For those who don’t know, Mushi-shi is an anthology-style show. It follows (roughly) the travels of Ginko (by trade, the titular Mushi-shi), a man who specializes in dealing with strange cases related to Mushi, spirit entities that most humans cannot see but that all can feel the effects of. He walks the length of ancient Japan, interacting with isolated villages and others that have Mushi problems whether they know that’s what they have or not. Part nature documentary, part medical drama, and part ghost story, Mushi-shi has a broad range of experiences to offer.
What it doesn’t have is plot in the conventional sense. In a few of the episodes we do learn more about Ginko himself, but that’s never really the focus of the show and there isn’t any sort of progression, with only a couple of characters showing up in more than one episode. Because of that, I haven’t titled this article as a Spoiler Review like all my others as, while I might make example of and “spoil” a few episodes, I’m not going to be going through it in exhaustive detail or any sort of order as I would a typical spoiler review. I’m sure someone could spend the time to pick over every episode and point out all the folklore and symbolism and describe every plot Ginko touches, but that person isn’t me right now.
First, let’s talk about the animation. Mushi-shi is one of the most gorgeous shows you’re likely to see… except when it’s not. There’s a consistency to the split as well; in Mushi-shi, the backgrounds (mostly nature scenes) are extremely detailed. The Mushi also tend to be wildly creative and (at least when you can see them) expertly crafted to have an otherworldly feel to them, resembling microbes or Cambrian weirdness more than the sorts of plants or animals you’d be familiar with. Granted, most Mushi are rather simple as well, but there’s a deliberate art to how they are depicted. Humans, however, get no such grace. They’re given very down-to-earth designs. Ginko is a little memorable, with his white hair and single green eye, as well as his oddly modern-esque clothing. Mushi-shi never says exactly when it takes place in terms of years or period. It’s certainly in the past, but it has a kind of timeless quality to it that’s not trying to emulate any particular history.
In any case, other humans are mostly… realistic. They have typical Japanese phenotypes and wear period Japanese clothes. Since Ginko mostly interacts with rural peasantry, that also means very simple and plain outfits as well. It goes well beyond the design, though. Humans, even Ginko, are drawn in a clean and simplistic way, and if they’re out of focus or shot from a distance in a scene, quickly lose details. It’s not at all odd in Mushi-shi to have two humans with the same plain earthy color palate and no rendered features like mouths or eyes talking to each other in a downright gorgeous forest. It can be jarring to notice, but it largely works. The focus in Mushi-shi is seldom on the humans. It’s the humans who have problems and need solutions, but it’s not the humans that are by in large the point. They look alright when we get a closeup and you can always tell who Ginko is, so really that’s pretty much all we need.
All in all, I think that the decision to make the humans in this show really cheap has to have been a stylistic choice. The art is so deliberate and so gorgeous, down to careful use of color to flavor a particular episode, that I find it hard to imagine someone looked at what they were doing and said “we could save a few yen by putting in less effort”. At least, it’s hard to imagine compared to the possibility that it was meant to serve a purpose for how these stories are told.
Speaking of which, let’s talk about the stories of Mushi-shi. One episode will almost always be focused on one particular Mushi, and what its presence or interaction with humanity (or a human) does. More often than not, Mushi interactions manifest as something not unlike an illness, albeit often an illness with some flagrantly supernatural symptoms. Other times, the Mushi will be more associated with an area or a situation, and it will lean harder into the “ghost story” side.
I’ll give three different episodes worth of example. In one, a man seems to have prophetic dreams. Ginko warns him that this could be dangerous, and gives him a medicine to help suppress the dreams. However, when he feels that his failure to foresee a disaster got people hurt, he stops taking the medicine. The dreams and disasters keep coming, until an unnatural plague he dreams of really does strike the village, disintegrating everyone into green spores. Ginko returns, finding the dead village, and explains the truth: the dreams were never prophetic, but a Mushi, symbiotic with the man and inhabiting the pillow he uses to sleep, would cause his dreams to become reality. In a second, the villagers of a certain town are suffering from leg ailments, which Ginko (able to see Mushi) can see to be the result of the buds of a plant-like Mushi that normally grows in the mountains and turns corpses to soil. A prepared ointment clears most of the cases up, but one man has a much worse infestation, and Ginko has to try to unravel why that is and how it might be treated. In a third, a local village is infested with a strange weed which, when burned (as seems necessary to save the crops, according to the village’s local Mushi-shi) takes on the next stage of its life-cycle, becoming a Mushi both familiar to Ginko and the local and a rather dangerous one that can sap the heat out of people, causing numerous cases of frostbite if not properly managed.
The first of those episodes works like a ghost story, with supernatural happenings that are, for the most part, poorly understood and only explained at the end to capstone the horror. The second is more medical, looking at a strange case and discovering its cure – though in Mushi-shi, those episodes can really go either way. The third is heavily focused on the life cycle of the particular Mushi, and indulges more heavily in the nature documentary side.
Most if not all of these cases are individually fascinating. The episodes, despite telling fully contained stories in a half hour, tend to be slower paced and more atmospheric, letting you really soak in the experience. As such, the individual plots are never too terribly twisted, with one or two important reveals along the way at most. They’re good, but you’re not in Mushi-shi for a story where things happen and lead to other things, you’re here to digest a slice of the strange and often unnerving world that Mushi-shi is more than willing to present.
In that way, Mushi-shi is absolutely brilliant as what it is. I know the show is something of a critical darling, and this is one time where I find myself part of the mass opinion. It’s engrossing to follow along with these stories as Ginko encounters them, whether they turn out well for the other characters involved or not.
That last bit is more important than you might think. A lot of shows with a case-by-case or monster of the week format always have the same outcome. If it’s a pure horror show, you know the spook is going to “get” its victim. If it’s more of a heroic show or a medical drama, you know the monster is going to be defeated or the condition cured, because that’s what the characters the audience cares about are invested in.
In Mushi-shi, you don’t always know what’s coming. Sure, Ginko has to make it out alright, but the show knows this and very rarely puts Ginko in any kind of danger that is supposed to be actually dramatic. He’s often tangential to the main action and main struggle of the episode, really. This means that, as with a pure horror scenario, we have the random victims of the week who can meet a bad end, because the show can go on without them. But Ginko, as a Mushi-shi, is also kind of a doctor and he’d look pretty bad if everyone he interacted with came to bad ends, so he’s often able to save people or at least mitigate their suffering. Sometimes he really saves the day, other times he does literally nothing except answer why things are happening the way they are. And sometimes, because he misread the situation or especially because some people take the wrong message from what he has to say, he’s the unwitting instigator of doom.
Mushi-shi honestly reminds me a good deal of the classic incarnation of The Twilight Zone. Something a good number of the imitators of that show forgot was that the Twilight Zone twist saved the characters of the episode about as often as it screwed them over. Sometimes the dead come back to mess up a town at the unknowing behest of a would-be conman, other times a careful effort can rescue a little girl from the parallel dimension she’s stuck in and let everyone exit happy. Some of the most famous twists are the dark ones, but the show is much better for having the lighter ones and saving graces as well. Mushi-shi actually understands that.
And, like The Twilight Zone, Mushi-shi is on the whole one of the greats of its medium. Again like The Twilight Zone it’s naturally not perfectly consistent – being an anthology sort of series will do that, with some episodes hitting while others don’t hand quite as well – but it does average very high. High enough, in my regard, to get an A. If you haven’t checked out the show yet, do yourself a favor and look it up, you’ll be glad you did.