Movies: Mushi-shi Vol. #5

O Hell! what doe mine eyes with grief behold,
Into our room of bliss thus high advanc't
Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps,
Not Spirits, yet to heav'nly Spirits bright
Little inferior …

— Milton, Paradise Lost

Thus spoke Satan on beholding Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The same sort of envy, or lust, seems to radiate from many of the characters in Mushi-shi whenever they encounter the mushi, the strange organisms that have been the focus of the show. They see them not as forms of life unto themselves, not as things to co-exist with, but as something to be controlled and tamed, put to use, engineered into a solution for a problem that might not even really exist except in your head. And then comes Ginko, the mushi master who’s the closest thing the show has to a hero — if only because he knows better than to assume that life is something you can just shape at will to fix your problems, like putty filling a crack in a wall.

Over the course of the series we have learned that Ginko is hardly the only mushi-master out there — in fact, there’s a network of them with whole libraries and vast tracts of information at their disposal. What sets Ginko apart is his relatively enlightened attitude. He would rather deal with the mushi as things to be coaxed out and sent on their way, not things that have to be exterminated ruthlessly. He also understands, sometimes painfully well, that there will be occasions when a mushi manifests and there will be no easy solution to the problem it presents. There will be days when we are the problem, not them, and when that comes about — well, I quote Milton again: “Hell shall unfould, / To entertain you two, her widest Gates, / And send forth all her Kings.”

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.