Back to chiryoushi's Profile chiryoushi's Profile

I first came into contact with Mushishi through a snippet of footage seen in an AMV. I still remember that particular fraction of a second quite clearly, so striking was its' aesthetic. I won't give anything further away here.

I watched Mushishi over the course of a fortnight. It became the thing I looked forward to in the evening and rapidly took second place out of all fictional works I have ever experienced.

Mushishi is, as closely as I can define it, an absolutely charming collection of ghost stories. Told from an unknown point of view, it follows a single lone traveller through an old land ... - a country that has not yet seen the march of human progress, a country that could be old Japan, old Britain or old Germany, but for the language the people speak. I say this because the stories feel as though they could happen anywhere, and the people feel as though they could exist anywhere, and the landscape looks as though it could be anywhere. This 'anationalism' lends Mushishi a feeling of timelessness, and it allows each story to be told to anyone, regardless of home or way of life.

It resembles, in some small ways, pre-Christian British and European folklore - stories about land-gods and spirits that are not human and can never be human and can never understand humans. Stories that happen to be united by a single calm, inquisitive character.

Some of these stories, under the surface, convey a very important message, and one that cuts deep: desperation, in the form of possessiveness or hope or stubbornness, festers quickly. Others are rather more fatalistic: if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time you may suffer ill fortune that you did not deserve: what matters is how you respond to it.

In short, Mushishi is restful. It does not tell Western stories in that it does not necessarily rely on action or drama or even interpersonal strife to drive it - in fact in several cases, it feels very much more like a documentary that just happens to catch details and events in peoples' lives in passing. It tells spiritual stories and sometimes those stories sit behind events which even now are inexplicable to most of us - a waking coma, or autism, or early blindness.

In even-shorter: Mushishi is incredibly hard to define in that overall, despite being a story about the inhuman, it is one of the most human anime that I have ever watched. It plays in subtlety and minimalism, and tells an even more powerful story precisely because its arrangement somehow resembles real life.