Week 7
This week’s episodes both concerned love and what happens when the beloved is not quite… human. The first episode (“The One-Night Bridge”) marked a little bit of a return to the “creepy” earlier portions of the series, involving a small mountain village in which people who fall into a certain gorge come back alive, but altered. They no longer speak, simply sitting in the sun until, at a certain point, on the night when a mysterious bridge appears over the gorge for just one night, they die. The most recent victim of this phenomonon is a young woman who, while running away with her lover, had second thoughts on the bridge over the gorge, tried to turn back, and fell through. Ginko has been called in to cure her, but he discovers that she is not really alive at all: she is being controlled by rope-like Mushi that move by inhabiting dead bodies. The bridge that appears when the controlled people die actually consists of all these Mushi, travelling to a new location. Her lover, who is still residing in the village as an outcast, refuses to accept that she is dead; but the night of the one-night bridge comes and the Mushi cast aside the corpse to make their bridge. With the real bridge fallen, Ginko and the lover must cross this bridge to leave the village; but the lover, having doubts, unable to live without at least the physical presence of his beloved, turns back and falls through, leaving Ginko to continue his journey alone…
The next place that journey takes him is a bamboo forest, where a man lives with his wife and daughter. They are trapped; whenever they try to leave the forest they find themselves going in circles. Ginko discovers that he can leave the forest on his own, and eventually obtains enough information to discover that there is a bamboo shoot-like Mushi at the center of the grove, having a symboitic relationship with the bamboo. The man’s wife and daughter are actually part-Mushi, having been born from the life of the bamboo itself, and the man cannot return to his village because he has drunk the water that the bamboo Mushi produces. When she learns this the man’s wife cuts down the Mushi and sets him free, but as a result she and her daughter die and Ginko leaves, defeated. But the next fall, as the cycle of life continues, the man hears the wailing of infants coming out of their graves…