Mushishi Zoku Shou – 07

 Where does rain come from? Little girls, of course!

Whew, time to play catch-up after being at Anime North for 3 days. Why couldn’t the break have been this week instead of last week? Oh well, I’m just glad Mushishi is back, even if I didn’t get to watch it until the convention festivities were over.

Ginko doesn’t display the usual kind of kindness that we expect when we hear the word. He doesn’t console or coddle. Instead, he addresses others with a blank face, calmly telling them the straight facts. When Teru laments that her special ability to summon rain has killed people, Ginko doesn’t say “Awww, you poor thing, that must be really hard!”. He says “Yes, you have. Take responsibility.” It sounds harsh, but you can tell it’s just tough love. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t be hanging around sweltering, hot villages for days on end to try to help a random woman. Ginko carefully watches Teru, weighs the situation, then responds accordingly.

Without sugar-coating anything, Ginko tells her that this is simply a reality she must accept. It’s tough, but she has no choice but to wait it out. Even a mushishi doesn’t always have a cure handy. Mushishi are sometimes at the whim of the mushi they claim to be able to exorcise, which ties back to the whole idea of mushi being wild and impossible to fully control. So Ginko’s only advice is to bear it until it’s over, like a real life version of some metaphor for how life always gets better after a storm. He also puts it into perspective for her by saying that no one is actually at fault for these deaths. Not her, not the mushi, not the rain, not anyone. It’s simply nature doing whatever it happens to be doing at that time.

“Uh…oops.”

It’s a very macro way of looking at things, but definitely an interesting one. When facing natural disasters like floods or droughts, it’s easy to want to “blame” the disaster itself for killing people. But in reality, it’s just that a bunch of factors aligned to cause this event and no one could have stopped it. It’s random. It’s different for human beings, who make their own choices. Things like rain and sunshine don’t do things because they want to, they just do things. That’s the difference between the rainmaker mushi and Teru. The rain has no purpose or desire when it wanders, but Teru turns her constant wandering into something meaningful. She used her misfortune to be able to provide dry villages with precious rain, and that’s what makes her special.

Poor Teru just happened to step on a puddle and it changed her entire life. Such is the world of Mushishi, where you can get owned by crazy monsters you can’t even see just by being unlucky. She did nothing to deserve it, things just unfolded that way. I like how Ginko explains the way nature is never at fault and that it just sort of exists, as if it’s somehow outside of our whole system of being. Despite this, the “aimless wandering” of this mushi (and nature, by extension) can devastate the lives of humans.  Just because it happens to rain for days or weeks on end can mean the difference between life or death. And as Ginko sees it, that’s just because rain “wandered” to that area without a purpose. No one to blame, no one to point fingers at. Just potential death waiting to stare you down at every turn with nothing you can do about it. And that’s scary.

Twice in a row would be just too much

In the right proportions, rain is wonderful. So is sunlight. We see the villages fluctuate between both extremes and this has an obvious negative effect on their wellbeing. I like how at first I was really hoping the desert-like village will see rain and we cheer alongside the happy villagers when it starts to rain. Then it doesn’t stop and I started to realize that this is actually pretty bad. It’s kind of like how in Winter you long for Summer, then once it’s too hot you start wishing it were Winter again. It’s ironic that the same things you need for life – sunlight and water – can also cause destruction. Everything in moderation, I suppose!

All in all, another great episode of Mushishi. The “nature is amazing and powerful” message felt a little more heavy-handed than usual though since Ginko is trying to make us believe that we can’t blame droughts and floods for our problems. I dunno man, it’s pretty convenient to say “my brother died because of a flood” instead of saying it was no one’s fault. If someone was clearly crushed by a rock during an earthquake, I think we’d attribute that death to an earthquake. Still, it’s a neat way to look at things for a brief moment even if you don’t actually put it into practice. A thought exercise, if you will.

I also appreciated how they put a little bit of romance without making it as cheesy as the mirror lake episode. It’s subtle enough that you could even read it as friendship, and it works well for Teru’s character. It gives her a reason to carry on until the rainmaker mushi leaves her body and she can return. It also continues the theme of isolation that’s been very prominent throughout. Teru can’t stay in one place too long because the life-saving rain she brings will cause too much harm if she remains in one village.

Even though she comes from an arid climate, her skin is pale and clammy whereas you can see every other villager has a bronze tan. I didn’t really notice until she held Yasu’s hand. Then I realized that this girl has to live with rain every single day and it’s even affected her complexion. She’s always followed by a storm. How else could it have affected her body and her mind? Does she drink water? Does her body regulate temperatures at all? Would she be susceptible to hypothermia? Can you imagine never getting to enjoy a sunny day every again because you’ve got rain hot on your heels everywhere? You would always be wet and cold, no matter what, with no escape. It wasn’t until I sat down and thought about it that being surrounded by rain started to sound incredibly difficult. It’s the little things eating away at you gradually that sometimes make you crack. But if you push through and wait for it to pass, maybe one day you’ll wake up and it will finally be sunny again.

She can’t sweat or cry so here’s the real question…does she still pee?