Mushishi Zoku Shou – 08

Never look in a man’s purse without asking him

Mushishi is my favourite show of the season, and having it be delayed without warning every other week has been quite disappointing. I look forward to this show every week, and I feel like something is actually missing when I don’t get to watch it. I imagine I’ll feel the same way when it ends as well. But at the end of the day, Mushishi is back once again to either warm our hearts or freak us the hell out. I can never tell which.

NOPE NOPE NOOOPPPEEE

As it turns out, this week is not a feel-good episode with beautiful scenery and a happy ending. It’s a terrifying episode about a mass of writhing, horrible snakes invading your home and killing everyone you love. There is nothing pretty about any of this, except for maybe brief appearances by the wind-controlling bird mushi during the day. But even then, they viciously destroy a house while gobbling up the disgusting snake-things, so their beauty is really limited. Even during the pretty scenes, I was terrified that a bunch of Yobiko would slither in and ruin everything. I couldn’t drop my guard for a second. I must admit that watching this episode was horrible and mildly traumatizing, even if the story itself was good.

I’m usually okay with snakes. I just watched Indiana Jones and saw him fall into a pit of snakes, and I was okay. But the Yobiko are pitch black all over. They look like oversized leeches or worms, which are 100x worse than snakes in terms of my own personal phobias. I’ll try to focus on the story but it’s really hard when there’s all this ugly, creepy imagery. Snakes everywhere! Holes in walls where the snakes writhe around in at night! Snakes covering Ginko from head to foot as he nonchalently leads them to shore! It’s not worth it for a few moments of pretty white birds pushing a sailboat around. It really, really isn’t.

More of this, please.

Mental scarring aside, Ibuki was an interesting lead. He’s one of the few that can see mushi, and he uses them rather harmlessly to his advantage at first. He actually shows respect by never forcing the mushi to overwork themselves if they don’t want to, and using his power sparingly. He’s clearly a good kid who is just living in stressful times. He’s got a stepmom (I’m assuming something bad happened to his biological mother) and a growing family that’s eating up all of their money – the little that they have. He’s just trying to get some money to make them happy. He’s not aiming to become the king of the forest or keep a beautiful girl alive for centuries – he’s got a pure, innocent goal. But even goals like these become corrupted.

Okay, it’s kind of his fault for disobeying Ginko and whistling during the night. He made the boat capsize and he lost his wages (and probably his chance to be a full-time sailor). But he only did it so he could get home faster and make more money for his family. Even so, his mom doesn’t seem to care that Ibuki almost died. She just tells him to sell the rather fetching present he bought her, without even praising him first. There’s clearly a breakdown in communication in the household. And I’m not pinning this all on the mom, as they all seem to not get along very well. But it becomes clear that all is not well at home when we see her curt response to Ibuki’s return.

Oh, you don’t like the gift I gave you? How about I give you the gift of SNAKES?!?!

Although it seems a bit extreme, Ibuki responds by trying to kill his family. Once he notices that the Yobiko followed him home, he just kinda…leaves them there. When Ginko chases them away, he has the nerve to call them back. He’s really determined to get revenge on his family for whatever they’ve done to him. The mystery is that we really know very little about his situation. What happened to his real mother? Why did his father remarry? Why don’t they get along? Is there a reason they’re poor? We only know that things aren’t going well.

I kind of like having that shrouded in mystery, because it makes Ibuki’s motives that much more difficult to assess. Of course, killing your stepmom is never really justified. But if we knew just how bad things were for him, we may feel his actions to be slightly more or less appropriate. Not having all the information kind of frees him from our ability to judge him. His intentions and goals are unclear, making him out of the least understood characters in the show.

Pretty…until I stare too hard and see the dangling Yobiko T_T

This makes his final decision have a lot of impact, because we don’t know what made him change his mind. Why did he decide to save his family in the end? What did he remember that gave him hope again? It’s up to your interpretation, or what you choose to believe. The irony is that even when he tries to save his family, it end sup destroying his home. I assumed all the Yobiko would be eaten and that would be that. An easy solution! But no, things are never this easy. You can’t undo something like that so simply. So in trying to do the right thing, Ibuki destroys the one place he belonged. Even if felt he didn’t belong there, it was better than having nothing. We never see Ibuki’s face again after this. We only see him sailing from a distance. Is he happy? I doubt it.

And so the story ends with Ibuki sailing all alone using the power of his whistling after ruining his family’s life. Great. A real swell way to end the episode. Don’t even try and console me with your nice sunset and white birds! You had a million snakes crawling on Ginko and it freaked me out! I really don’t want to think about the Yobiko anymore so let’s just…end it here. Please.

I’m just going to stowaway in here with Ginko and cry in a corner