over her, or ask her to come with him. He merely comforts her with some very simple words, and leaves to resume his travels.
But wait—where is the self-serviceability in this? If Ginko had no particularly strong desire to be with the girl (and indeed at the very end of the episode he seems more interested in the swamp’s babies than in her fate), why all the effort? I’m not sure if Ginko himself could answer these questions properly, but several things are clear: Ginko is neither as mercantile as he appears at the beginning of the episode nor interested in “denying himself” anything he desires (he has not left the girl because he thought that some kind of “tragic fate” held them apart—although we shall see later on that Ginko does have pressing reasons not to become too close to any potential romantic interest). Instead we see in Ginko that mysterious quality I mentioned in the series description: when he sees someone suffering, when he sees some misfortune that could be changed to fortune or a wrong that could be righted, he is simply incapable of preventing himself from trying to help. He judges himself not by the success or failure of his missions—if he is trying to save people from the Mushi (as we shall later see other Mushishi attempting to do) than Renzu at least would have been a total failure—but rather by the extent to which he succeeds in helping people to find peace, or healing. That is why Renzu and Shinra are his greatest success thus far; that is why in the cases of Sui and Maho the Mushi had to die for the case to be resolved; and that is why Ginko so desperately tried to avoid letting Jin find out the truth about his ailment, and why Jins eventual self-destruction left Ginko so torn up. Ginko is someone who cannot forgive himself his failures, and cannot present himself from acting based on motivations far more noble than he would ever admit.
Admit ? Yes, there are also that strangely roguish, devil-may-care attitude Ginko sometimes adopts, his tendency to seem blunt and uncaring, his absolute willingness to use trickery and deception to force people to help themselves (OK, thats just good Buddhist Upaya, but I havent got time to discuss that), and of course his lack of manners and bizarre dress. Are these flaws simply a tough-guy façade Ginko assumes in order to prevent others from seeing how easily hurt he is on the inside? Perhaps to some extent he behaves as he does to keep his patients from suspecting just how much of a softhearted busybody he is (this is particularly noticeable in the later rainbow episode), but I think that theres no such simplistic duality in his fundamental nature: he really is rude, insensitive, self-absorbed. What makes Ginko so fascinating is the way all of these aspects of himself form, not conflicting personalities, but different facets of a single whole: human personality incarnate, infinite complexity within a highly limited consciousness.
And of course I havent even mentioned Ginkos attitude towards the Mushi themselves—that will have to wait until a later episode. Suffice it to say that, just as his care towards Io in this episode may be taken as a symptom of a general love for all humanity, his tenderness for the swamp may be seen as an example of his respect, not just for the Mushi, but for all life. That is why his focus is on resolving conflict rather than helping humans to win. Ginko is someone who can see every perspective at once; he seems to ascribe to a form of Buddhist morality without the tenet that life is suffering—a very Japanese way of viewing the universe.
Ginko will only continue to become more fascinating as the show goes on and more of his past and present selves are revealed. As I said, it is at this point in the show that Ginko went of my list of characters like Motoko Kusanagi, Reki and Rakka, Ashitaka and San, and Chiyoko Fujiwara as truly live animated people.
***
But it took until the next episode for the series itself, which I was still somewhat undecided on because of its generically elusive nature, to really cement its position as one of my favorites. The Herd that Drinks Dewdrops is a miniature tour-de-force (if Im allowed to say that), a masterpiece of that subtly different (yet completely human) perspective on the universe that first attracted me to anime. The setting itself is wildly archetypical, indeed fantastic in fairy-tale manner: an island that can only be reached one time a month, upon which dwells a mysterious power that holds all the inhabitants under its power. The themes of the episode are also basic and universal: death and rebirth, the validity of faith, the attempt to make a better life, the question of what it means to be content, that quest to find a cure that is so strongly associated with Ginko. But Mushishis point of view is unique, and the conversation between Ginko and Akoya after she is cured is a perfect example of its slightly shifted thinking.
In the usual fairy-tale model, Akoyas deliverance from her state of ineffectualness and unawareness would be a liberation, and would mark the end of the story: the princess has been saved, as it were. But here it seems that the state of entrapment was itself the liberation the girl so desperately desired: liberation from the future. Humans have a tendency (and this is true across cultural and ethnic boundaries—it seems to be an element of the way we interact with the world) to think always of the future: when we are small we cant wait to grow up; when we are in our early schooling years we are defined by our acceptance or rejection of the fact that we are being prepared for life in the real world; if we go to college, we do so in order that we may be better qualified for a productive (or worthwhile) life; we work for the majority of our lives, always looking forward to retirement, and at retirement we prepare ourselves either for death or the afterlife. I am not saying anything that has not been said a million times before, but somehow we have a way of placing value on our present activities based on how helpful they will be to us in the future (thats why buying nice food, or going to a movie, which are inherently limited-time activities, are viewed as somehow less justifiable than buying, say, a boat, which has the potential for many years of use). When Akoya was in her Living God state, she discovered that her inability to make plans or even to form trains of thought was not the nightmare this sort of wisdom would suggest it is: she did not give up much future pleasure because she thought only of the present. Rather, her enjoyment of life was increased a hundredfold: she could forget wrongs, live without fear, stop that desperate and hopeless attempt to maintain herself by constantly sifting through the complex of memories and expectations that (as Oshii often points out) are all we can point to as our personality. She just was; she lived in the eternal moment, and she found that her human spirit was far more at home there than it was in the concrete world of endless futures and the imposing demands of planning.
But hold up! Perhaps, from this perspective at least, the weight of the future is indeed a terrifying thing. Certainly its unpleasant to have to think ahead all the time, to make our decisions based on the consequences of our actions, but isnt there also something admirable in the struggle it entails? Isnt it necessary to recognize that, although life can be hard, we must not run away as Akoya does? Ginko seems to take this into account at the end of the episode, when he makes his just live speech to Nagi, but at the same time he cannot think of any response to Akoyas lament for her lost innocence, other than to explain the mechanics of what happened to her. When Akoya runs away from the death of her father and from all the suffering she has engendered, Ginko does not even try to save her again: Nagi is the only one who sees a failure, while Ginko sees a liberation (back to the backwards fairy-tale archetype: the princess is enthralled by reality, not by illusion). Are we to conclude, then, that Nagi is strong enough to live properly while Akoya must become the Living God in order to survive (and therefore that all of the weak have some license to escape reality, while the strong are required to bear them)? I think not. I think that once again we are seeing Mushis beautifully different logic at work: it is not that Akoya is cowardly for choosing over there when she sees her fathers body. Indeed, the act is actually a sign of great strength: Akoya now understands that by becoming the Living God she is leaving behind herself and entering a state in which she cannot distinguish her own perceptions from those of the Mushi. While Nagi cannot choose but to cling to his uniform and heavily structured (yet, in a sort of masochistic fashion, comforting) reality, Akoya leaps into the abyss of subsumption and makes the ultimate act of self-denial. Akoya is not weak. She has simply seen how she can be saved, and destroyed herself to achieve that salvation.
I do not make any judgments about the validity of this perspective on life; but certainly it was, for me, a way in which I had never thought about things before. It really made me ponder (even as it invested me deeply in the characters and the story itself)—and that is why I love this episode. (And, come to think of it, this series).
Phew, I could go on forever (be glad I didn’t!)…