There are some shows that are addicting, some shows are to be gulped down like a severely dehydrated man drinks water and then there are some shows that need to be savored, shows that are are like a balm on irritated skin - cool and soothing, to be used at regular intervals and at each time giving so much satisfaction. Mushishi is the latter kind.
Watching it while letting the amazing art, beautiful sound and touching stories wash over me was such a great experience. It is an anime that could have gone on forever and I would have watched every minute of it. You can just see the amount of love, work and thought that has gone into crafting every frame of the show. Every scene is a work of art. The scenery captures more than just the image, it captures the soul of the place.
The world is particularly impressive.
What struck me as extraordinary was the fact that there were no evil people or creatures. There was no monster that the hero is fighting. The people aren't evil for the sake of being evil. There are occasional grey characters and even they are just out to survive. Even if something is harming us, the idea that we should consider that it is just trying to live and we should tolerate it is so foreign in this world. In our world the knee jerk reaction to something bothersome is to destroy it. Ginko's empathy is not seen as something extraordinary in the anime, just a part of the world. That universe is completely fleshed out.
The mushi live an existence separate from what we know as normal and that is okay.
The stories are complete and they work very well even taken without the whole. What moves the stories are the characters. We are only introduced to them for a short while and we see them as human in the sense that we don't understand them completely, we don't have to understand them completely but we know their story and that matters.
I love detective stories and Mushishi is paced like one. Introduce the problem and have the detective figure it out. The eureka moment doesn't give the same jolt that I get when a detective figures out a problem we are baffled by even when we have all the information, but it is still nice. Another important part of the anime is love, in its most powerful and intangible form. It is in every story and in every form.
The music flows through the show. The opening track is with its visuals sets the tone perfectly and drops gently into the story, the background slowly pulling its viewers into the story and keeping us there till a few seconds after the credits start to roll. The feeling that the story continues through the credits, that the story continues beyond what we have been told, that the characters we were with live on is solely because of the beautiful music.
Ginko is the main character but it isn't really about him. This is such a strange show that way. It isn't character driven in the sense that we need Ginko to make the story interesting. In many episodes he seems almost like a foot note in the main story. Even in the final episode, where I was expecting some kind of bang, just has him as a secondary or even tertiary character. It is a testament to how compellingly they have written that world that we don't need an anchor to sink into it. His western clothes remain a mystery (albeit a well dressed one).
I really wish there were more episodes of Mushishi.
