[Categories: Anime Reviews]
Mushishi episode 14: Inside the Cage
After the heartbreaking events that took place in episode 13 I was hoping for a more optimistic tale this time around. For the most part though, ep 14, Inside the Cage, is perhaps equally depressing but no less poetic and brilliant.
Ginko meets a man in a bamboo forest who has not seen a stranger in around three years - the man, whose name is Kisuke, explains that he has become lost and asks if he can accompany Ginko to find a way out. When the two of them wind up going in a big circle, the cheerful Kisuke admits that he was using Ginko’s company to test a theory: the forest-dweller cannot leave and neither can anyone who travels with him. When Kisuke feels a little guilty at the trick he played he explains how he came to live in the forest with his wife and daughter (below) and how he is unable to return to his former home in the village nearby.
It is at this point that the episode becomes another tearjerker. Ginko finds out that Kisuke’s wife Setsu is half-mushi: he used to regularly visit the girl in the forest and, in the fullness of time, they got married and bore a child. Unfortunately the villagers (including his own sister, shockingly enough) shunned the man who left them for his half-mushi wife and did little to help them when they became prisoners in their own forest.
After Ginko hears the full story his investigations uncover the mushi responsible for the sad state of affairs but things only get worse for Kisuke and Setsu: she believes that she is responsible for her husband’s problems and her reaction has dire consequences. It is a tragic mistake, an act of desparation done out of love, but at the very end of the episode there is still a glimmer of hope.
This was a great episode, even if that’s what I’ve said about every instalment of Mushishi so far. The predicament that Kisuke and Setsu find themselves in is through no fault of their own: it is a mixture of circumstances and the typical human traits of ignorance and fear of the unknown. The mushi involved (above) is the root cause of the situation in a very literal sense but what caused Kisuke and his family so much suffering is the attitude of the people who he once considered to be his friends. Inside the Cage is another unflinching examination of the human condition but rarely is it as visually stunning and dramatic.
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