Just from the first few notes of the acoustic guitar from the opening song, you get a sign that it is time to slow down, cool off, forget all your problems and just drift away from the world you know, into a completely different, fascinating world, where people believe there's more to life and existance than we know.
Whether the story takes place during winter in a remote village, or warm spring and a farm on a mountain slope, the scenery is always beautiful. Even the tiniest of plants look alive and the hills buried in fog seem hazy and weary.
None of the characters are too bright or standing out. And a very important reason for that, is that the show isn't about the characters. It is about the stories they tell. The person telling the story might play a very big part in it, but you can't help but forget the person's face as you drift away into the fantasy world as if you're lying next to the campfire, feeling its warmth, hearing the distant sounds, feeling the sweet smell of the atmosphere that surrounds you, while listening to stories not one person apart from you and the storyteller has ever heard of.
When an episode reaches the end, the story always reaches its conclusion, be it something that is too unfathomable for our world, or something personal, maybe even too simple or obvious to be noticed straight away. A soothing ending theme composed especially for each episode takes off, as your mind enters a dreamworld of its own.
Mushishi is not pretending to be something it isn't. It does not try to enliven its stories with anything that has since become a cliché element. It expects you to understand that at this moment you're only the listener, and not the storyteller. But such a strong and quite unexplainable attachment that I feel towards something as modest as this, can be called nothing short of ...Love.
