[Categories: Anime Reviews]
Mushishi episode 9: The Heavy Seed
The Heavy Seed is another episode in which we see how humans misuse the power of mushis for their own ends, even without realising it. While on a search for some food Ginko winds up in a village that suffers from some strange phenomena that revolve around a curious local legend: whenever there is a natural disaster in the village the buried ancestors allegedly allow a bumper rice crop the following year. Needless to say there is bound to be a more interesting explanation which is mushi-related so Ginko takes it upon himself to investigate.
For whatever reason I actually found the finer details of this episode quite hard to follow, which could be explained by the complicated terminology that appears to be bound quite deeply in Japanese folklore. The general gist is clear though: the village’s priest is aware of the real source of the high rice yields, and through the generations the succession of priests have been tampering with nature without their neighbours’ knowledge.
This all comes out after a lengthy investigation on Ginko’s part: seemingly unrelated events point towards one coherant solution which is clouded by the fact that human lives are at stake. The fundamental question is that if one course of action will save a whole village from starvation, is it all right for this course to sacrifice one villager’s life? The ending to this episode is a powerful and profound one, and one of the best episode conclusions so far. We even learn one or two (albeit minor) details about Ginko’s life to boot.
As with any Mushishi episode it is not just the ethereal mushis that are the main event here: it is also the way in which humans interact with them in their daily lives. During the course of this episode we learn that the village’s priest shares Ginko’s ability to see mushis but he is still making life-or-death decisions about using natural forces that are on the edge of human understanding; this is a scenario that we see in our own science-orientated world as well as in Ginko’s world of half-seen supernatural life forms. Even though these stories are set in a world far removed from our own this does not detract from the themes’ emotional impact or relevance.
Leave a Reply