Bethel Anime Club

Note: This week your President is on vacation, and thus is limited by lacks of time and of the resources generally at his disposal. Thus these synopses will be written in great haste with no fact-checking, and while they will convey the general idea of last week’s events they make no claim whatsoever to accuracy. Your normal neurotically complete service will resume next week…

Episode 11 and 12 Synopses:

Episode 11 (“The Sleeping Forest”): There’s a hole in the mountain. No, literally: a perfectly circular hole, through which the clouds can be seen. No one at the little roadside restaurant seems to notice it except for Ginko, which tells him straight away that it’s time to check out this “holy mountain.” When he arrives at the village on the mountain’s haunches, he discovers that its inhabitants are both frightened of the strange things that have been happening and nervous about the fate of their Mushishi, a man named Mujika who is the only person able to communicate with the “Guardian of the Mountain.” Mujika serves as the villager’s counselor, telling them the wishes of the guardian and allowing them to maintain their peaceful productivity. Ginko agrees to go into the mountainside forest to find Mujika, but is warned that no one who has gone into the woods recently has come out safely. As Ginko wanders through the woods he finds one of these people: a boy named Kodama who is suffering from a very bad fever. Ginko gives him a bitter restorative and tells him to stay alert: the mountain is a place where life gathers, a place of great puissance and noble virility but also a place of dangerous overwhelming inhumanity. For a normal human to spend too long in this forest is tantamount to a slow poisoning of overstimulation; thus Kodama’s fever. The Guardian of the Mountain, whose task is to harness and control these forces, must be damaged; Ginko has to find him as quickly as possible. He decides to go “Kodama riding,” the Kodama in this case being not his young friend but earth Mushi that congregate in places of power; by burrowing underground with them Ginko can quickly search the mountain for its Guardian. When he finds him, however, the Kodama are dissipated: the Guardian does not wish to be disturbed. Something is very wrong.

Ginko and Kodama decide to go searching for Mujika. As they do, they keep on hearing a mysterious bell; but since there are many odd phenomena in a place like this neither thinks that much of it. They finally find the old Mushishi trapped under a tree with a twisted leg; as he tells them that evening in his mountainside home, he made a foolish error and fell. He thought he knew the forest like his own backyard, but life managed to be too powerful for him. Ginko asks him for his story, but instead Mujika briefly relates how Kodama came to be his apprentice: because of the great forces in the mountain, the villager omen bear more babies than they can possibly handle. Some of the children are simply thrown away into the forest; Kodama was one such child, and Mujika found him and raised him. Eventually, his siblings having died, his parents wanted him back; but they allowed him to continue as Mujika’s pupil. But Ginko wants the real story: he has figured out that Mujika himself is the Guardian of the Mountain. The reason the balance has been upset is that Mujika was trapped and unable to fulfill his duties. Mujika admits that this is true and tells his story:

In his youth he was a traveling Mushishi, like Ginko, but he found that this one village consumed much of his time and attention: he returned there at least once a year, always to a hearty welcome and a spate of fresh cases. Particularly happy to see him each time he came back was a woman named Saku, to whom he began developing a strong attraction. But Mujika suffered from the same ailment that prevents Ginko from staying anyplace for too long: he attracts Mushi. He cannot remain anywhere for the safety of those around him—unless he becomes more than human himself. When one of the villagers foolishly killed the old Guardian, Mujika saw that his chance had come: he ate the flesh of the old guardian before it vanished and assumed the mantle. Now endowed with the power to guide and harness the Mushi of the forest, it seemed that there was nothing stopping his happiness; but poor Saku was not strong enough to handle the forces flowing around her and died young. So for the last half of his life Mujika has been alone, protecting his village from dangers they cannot possibly imagine.

Ginko is impressed, and bids the old man a fond farewell as he goes down the mountain to return Kodama and tell the villagers that Mujika is safe. But that night, he is awakened by the sound of the mysterious bell he heard earlier, and suddenly he realizes what it is: the Kuchinawa. The Mushi that eats Guardians. Mujika was not truly injured; he was summoning the Kuchinawa to consume him and take his place.Ginko realizes that he’s trying to throw his life away and runs up the mountain, pursued without his knowledge by the worried Kodama.

Ginko finally finds Mujika at the top of the mountain, silhouetted by the bleak light of early morning, with the Kuchinawa rushing up the mountain to devour him. The two begin to argue, but it’s too late: Mujika tells Ginko that a new guardian must be appointed before Mujika’s body fails him; and that he deserves to be eaten because of his crime. He has not told the entire story, and as the massive Kuchinawa smashes into them Ginko experiences Mujika’s memory as if it were his own: Saku was not just fond of Mujika, she was desperately in love with him. Her personality was of that type that could find its fulfillment only in one goal; although Mujika also loved her, he knew that his journey was too harsh for her and he did not wish to murder the current guardian for the sake of his own happiness. But Saku finds out how Mujika might be made to stay in her village, and she forces his hand: stealing his map and his Mushi poison, she kills the Guardian, a beautiful creature in the form of a giant boar, and offers its flesh to Mujika. (One of the images that best illustrates this entire series occurs during this flashback: a smiling Saku, with the Guardian’s blood drenching her kimono, telling Mujika that she’ll prepare something really delicious for him. The combination of beauty, horror, pathos, longing, and compassion implicit in this scene is one of the things that makes this show so great.) Mujika had no choice but to eat, in the understanding that, indirectly, he himself was responsible for the old Guardian’s death.

When Ginko wakes up, Mujika is gone and a frightened Kodama is hovering over him. Although Kodama can see Mushi, it turns out that Mujika taught him only the skills necessary for his survival in the living woods. The Kuchinawa will be the new guardian, and unlike a human it can last forever. Ginko’s work is done, and justice has been served.

So why does he feel so strongly that he has failed?

Episode 12 (“The One-Eyed Fish”): “Hey, kid. Are you alive?” So begins the episode that finally delves into Ginko’s past, a brief but poignant elegy of loss and compassion. A mysterious woman named Nui, who like Ginko has white hair and just one, green eye, finds a child named Yoki dying on the road and takes him back to her isolated home. (Nui’s voice is familiar: she is the narrator who introduces and concludes many of the previous episodes, and with whom Ginko had the odd conversation at the end of Episode 2.) There she nurses him back to health, telling him that he must leave as soon as he gets better. But as time goes by and Yoki gets healthier and healthier, he shows a strange reluctance to leave. Finally Nui confronts him and asks if he has a family at all. Yoki begins to cry, and tells his story:

He has never known his father. He and his mother were travelers, wandering from town to town peddling useless wares and (it is suggested) stealing to stay alive. Often Yoki saw things that others could not: strange threads hanging in trees, or terrifyingly enormous insect-like creatures that noiselessly walked through the sky. His mother always told him that these were nothing more than fantasies, with no power to hurt him; nevertheless Yoki was frightened by these visions. Just before Nui found him there was a landslide, and Yoki’s mother was killed; Yoki himself was badly hurt. He literally has nothing left to live for, and no valuable life worth speaking of. He is alone.

Although her face remains impassive, Nui feels pity for the boy and tells him that his visions are all of Mushi: it is true that they do not exist on quite the same plane of reality we do, but we can affect them and they us. She takes him out behind the house and says that in the pond lives one of the most dangerous Mushi there is: the Tokoyami, a creature literally composed of true Darkness (the Toko no Yami that we have seen before, in Episode 2) that comes out during the night and eats the smaller Mushi in the pond. But the Tokoyami has an effect on normal creatures as well, as is illustrated by all of the white, one-eyed fish in the pond: when morning comes and the first light hits in, the Tokoyami digests all of the Mushi it has eaten during the night, producing a brilliant white light that turns whatever looks at it into a creature like Nui and the fish. However, it is not actually the Tokoyami itself that puts out this light but a symbiotic creature that lives inside its body, a creature made of the light that can only be found in the midst of the True Darkness: the Ginko. The Tokoyami consumes, and the Ginko creates. But the light produced by the Ginko is not the only danger the Tokoyami presents: in exchange for Yoki’s story, Nui tells her own.

She became a Mushishi not by choice but by necessity: she was born with an ailment that attracted Mushi to her, and she had to learn about them both to survive and to equip herself for the journey her life needed to be. But before her travels began she had already married, and had a son; she often returned to her home village to visit them, and for her the travels were not a joy but an exile. But one year when she returned to her village she heard horrible news: a large group of villagers celebrating a festival, including her husband and child, had gone into the nearby woods and never returned. By examining the area Nui concluded that there was a Tokoyami in the region, for under the right circumstances, when the moon is cloudy and the night is dark, the Tokoyami can absorb people and make them a part of itself. Nui was sure that there must be some way to save the people that had been absorbed; sure, because if it was not so, then she could not see anything worth living for. But her attempt was a failure: she could not save any of her friends or family from their fate, and her contact with the Tokoyami made her into the white-haired, one-eyed person she is today. With no one else to care for, Nui ceased to worry about how many Mushi she attracted to her: she settled down and lived in solitary mourning.

Yoki asks the obvious question about how she keeps the Mushi hordes from becoming too overwhelming, and Nuis says that, although the Tokoyami consumes a considerable amount of them, her ever-present cigarette is the real secret: its smoke, a Mushi itself, drives other Mushi away. Yoki asks to try it, but his lungs aren’t strong enough. The next morning, he gets up before dawn—he wants to know why there are no fish that have lost both eyes to the Ginko. To his horror, he finds in the brilliantly white light that when a fish looses its other eye it simply vanishes—absorbed into the fabric of the Tokoyami. Nui finds him staring and, although she is touched by his worry for her, she is furious that he disobeyed her orders and risked blindness. She tells him that she is already doomed: when she tried keeping some of the blind fish away from the light she found that, although it happened more slowly, they also lost their other eyes and disappeared. Nui will become a part of the Tokoyami; it will happen soon. Yoki is crushed. Nui tells him that if he is ever alone, on a dark night, and the Tokoyami begins to consume him, it will try to eat his memory first. He must remember something to be saved: just his name will do. He can even make up a name, but if he does that he will become an entirely new person, his old memories vanished forever into the darkness.

The crisis point comes the next day: Nui wishes Yoki goodbye and begins to fade. But he won’t have it: he has no one else to live for. Frantically he follows her into the Tokoyami itself, where she once again berates him for refusing to obey orders. She cannot be saved, Nui says; but Yoki still might escape if he pays the price. He must lose one of his eyes, and his hair will be bright white for the rest of his life. Nui herself takes this price and vanishes, telling Yoki that he must do the rest on his own. But what rest? He cannot remember. The boy knows that he is forgetting something important, knows that he must do something, but he simply cannot remember what. Then, far beneath him in the blackness, he sees a beautifully white, green-eyed dragon-form swimming: the Ginko. That is his name, he realizes: old or new, it is how he will define himself for the rest of his life. He must say his name, and the only thing on his mind is that image of the destroying savior below him: “Ginko.”

He steps out of the Darkness and into the woods. He has forgotten; he has remembered; he is Ginko. He bears a burden, and the power to set others free. Shouldering his new name and letting his past fall away, Ginko steps into the future.