Anime x Lit Crit: Shiki 3, Part 2

This is a continuation of the latest installment of my collab with the marvelous Moyatori!

Moya: Love the fact that you brought up those Greek myths! It’s xenia, right? The notion of offering hospitality to guests who are far from home. Perhaps the village is the only possible feeding ground for the vampires due to the villagers’ hospitality. I remember there being one episode where it’s mentioned that the villagers never lock doors.

Primes: Thanks! Yes, the Greeks called it xenia (not to be confused with Xenia, Ohio, or Xena, Warrior Princess). The Romans called it hospitium (whence English “hospitality”), and you see similar customs among the Celts, Hindus, Afghans, and the peoples of the Middle East. So it’s not just a Greek thing.

So to return to the vampires, they’re violating something sacred. That might seem like a bit of a stretch if it weren’t that the language of ritual is used all over the place, especially in this episode. We have the Bon festival, we have the shrine where the monk meets the vampire girl, we have the girl’s comment that she would like to live in a city that resembles a shrine, we have the extensive treatment of Nao’s burial ritual, and more… and that’s just in this episode. So will the vampires receive some sort of divine punishment?

Or—and this is rather disconcerting—have they already been punished? The episode opens with a section from a story that the monk is writing, about a man who is, quote, “cursed by God”. Whenever a story refers to another story within itself, I always sit up and pay attention, because something significant is going on. In this case, I could write an entire post at least as long as this one on the significance of this particular scene, and maybe I will. For now, let it suffice to note that a similar idea comes up when the vampire girl is talking to the monk. She tells him his stories are all about people who have been “forsaken by God”: Is that why she likes them so much? Traditionally, being “undead” meant being damned, cut off from God and salvation, and so the vampires in Dracula can only rest with God once they have been killed (with a stake, garlic, and beheading, typically). Van Helsing says as much. And if they have already received the worst of all punishments from God, what further can humans do to them?

Or—and this may be the worst option of all—are they the punishment for the villagers’ neglect of the boundary of the sacred? Or some combination of all of these options?

Moya: According to Sunako [the vampire girl], they have definitely already been punished. I also find it interesting how the Buddhist monk is so interested in Christian things. He writes stories about being forsaken by God and hangs out in an abandoned church. As far as I know, you don’t really need the Buddha or another being’s approval in life according to Buddhism. The Buddha is there to offer guidance if you seek it, and isn’t really one to punish or reward you. I think Seishin [the monk] does mention at one point that the path of monkhood is something his family wants for the sake of continuing their legacy, so maybe being interested in Christianity adds to his inner rebelliousness and his belief in free will? He also writes pretty dark novels as a side thing, so…a rebel indeed?

Primes: Woah, that really grabs my attention! Jumping ahead to a future episode, I had noticed that he likes to hang out in that old Christian church. Christianity has a fascinating history in Japan. (Did you know that the biggest centers of Christianity in Japan, up until WW2, were Hiroshima and Nagasaki?) Christianity is not historically a European religion, stereotypes notwithstanding, but it was Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries who brought it to Japan, and so it makes sense that it would be associated with Europe in Japanese culture. So in Shiki, on the one hand you have the apparently dead and/or harmless Europeanism of Christianity (represented by the old church), and on the other the threatening and enticing Europeanism of colonialism (represented by the “European-style house” that the vampires live in).

And the monk being a rebel makes perfect sense! Sunako says she envisioned the monk as having “horns and a tail” (like the Devil, the original rebel in Christian lore), and then says that “instead” of the horns he has a scar on his wrist (from a suicide attempt). Suicide is a kind of rebellion, against life or against suffering.

Moya: The villagers are mocked at different points for their ignorant attitude, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the vampire plague is their punishment. Especially those four old people who sit on a bench and watch the village burn (figuratively) and laugh about people dying (happens in another episode). If we’re talking about their neglect for the sacred though, I’m not sure if the villagers are negligent enough. On the contrary, it’s Natsuno’s parents – people from the city – who are the least willing to believe in spirituality, as we see later on.

Primes: You’re right as far as I can tell. I guess I was thinking of Megumi, but she is something of an aberration in town, I suspect.

We also are introduced in this episode to Masao, who becomes a key figure later on; but since this is already pretty long, I’ll save my thoughts on him for another day.

For now, the only thing I’m sure of is that I like the vampire girl, and hope she turns out to be good after all—and I’m sure that I like Shiki.

Moya: Sunako creeped the hell out of me when she was first introduced, but she’s definitely one of my favourite characters! 

 

Thank you for joining us, folks! If you’ve not seen the earlier parts of our collab, you can find them here:

Shiki 1

Toradora 1

Shiki 2

Toradora 2

Shiki 3, Part 1