Hi, friends and fellow anibloggers! I am back from my very awesome business trip. 🙂 So back to blogging it is!
While I was gone, I picked up the following book:
It’s an easy-to-follow introduction to literary criticism, yet detailed enough that even someone like me (who, you’ll recall, studied this field for over a decade) found a lot to learn. Also, it’s got a handy-dandy glossary. I could criticize the ways certain things are treated—I am a critic by training, after all—but by and large this seems like a worthwhile addition to your edification book shelf.
Got back in town to discover that my sump pump was broken and the basement had flooded (mildly, fortunately). That was an urgent multi-hundred-dollar expense.
But enough griping. Let’s make up for lost time with Shiki episode three: “Third Tragedy”!
“Third Tragedy”
Several key things happen in this episode. For starters, we’re introduced to the vampire family. First, the husband and wife show up when some of the villagers are out at night blowing off fireworks to celebrate Bon. The villagers invite them to come visit their homes—and you know what that means. Yes, now the vampires can enter!
Moya: I wonder where the rule “vampires must be invited before entering” came from? I’m curious about the context of that.
Primes: With the help of the All-Knowing Google and the Infallible Wikipedia, I dug around on this question and was able to turn up… nothing. At least, nothing further than that the idea becomes linked with vampires (as opposed to other creatures) with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and no one really knows why. Some see it as Christian (evil in general is powerless unless you invite it in), Freudian (“inviting him in” given a Darling in the FranXX sexual overtone here), or emphasizing the sacredness of the bond of hospitality (more on that below).
I wasn’t familiar with Bon. Turns out it’s a Buddhist (or Buddhist-Confucian) celebration of the dead, when the family ancestral spirits return to the shrines the living have set up for them. Is it significant that the vampires show up at the same time? Are they standing in for the ancestral spirits (which would be a kind of criticism of the ancient customs, and thus seemingly out of place in Shiki), or do they represent some sort of corruption or deviation from the normal spirit return? I’m inclined towards the latter: It sounds quite Confucian to me to warn that bad things can happen when the proper rituals and respect for the dead are neglected. And we’ve already seen that the Jizou statues have been desecrated.
Moya: I’m with you on the corruption of Bon rituals. Thanks to the fact that you drew attention to it, I also ended up doing a bit of research on Bon. It turns out that Bon is more or less the Japanese counterpart of Zhongyuan Jie (Ghost Festival) in Chinese cultures, which I am more familiar with. The latter focuses more specifically on the return of lost, suffering souls as well as your ancestors’ spirits (kind of like what Halloween was originally about?). In Taiwan, it’s a common practice to leave packaged foods and fruits on altars and to burn paper money for the ghosts. If this was the context in Shiki, I would agree with your first interpretation that the Kirishikis represent returning spirits, but in a way that doesn’t necessarily criticize traditions. Unless humans simply lack what it takes to save anyone other than themselves, and are being superficial by practicing such rituals? With how Bon seems to be in Japan, I have to agree with you that the vampires are there to corrupt it. Either way, the irony is definitely present, as it is in every other episode of this anime.
Primes: Yeah, this is pretty much “Irony: The Anime”. And thank you for drawing out the cultural details for me/us! Man, I have so much to learn about Asian cultures!
Next, the little vampire girl tracks down the monk outside his shrine. The monk is a novelist, and she’s read everything he’s written. Naturally, that’s flattering to any author! I noticed that unlike her parents, she didn’t try to manipulate him into allowing her to enter his home—but she did gain entry to his heart, that is, his trust and affection. Furthermore, she reveals that Mr. Vampire decided to move to their village after reading an essay the monk had written about it! In the essay, the monk described it as “surrounded by death”, which apparently is the vampire equivalent of “waterfront property” in real estate. So even as the monk steels himself to fight whatever is harming the town, he’s the one directly (if inadvertently) responsible for it in the first place!
Moya: Oh, I felt so bad for the monk at that point. He doesn’t seem to feel that guilty himself though, even after realizing everything, but let’s save that for another time.
Primes: I look forward to a later discussion of guilt in Shiki! There are definitely a lot of things I want to bring up but can’t until the appropriate episode…!
Finally, Yuuki’s friend Toru meets up with the guy who helped the vampire family move in. After a brief chat, Toru invites him to visit sometime. At which point… you guessed it! Moving Guy is a vampire, too!
What’s really horrible here is that the vampires are abusing the trust and charity of their neighbors. The villagers are literally trying to be neighborly. In a flashback, we see Yuuki remembering when his family moved in, and how Toru’s hospitality won him over despite Yuuki’s resolve not to become close to anyone. And now the converse happens: The villagers seek to be hospitable, and their hospitality is willingly accepted by the vampires, only to be greatly abused.
What makes it worse is that hospitality has universally, in nearly all times and places, been considered sacred. The sense of the sacred is culturally absent in the West today (though very much alive in certain settings), so let’s take a moment to try to put ourselves in the shoes of a culture where sacredness is part and parcel of… everything. This doesn’t mean everything is holy: On the contrary, the sacred indicated a line or boundary between that which was safe to encounter and that which was not because it was too close to the divine. It’s like a heavenly line in the sand: Don’t cross it or Zeus will cast lightning at you. And your family. And your neighbors. And your city.
Hospitality set up these kinds of boundaries. In Homer’s Illiad, as the Greeks and Trojans spend a decade slaughtering each other, a break from the action occurs when the Greek champion Diomedes encounters his Trojan counterpart, Glaucus. In fine warrior tradition, they start boasting about their families—at which point they discover that their fathers had shown hospitality to each other. So instead of fighting, they trade armor, shake hands, and part ways to find others to kill. The bond of hospitality is stronger than the antagonism of war.
Ancient stories are also rife with examples of people who broke the custom of hospitality and suffered severely as a result. In Homer’s Odyssey, the Greek sailors seek shelter from a Cyclops, who instead begins to eat them; that makes Odysseus angry, and he blinds the Cyclops. In another story, Tantalus famously welcomed the gods to his home and served them a meal—namely his son, chopped up and cooked. The gods punished him by sticking him for all eternity next to a cluster of grapes and a pool of water—both of which would always move just out of reach whenever he tried to eat or drink. This is, as you may have guessed, the origin of the English word “tantalize”. 😀
This is getting really long, so I’m cutting it in half and will post the rest tomorrow. Sweet dreams, peeps!
If you’ve not seen the earlier parts of my collab with Moya, you can find them here:
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