Hey, all, so: First an apology for not doing any Shiki for three weeks. Well, not really an apology, as it’s not like I harmed you by not writing. Unless being deprived of my scintillating wit harmed you, in which case a) I’m flattered and b) you may need help. But who am I to judge? So really, by way of explanation: I had some travel, followed by some family stuff, followed by getting sick.

Moya: Confirmed: no apologies needed. And oh dear, I hope you’re feeling much better now and that everything is dealt with!

Primes: More or less! 🙂 Thank you. And seriously, not a day went by when I wasn’t thinking, “Gee, I really hope I can get to more Shiki soon!” So happy to be back!

Now, let’s go drop in on our favorite vampires.

Something a little different this week: Let’s look at the figure of Masao, who connects episodes 5-7, and thus allows me to kind of sneak in three episodes at once.

I referred to him previously as creepier than the vampires themselves, and I don’t think that’s far off the mark. When we first get some of his backstory, and find that he doesn’t like his sister-in-law (or pretty much anyone else), this happens:

I’m pretty sure this weird twisting of his shoulder is not supposed to be taken as actually happening: rather, it’s representative of something psychological. Yes, the guy’s psychologically twisted. Or perhaps better, mentally ill. He’s pathologically convinced that other people don’t like him, and this makes him socially inept. He tends to say whatever comes into his head without thinking of how it will affect those around him, and thus comes across as rude and even malicious.

Moya: Yeah, Masao looks pretty darn horrifying. I like how you see Masao’s issues as being pathological in nature. With his ridiculous appearance, shrill voice, and constant failings at life, the anime seems to treat him as quite a clown (and so do many of his peers). When such a mean and unpopular character becomes a member of the dark side (not all that willingly), are we supposed to pity him? Do we? I found myself thinking “serves him right” on my first viewing, and sympathizing with him significantly more on my second. I still don’t quite know how I feel about this character!

Primes: I felt sympathetic for him, but I’m the guy who (as a child) felt sorry for the dinosaurs for how they must have felt going extinct! It’s to the anime’s credit that it manages to provoke different responses from different people towards the same character.

Moya: Sunako says: “No death is particularly tragic.” That may be true according to her philosophy, but it is certainly not true for the anime-watching audience. To me, Tohru’s death was certainly more tragic than the death of the newbie police officer from the first episode, whose name I no longer remember! Even while sympathizing with Masao on my second viewing, I can’t manage to care enough for him – a pesky side character. Why feature his transformation, instead of Megumi’s or small spoiler Tohru’s? This does seem to justify Sunako’s statement that “death is the great equalizer” though. Tohru’s and Masao’s nephew’s deaths are accompanied by ceremonies of tears, while Masao dies shivering alone in his room and isn’t discovered until at least a day later. Yet, all are dead, and all have an equal chance to a fresh (and terrible) beginning.

Primes: And that’s a great point about how Shiki shows that death does prove to be the great equalizer. (Though Tatsumi does say that not all the bitten rise again, but that’s a small point.) In the end, whether prince or pauper, we’re all worm food.

As should be clear, Masao doesn’t have a lot of friends and probably isn’t invited to a ton of parties. So it’s a great shock to him when Toru, one of the few people he kind of sort of got along with, whom he considers his closest friend, dies. In trying to make sense of things, he says some stuff that his father and brother take as extremely insensitive, to the point that his father slaps him.

He runs off to Toru’s wake, where he tries—very hard—to say something comforting to the family of the deceased. It doesn’t turn out well. In the end, Toru’s family lash out at him.

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His usual ineptitude derails his good intentions, and he ends up running out into the night. As he heads towards home, his bitter feelings get the best of him, and he declares he no longer cares for anyone.

Moments later, as he goes to enter his house, a vampire ambushes him and bites him.

I find it meaningful that the bite comes on the heels of his rejection of others. Obviously, within the story, there doesn’t appear a cause/effect relationship. But symbolically they are linked, both by being adjacent to one another, and by paralleling Megumi from episode 1. Megumi, you’ll recall, yelled out how much she hated the town, right before entering Kanemasa and falling victim to the Shiki.

One of the recurring themes in Shiki is the destruction of social bonds. The vampires catch people who are isolated, especially those who like Megumi and Masao are isolated both physically and emotionally; and they control some of their victims into moving out of town without notice, or into quitting their jobs suddenly without explanation, immediately prior to their demise.

Here, I think, there’s an intriguing difference between Shiki and Dracula. In Dracula, although there are multiple vampires, there is hardly a vampire society. There’s Dracula, and there’s a small harem of vampiresses, victims of his who are now nothing more than his slaves, unless it be that they are also slaves to their own desire for blood. The only vampire with any significant agency or will of his own is Dracula himself.

Whereas in Shiki, as the vampires tear apart human society they also replace it with their own. Fast-forward to episode 7, where Masao wakes up inside his coffin. Panicking, he is ‘rescued’ by the mysterious blue-haired vampire. Masao is the first person we actually watch make the transition from human to vampire. Surprisingly, it’s not a smooth or automatic process. Yes, he comes to un/life with features we associate with vampires, like weakness to the sun and a thirst for human blood. But initially he refuses to drink the blood offered to him. Blue-hair first flatters him, then encourages and befriends him, and finally threatens him until he caves in. In the end, what proves Masao’s weakness is simple: He doesn’t want to be alone.

Moya: Masao’s simple weakness does make him a good candidate to be featured for his vampire initiation. The idea of “choice” is emphasized by the fact that Tatsumi prepares both a live captive and a cup of blood as Masao’s options, aside from the obvious alternative of choosing neither and dying. Despite Tatsumi’s threats, Masao isn’t force-fed, and must independently perform the act of feeding.

Primes: Wow, that escaped me. It really does highlight the whole “choice” aspect of the situation.

Moya: This reminds me of a social psychology experiment in which three groups of female participants are asked to join a dull discussion group (Aronson & Mills 1959). Members of the first and second group undergo a simulated initiation where they must endure the discomfort of reading sexual passages aloud and being ranked on an “embarrassment scale” for their performance, the first group’s conditions being categorized as “mild” and the second group’s as “severe,” while members of the control group go through no trial beforehand. As a result, members from the “severe initiation” group were most likely to rate the subsequent discussion more favourably. Whew, Tatsumi must have majored in psychology…(the more I think about it, the more I realize just how manipulative this guy is in the series)

Primes: Man, Tatsumi gives me the creeps! Yeah, he’s an expert manipulator (for example, he’s the only vampire that manages to work his way into the hospital). But I’ll save my complete thoughts on him for later… I hadn’t heard of that experiment; it does seem to support the general principle that how you frame things makes them appear more or less desirable.

In the end, Masao has to choose to be a vampire, in the fullest sense. In a social sense. Later on in episode 9, when the vampires assault the hospital, we see them working together; and we learn that they have a social structure.

This is vastly different than the world of Dracula.

Moya: True, this is probably where the Shiki differ the most from Dracula. In addition, Dracula is a lot less human-like than the Shiki are. My professor from last term called Count Dracula a “scheming killing machine.” Sure, Dracula finds fun in teasing his captive Jonathan Harker and apparently has a passion for hoarding things, but for the most part, he commits murders without attaching emotional significance to them, and his only weaknesses are all physical. And look at how anticlimactically he dies too: “the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from […] sight” (Stoker 314). Classic I-don’t-feel-so-good.The Shiki, on the other hand, are beings that cry, laugh, beg, and taunt as they interact with Sotoba’s villagers – a population consisting not only of food, but of lovers, classmates, relatives and enemies. Tatsumi is the only character who really acts like Dracula, but we don’t know much about him yet at this point.

Primes: Yes, no spoilers about Blue-hair! I agree: I found the resolution of Dracula kind of a let-down. Although, with all of the emotional tension built up through the book, pretty much any resolution would have worked, and this is no exception.

The difference between the Shiki and Dracula reminds me of the two kinds of damnation in Dante’s Inferno. Everyone who knows anything about Dante’s trilogy poem, the Divine Comedy, will remember that it’s broken into three parts: Hell, the realm of the damned; Purgatory, for those on their way to Heaven but not yet ready to go there; and Heaven, home of the blessed. Hell and Purgatory/Heaven are contrasted as two Empires, each with their own Emperor and social hierarchy. (This allows Dante to make pointed statements about kingdoms and their rulers on Earth. He’s well-known for consigning an awful lot of his contemporaries to hellfire, which—like Masao—didn’t win him a lot of friends, and so he died in exile. Though so far as I know he didn’t come back as a vampire. But to be honest, an undead Dante sounds pretty awesome.)

What all too often gets glossed over is that there’s a fourth state mentioned briefly before Dante’s poem dives into Hell. This is the dwelling of those angels who “stood neither for Heaven nor for Hell, but for themselves alone.” Where even Hell is social, this unnamed place is pure separation: there are no allegiances, no relationships, and in the end no selves. As Virgil explains to Dante in the poem, Heaven would not accept them because they rebelled, and Hell had no place for them—because even Hell has society. (It’s also the home for human souls who were neither good enough for Heaven nor bad enough for Hell. Even Hell has standards.)

The unnamed place, with its lack of society/relationships, reminds me of Dracula’s state; while Hell seeking to establish a kingdom in place of Heaven brings to mind the Shiki trying to set up a vampire society to replace the dying human town. I wouldn’t say that the small Japanese town is in most ways comparable to Heaven(!), but at least it seems preferable to the alternatives.

Moya: I haven’t read Divine Comedy (though I’ve sung a section of Purgatorio in choir and was absolutely in awe with its beauty). What I have read is Milton’s Paradise Lost, which also portrays an army of fallen angels uniting under Satan’s lead in Hell, greatly due to his charisma and his threats (wow, isn’t Tatsumi a bit like Satan too now?). The Shiki strive to make the best of their (un)living days, much like the residents of Hell in Paradise Lost, who give convincing speeches about optimism and freedom.

Hell is a social place, and so is Sotoba Village, by day and by night!

Primes: I think we have to do a Miltonic reading of Shiki now. Man, I’m stoked!