I was on a summer holiday in Austria with the family last year and the house we stayed in had a good enough internet connection I could watch anime from my Plex server in Amsterdam. So each day we went out to climb mountains and look for four leaf clovers and each evening I would spent a couple of hours watching stuff. One of the series I watched there was Mushishi and boy was its opening applicable to me:
Personal circumstances aside, Ally Kerr’s song is the perfect way to open this series with, as gentle and melancholic as Mushishi itself. Mushishi is on a manga by Urushibara Yuki. Set in a pre-modern, still closed off Japan that seems to consist of mostly mountains and forest with the occasional village in it, Mushishi follows Ginko on hsi travels through the country. Ginko is one of the few people able to see ‘Mushi’, primitive lifeforms that are neither plants, animals, fungi or bacteria, but which live almost unpercieved among us. Ginko can not only see them, but he attracts them, hence his travels. Too long in one place and it becomes infested with Mushi. And while most people cannot see them, that doesn’t mean Mushi cannot interact with them, for good or bad. When that happens, Ginko, as a Mushishi, is one of the few who can diagnose and cure those afflicted.
Mushishi then is twentysix episodes of Ginko wandering across rural Japan getting involved with whoever is tangled up with Mushi this week, sometimes able to bring about a happy end, sometimes not. It’s clear throughout the series that the Mushi itself are not some kind of evil monster, just creatures living their own lives, with no real intelligence behind their actions other than instinct. Nor are most of their victims evil or bad; just unfortunate. At worst there’s the occasional person ignoring local superstitions and suffering the consequences. There’s little continuity in the series, it’s mostly a series of oneshot stories, but gradually a little bit does get revealed about Ginko and his past.
Ginko isn’t an action hero and the Mushishi themselves are not the sort of monsters that lend themselves to lavishly animated fight scenes. The pace is slow and scenes are drawn out, with lots of slow lazy pans of the scenery Ginko moves through. Lots of closeups of hands in motion as well, something I started to notice after the first few episodes. Conversation is slow too and the end result of all this is soporific. Not to be honest a series that you can easily binge. Two, maybe three episodes at a time is ideal. Very much a series to calm you down. If you liked Natsume’s Book of Friends, this is a series you’d enjoy as well.
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