Anime x Lit Crit: Vampires and Valentines—Shiki 4!

Happy Monday, readers! I’m still an episode of Shiki behind, thanks to my business trip a couple of weeks ago. In the near future I may do a double-review to catch up.

In the meantime, welcome to the latest installment of the collab between Moya and myself!

There’s a lot going on here in episode four of Shiki. It’s called “Fourth Death”, a bit misleadingly since we’re already at 19 deaths in the village.

Moya: It’s called “Fourth Death” because the people behind the anime were trying pretty hard to make a dark pun out of every episode title. In Japanese, it basically reads “The xth Episode” every time, but the characters used to spell that are always related to death and pain, as opposed to the usual characters for numbers. It can occasionally feel awkward when translated into English!

Primes: Actually, I’m glad you explained this to me, because I just watched the most recent episode of Sword Art Online Alternative: Gale Gun Online, and one of the teams goes by the name “PM4″—and the characters pick up on the ‘4’ as meaning ‘P’ and ‘M’ are going to die. So the “4” meaning death seems a well-enough recognized dark pun in Japanese, which (without your explanation) I would have been in the “dark” about! 😀 (I’m a sucker for puns!)

The main scenes include the doctor holding a ‘council of war’ with his staff; the monk and the vampire girl meeting at an abandoned church; and the most spine-chilling vampire assault we’ve seen yet. I’ll focus this time on Sunako, the little novel-loving vampire girl. She’s far and away becoming my favorite character in the series—and it’s not just because she’s got a literary streak like me, I promise!

All of the other characters fall into a few clear categories. You’ve got the vampires, who pretty much want to suck blood and make more vampires. You’ve got the villagers who want to stop the “epidemic”, like the doctor and the monk; and you’ve got those who pretty much are preoccupied with other things. Did I miss anyone?

And then there’s Sunako, who alone doesn’t fit easily into any of these descriptions. She’s a vampire, but she seems much more interested in the monk as a person than as a pasta. Nor do we see her ‘hunting’ anyone else. She’s also interested in novels: I don’t think any of the other vampires have shown any interest outside of feeding up until now.

Moya: True… Sunako is the only one with hobbies! Though to be fair, it may just be because we don’t get to know anyone else from Kanemasa that well. As for the newer vampires – they’re definitely just preoccupied with feeding, as you noted. Maybe you find your hobbies with age?

Primes: I guess that means we don’t learn enough about the world of Shiki to say for sure—at least I don’t as yet. This definitely gets me wondering what the long-term plans of the Shiki are. You know, besides the obvious.

Ok, a quick caveat on what I just said about the vampires only caring about feeding: Remember Megumi, the girl from Episode 1? She’s back as a vampire now, and has the opportunity to drink the blood of Yuuki, the boy she was obsessed with. Instead, she goes after his friend, on the grounds that the latter enjoys Yuuki’s friendship to a degree that she never got to enjoy. In other words, she’s jealous! Still, that only determines who she feeds on, not whether she feeds. Sunako, on the other hand, seems to have hobbies and interests that are not meal-related at all.

Moya: Megumi’s appearance in this episode is quite possibly the most horrific moment in the anime for me when I first watched it. In fact, I believe all the scariest moments for me during my first watch had to do with Megumi. Well, that’s excluding two particularly gory and merciless moments that are to happen later on. Megumi is one elusive predator during the earlier bits… You know that she’s there, but then, do you really know?

Primes: Ye gods and little fishes! Megumi causes at least two jump scares in episode 4 alone! Single-handedly! Brrrr…

Sunako occupies this odd “no-man’s land”, so to speak: this space between the clean-cut categories that makes them a lot more problematic. In other words, she’s a deconstructionist’s dream! In a sense she’s a bigger mystery than the mystery of all the dying villagers: We, at least, know what is going on even when the villagers do not; but even as viewers we don’t yet know if Sunako is really good-willed, or what her primary motivations might be, and what her attitude towards villagers who are not the monk might be. Basically she raises a lot of questions for us.

Moya: Hahaha…Sunako is a deconstructionist’s dream? That’s certainly a new way to think about her. Because of her soulless pupils, I was firmly convinced of her malevolence when she was introduced, but come to think of it, it’s true that she’s the most unknowable of the Shiki. The characters are all drawn in a way that makes it painfully clear who the Shiki are (the eyes are the giveaway!) even when a time comes where they become more difficult to distinguish, but we still don’t know what Sunako wants or who she really is.

Even if Sunako has lost a significant portion of her old self after her rebirth, I would still say that all is not gone. Even among the Shiki, there is an apparent difference in status. The Kirishikis are like the aristocrats, while the newbies are clearly their subordinates. Hmm, or would you still say that none of that has to do with who the Shiki were before they died? All that was established was lost, and the vampires rebuild themselves from nothing? But not all Shiki are reborn equal either. I think I’m getting way ahead of myself though…

Primes: So… basically there’s a lot we don’t know! A lot of questions raised. I suppose that’s part of the appeal of the way the story is told: Whenever a question is answered, more are raised. The world of Shiki (like our own!) isn’t completely unknowable, but there is always more to know. That, by the way, is one of the theological definitions of “mystery”, as when we say “God is a mystery” or talk about “the mystery of evil”. I think there’s a primal human longing in us that draws us to mystery in this sense, even when that mystery is not always benign or may even be malevolent. Stories like Shiki make use of this.

Back to Sunako and the monk: So you have an older man and a little girl meeting alone at night in an abandoned building in the middle of a forest. That’s perfectly normal, right? And as any reasonable person would expect, they then have a conversation about death.

Sunako tells the monk that there’s no such thing as an especially tragic death: All deaths are equally tragic, since Death is the great equalizer who cares nothing about your age, your status, your wealth, your beauty, your anything. Once you die, she says, all of that is gone.

Except, she of all people should know that that’s not the case. For the vampires, at least, it is not gone. Or is it? One would think the vampires could continue to enjoy their worldly possessions and experiences and personal relationships, and yet… they don’t. So far I’ve not seen any of the villagers-turned-vampires doing any of the things I would do if I were granted immortal life and perpetual youth and health. The only possessions they take with them are the clothes they’re buried in; the only vestige of their relationships that remains is warped into the bloodlust.

So why is she telling this to the monk? Does she have some awareness of death—and does she miss it? She seems oddly tranquil and peaceful talking about it, even serene, if a bit wistful or melancholic. I’ve experienced a serenity that feels the same to me when visiting graveyards: for me, the dwellings of the dead are places of light and peace. When I visited Rome, I went through the Capuchin Bone Chapel, a small crypt under a church that is decorated in gorgeous Gothic decor—made entirely from human bones. The walls, the arches, the statues, everything. Even the very lamps themselves are made of human finger bones. The statues include the angel of death (of course) as well as an hourglass (made from human shoulder blades, IIRC). Some people have told me they found it creepy; I found it peaceful. And when I look at Sunako, I see someone who misses that peace.

Moya: Sunako’s speech often doesn’t reflect her actual beliefs. She doesn’t even seem to speak as herself a lot of the times. This is particularly evident when she tells her backstory as a third person narrator later on. Here, she frames death as a “terrible” thing, but spins around in circles while smiling when she talks about it. It sure is interesting reading about your experience in the Capuchin Bone Chapel, and it seems to apply to Sunako pretty well. As someone who cannot view death as something peaceful, I saw Sunako’s behaviour as twisted and perhaps even deliberately cruel on my first viewing. After all, Sunako herself is exempt from this brutal thing called death. Whether she actually “misses” it is a very hard question to answer. Perhaps it’s another “she does, but she doesn’t” case, where she feels tortured for being “alive” but wants to keep existing so much that she hunts humans and bonds with other Shiki (and a human) both for practical purposes and for company.

Primes: Good point—she may not be a reliable narrator. I think what I’ve learned from our conversation here is the psychology of the undead is very different from that of the living. Perhaps one of our psychology readers would care to venture an analysis of the undead psyche? 🙂 I’d look forward to reading it!

It’s also neat to see how the same scene affected us very differently. Remember that the conversation takes place beneath the stain-glass windows depicting Christian martyrs (something Sunako points out explicitly).* Martyrs are people who chose death rather than give up something else precious to them, and this too is something that different people respond to differently. Is their choice foolish or wise?

I think it’s a sign of a well-told story that it is open-ended and welcomes questions and multiple interpretations, rather than locking the reader in to a single way of approaching it. Shiki is such a story.

Thanks for reading! Your comments are always welcome!

 

Note

* One of the forms of martyrdom explicitly mentioned in this episode is mino-odori, the “raincoat dance”. I had to look this up. It appears that during the Japanese persecution of Christianity, Christians were sometimes wrapped in straw, doused in oil, and set on fire. In case you were wondering.

 

If you missed or want to reread earlier chapters in our collab, here they are!

Shiki 1

Toradora 1

Shiki 2

Toradora 2

Shiki 3, Part 1

Shiki 3, Part 2

Torodora 3

Toradora 4