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kaigou-- previous posts on this ongoing conversation with myself: here, here, here -- plus, images behind the cut (none large, but a fair number of them) -- NOTE: some images missing, lost in journal-transfer
When I'm rambling like this, the point isn't really to persuade anyone, though I know I can take that tone like I'm an authority of some sort & trying to bring you 'round to believe in my point. (Sorry.)
Maybe it doesn't matter if there's a hundred-percent bulletproof logic to anything I'm positing, maybe it doesn't matter if there are half again as many exceptions to prove every rule, so long as maybe someone (other than me, because it'd suck to be doing this all by my lonesome) stops and says, what else have I taken for granted, that's built into our cultural biases?
You know that old joke about the woman who cuts the top foot off her broom handle because that's the way her mother and grandmother did, and the history revealed is that her grandmother did it because a broom wouldn't fit in the pantry without being shortened? We all write short brooms, and sometimes that's just a quirk of our world-view thanks to our culture, our research, our own personalities -- but that doesn't mean it's bad (in my opinion, at least) to sometimes ask, just why the hell am I automatically shortening the broom?
About language: on my wall, I have a long-life blessing given by a Chinese friend. At the top is the ancient character for 壽, shou, life, and below that the character is written out in all its ancient variations, a hundred times. This type of scroll is sometimes called "a hundred lives" or "a hundred years of life" or similar wish/charm for longevity. Contrast that with the idea of a large poster that says this:
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
If anyone's asking me, I'd say it'd look pretty funky on a wall. I can't imagine looking at it and thinking immediately, oh, yeah, that's a blessing for long life. More likely, I'd be thinking, okay, who let the pop-art fanatic in here? Because when I stop and really look at it, I'm not seeing "life, life, life" (let alone thinking that the repetition equals "lots of lives"), I'm seeing a whole bunch of Ls, Is, Fs, and Es.
[Which is what I meant in the earlier post that you can't really deconstruct kanji/hanzi as a process of reading it: you see the entire character as a distinct unit. If, say, 'Q' meant 'horse' then seeing Q Q Q Q you would think, "lots of horses" -- not, "oh, it's an O with a strange quirk at the bottom" or "someone wrote their Ps backwards".]
I can't think of a single example in my entire life in which someone has given a poster or picture with a single word where the intention is to act as a good-luck charm or a blessing. I mean, outside of bad sixties pop-art or catchy inspirational phrases. Sure, plenty of people needlework or cross-stitch biblical quotes and hang them on their wall, but there's a different nuance to that, I think.
The written word there is an echo, somehow; it's not a charm in and of itself. It's more like a reminder of what we want or should be, rather than something that in and of itself carries power to get us there. We tend to rely more on symbols over using written language (though the use of symbols like statues and other paraphenilia is common all over the globe) -- I'm thinking of things like a Catholic crucifix, or the Magen David. There may be words on/with the symbol, be that YHVH or ICXC, but it doesn't seem like this inclusion is mandatory considering how often I've seen crucifixes and magen davids without the attendant letters.
Part of what's swirling in my head that's relevant to storytelling is remembering the bit from... oh, damn, now I can't remember the movie. (CP would know, but he's already left for class. Hrk.) It's a vampire movie, and one of the humans tries to ward off an attacking vampire by brandishing a cross. The vampire replies, "that doesn't work on me, boy: I'm Jewish."
-- see replies for clarification on correct quote & source --
If an author writing urban fantasy gets to the fight scene(s) and is focused on knowing the name to command/have power, or on using a magical or modern word to enact power... would this work against someone who isn't natively fluent in the language? Or deaf? What about someone with damaged hearing? (Like me, who will reconstruct sounds that aren't full comprehensible and thus 'mishear' things on a regular basis -- "carolling stops" for "car in the shop" for instance. No, I'm not just being weird or obtuse; I've met other folks with similar types of damage and they report misinterpreting in a similar fashion.)
Would a blind person be immune to written charms? If someone has spent his life plunked down in front of the television and/or computer, doesn't like to read books, and has never had a newspaper subscription, would written charms have less efficacy because of the person's own disinclination? What if the person is the one casting the written charm, but isn't really that big on reading/writing, doesn't have the largest vocabulary, will this reduce the charm's power?
If someone's culture relies most strongly on written charms, does this render blind people unable to do magic in that culture -- how can you write a charm you can't see? What about deaf people working in a sound-based magical culture? Can you sign a charm? Would that count as written, or as a moving symbol like some kind of magical performance art? And what if it's a sound-charm person up against a word-charm person? Will the two cancel each other out, or be rendered useless against the other who doesn't work on the same wavelength?
And, as CP pointed out, there's also the risk of an ethnocentric bigotry similar to the crucifix being used on Jewish vampires: if we can reasonably assert that the western culture leans towards "what is spoken" being the most powerful and "what is written" being something less attention-worthy (which might have extra-strength right now, given the current trend towards characterizing the educated as ivory tower eggheads...) then it would certainly qualify as ethnocentric bigotry to have your spoken-word sorcerer besting the sorcerer who's waving around little signs with 50-cent SAT words.
Why would one automatically be better than the other? Or alternately, if one is better than the other, why would this automatically be that from one's own culture?
Not that I can think right this instant of books that show one or the other example (and I wouldn't quote them anyway), because me asking isn't to show up some author or to taunt anyone about being ethnocentrically tunnel-visioned. We all do that, one way or another. It's hard to step outside your culture.
Nope, the only reason to ask questions like that is because I want to keep it in mind for the next time it's me who's writing that fight scene. I can't be the only person who considers it important to stop and say, well, what if there were Jewish vampires? Why must it always be a sign of the cross? ...well, not the question about vampires because I don't write 'em and only read them if they're secondary and frankly would like them retired about now... but you get the point. I hope.
For those of you now curious about Mushishi, I should clarify that I mildly glossed the description in the previous post. It's far more nuanced than I think I really gave it shrift in my review/description, and although Ginko follows the peddler-route in the story, he's more of a doctor-peddler. In other words, as he travels, the depth of his knowledge may not be fully understood (or exactly what he deals with, mushi being a mystery to most folks), but he doesn't truly enter as a complete unknown, not in the strictest sense of the peddler-who-is-really-a-sorcerer (but doesn't tell anyone until the last minute).
However, Ginko remains ambiguous for other reasons, like the question of just how much the mushi have affected him, and why it is that he can relate to them -- and perceive them -- so easily and calmly. At the same time, there is still an exchange; he's often shown receiving some kind of payment for his work. Sometimes it's in trade, and a few times it's not quite the most above-board trade, in that his patients may not be aware of what he's taking away.
Ginko is also much more conversational about what's going on, far less cryptic with mundane/folks. He uses simple analogies that are comprehensible, even if what is being described is incomprehensible.
To explain mushi, he holds up his hand and says, imagine your body is the entirety of life. On your hand, the fingers would be animal life, and the thumb would be plant life. Humans occupy this space at the very farthest tip of the middle finger. Now, follow the veins backwards down the palm, the wrist, the forearm, as the veins meet at their branches, retracing the route to the heart. As these veins join up, at some point it becomes harder to distinguish between plant-life and animal-life, until eventually they're virtually the same thing. Closer and closer to the heart, the main source pumping out life's blood, and at the very heart of things is the mushi.
(Which from the perspective of a 21st century person, is an amazingly apt scientific description, too, considering that I seem to recall that of the life-forms on this planet, don't single-celled and simple-celled organisms make up like 80% of it, or something? It's a wildly massive number, given that these are things you can't even see -- mostly -- with the naked eye.)
Also of note: while CP and I agree that the main character in the other series, the Medicine Seller in Mo No No Ke gives us the distinct impression he's not entirely of human origin (or if he was, it's far in the distant past), CP took away from Mushishi that Ginko is a human, albeit one with additional sensitivities and abilities. Me, not quite so much.
Very early in the series, Ginko deals with the results of an interrupted shifting from human to mushi (an event prompted/created by mushi themselves). The problem, he says, is that as one moves closer to the state of being wholly mushi, one loses that human awareness and consciousness. It's moving beyond being human, but going with the analogy of the body's blood, it's also regressing to a simpler form of life. Language, courtesies, societies, would all strip away (I would guess) and reduce down to instinct, then farther down than that...
I got the impression that Ginko may have begun life as a human but at some point, apparently thanks to significant interaction with mushi, he's not entirely human any more. He straddles the line between human and not, and while this more-than-human status may be roughly similar to the Medicine Seller's, Ginko has become more-than-human but retains his human awareness somehow.
The other series, Mo No No Ke, is crammed to the brim with symbolism and nods and homages to folklore. But if Mushishi leans hard to Shinto, then I'd say Mo No No Ke is the Buddhist answer to Ginko's story. I originally thought to just list all the symbolism I noted, and see if anyone else could think of stuff I'd missed, but that would involve a lot of spoilers... so I'm breaking that post out into its own.
Alright, in this post I will end up (partially) spoiling the first episode in the arc, but believe me, knowing these details won't reduce the emotional impact. (It may hit hard regardless, because I'm not telling you anything about the form of resolution, so no fear reading.)
Both Mushishi and Mo No No Ke use a certain storytelling style (though the latter to a much stronger degree) which is apparently rooted in traditional Noh theater, where the aesthetic sense is that things from the past have a relevant beauty that outshines the crassness of direct, current conflict. Hrm, a better way to put it (because I can't find the translated quote): well, again with that cultural preference for subtlety over in-your-face moments.
Strangely, these stories sort of straddle that, because while the demon-ghosts in each story (or the living people involved) in some way retell the past history, concurrently Kusuri-uri is doing battle on some level with the demon-ghost in the present. But for the traditions of Noh, it's the reflections on the past that give the present its poignancy.
The Medicine Seller (Kusuri-uri, which literally just means 'medicine seller') was first introduced in the third story of a bundle, titled Ayakashi: Classic Samurai Horror. I've seen the first episodes of the first two stories in the arc, and they may be classic Japanese horror but to me they were classically... well... boring. The third story is an original work, and boy, does it show: it's a wonderful amalgamation of folklore, some esoterica, intensely-cultural visuals, and modern storytelling in terms of tension and revelations.
The first two stories in Ayakashi are based on traditional ghost stories, and from a Westerner's eyes, a lot of Japanese 'classic' stories can be reduced to "rocks fall, everyone dies," and I mean that quite literally. There's no conflict visible enough for Western tastes; a demon appears, a bunch of people die, and... it ends. I simplify but that's pretty much how a lot of the traditional Japanese stories come across. Yawn.
The three stories are completely independent of each other, and I think it may have even been different teams working on them, because the styles are radically divergent. The first is unattractive, the second is mainstream and passable but nothing to write home about, and then you get to the third. If you've not seen the icons I've been posting, or the trailer-AMV embedded from youtube, here's a single picture that doesn't say a thousand words. More like a gazillion and all of them shouted at the same exact instant. Good luck with it.
Here's one of the other DVD covers, but for this one I trimmed it to just focus on Kusuri-uri. Helps with the headache inducing wildness, at little. I hope.
(Strangely, this crazy over-colorful visual-packed style actually works for a horror/ghost story. It's like being in a freaking funhouse, or something.)
It appears that Ayakashi may have used its third story -- Bakeneko [bah-kay-neh-ko, goblin/demon cat] -- as a kind of pilot to lead into a series that focuses on Kusuri-uri, as fans prefer to call him. The spin-off, Mo No No Ke [moe-noe-noe-kay] is five stories told over twelve episodes. Like Mushishi, it's entirely episodic with the separate arcs being completely unrelated to each other (although a character from the original Bakeneko storyline reappears in one of the Mo No No Ke storylines).
Kusuri-uri is implied to travel from place to place, peddler's box on his back, but we only see him arrive/leave, never mid-journey; in contrast, the majority of Ginko's stories show him crossing significant distances before he reaches that story's happening-place. But like many detective-styled stories the world over, when you see Kusuri-uri appear, you know there's probably a demon/ghost somewhere around. It's like having Jessica Fletcher sighted at your local diner: someone's gonna be a dead body by dawn.
Unlike Ginko -- who does introduce himself as a mushishi, or 'mushi master' (even if this is dismissed by mushi-unaware humans) -- Kusuri-uri simply appears and offers his wares. When his pack is rifled by a suspicious household, they find medicine and drugs (though, Kusuri-uri says, none are poisons), and some children's toys, and... pornography. Ahem.
[No, I'm not making that up. It's a pretty funny scene: you see a quick glimpse of two hands holding a colored book open to a rough print of what looks like a couple making out, and the soundtrack is of several guys doing the suddenly-adolescent "hehehehehe" ala Beavis, then a slight cough as they regain their composure.]
That's the other major characterization difference between Ginko and Kusuri-uri: I really can't recall any episode in which Ginko evinces any significant romantic (let alone sexual) interest in anyone or even *ponderponder* any where someone else shows such interest in him. It's like he holds himself distinct from that, removed, but in keeping the world at the arm's length of a passing traveller, he treats all people with the same basic levelness. Kusuri-uri, though, several times produces a rather heated reaction from female characters -- nothing overt, mind you, but those are definite blushes on their cheeks.
Which had me a bit wierded out at first, because the tone of voice and delivery Kusuri-uri uses is... well, the only word that really fits is sinister. Where Ginko slurs his words and speaks in a conversational, amiable tone, Kusuri-uri has a sort of flat delivery that's as precisely enunciated as any theater-trained actor might have. And his phrases are loaded with implication, even when the phrasing itself (at least in English) is really very simple: "things may become quite... dangerous."
Not entirely a pregnant pause, because the actor's voicing doesn't drop in pitch as though delivering a final wham! in the line. Instead, such pauses come with the same basic level inflection, and the tone then becomes more of a kind of amused (maybe sometimes even delighted) distance.
I think of someone watching a friend pour gasoline on the grill in hopes of getting the charcoal going, and the observer remarks, "well, this is going to be... interesting."
That dry, deadpan delivery that can make it hard to tell when Kusuri-uri is actually being deadpan (which he does do, sometimes) versus when he's being deadly serious. Compared to Ginko, Kusuri-uri keeps himself under a great deal more control. His expressions stay within a much smaller range: from neutral, to annoyed, to... definitely annoyed.
Once or twice, he evinces a kind of curiosity. From the illustration's subtle details in eyebrow and mouth I might even say there's a note of amusement in there.
With maybe three notable exceptions, that's about it. I don't know what else could possibly sum up so well this character's quirks as those images, so there you go. He may ultimately be there to help, but he comes across as doing it because, well, here he is and here's the mononoke, so let's get this over with. He certainly does not seem like the kind to look someone up in a year when he's back in the neighborhood (again unlike Ginko, who's invited to do such and implies once or twice that he accepts the invitation).
Kusuri-uri just isn't cuddly at all, in act, word, or tone of voice. That's not to say he doesn't show a kind of subtle fondness for one or two characters, but with such a deadpan delivery that the characters probably have to take it completely on faith that Kusuri-uri is teasing, and not truly annoyed.
Quick example: in the second storyline, Kusuri-uri meets up again with Kayo, a servant-girl from the original Ayakashi (Bakeneko) story. After their ship is attacked by an Ayakashi & dispelled by Kusuri-uri, the second episode opens with Kayo sitting beside Kusuri-uri (who reclines with his back to her, looking like he'd be napping if given the choice). She's silent, but giving serious thought to what she knows of Kusuri-uri, and frowning intently over the question of just who's side he's really on. He interrupts her thoughts with the comment, "with a face like that, it will be a wonder if you ever marry."
Kusuri-uri isn't about to win any popularity contests, that's for sure. I don't know if Ginko would consider the issue any more than Kusuri-uri, but I would expect Ginko to be momentarily taken-aback upon rejection. (A few times other characters refuse Ginko in some way -- either his company, or his help, or cures, etc -- and he tends to display a bit of startled "oh, well, if you say so," kind of shrugging-off after slight startlement.)
When it comes to characterization, Kusuri-uri would be damn hard to write from a western viewpoint because he is both a tabula rasa in terms of his history/backstory, and completely opaque in terms of any current motivations. His external characterization is consistent, but with almost no other information about him, a reader would be left to fill in a truckload of gaps.
Also of note (as bearing on the discussion about word vs. sound in magic) is one of his major tools, the o-fudo. This is a printed charm that creates a barrier (a common enough use of them in animanga, if slightly less common in the real world). In Mo No No Ke, they have four stages. At first they appear blank; then (I guess) they get charged somehow -- and black printing appears on the paper, only to shift almost immediately into a symbol-based image. Last, they appear to activate when kicked into gear by a demon's presence, and that's when they shift to red and the symbols expand.
Sometimes Kusuri-uri places these on the wall, one at a time. In other cases, he can present a sheaf of them like an old-time poker player producing aces from his sleeve, at which point Kusuri-uri throws the o-fudo top speed and covers entire walls in this mystical barrier, at a single throw.
Btw, he doesn't say a word when he does so -- another part of that sound vs image thing I was talking about, in the earlier post. (Just what might be represented in the second and third stages, I'll leave for some other time. Hint: probably going to take thirty words or more.)
In that Western/European version I posited, the peddler-sorcerer would spend a lot of time figuring out the demon's name. Kusuri-uri pegs the situation as a Zashiki-warashi relatively soon after the demon-ghost first acts. (Given his actions of setting up protective charms throughout the inn from almost the moment he walks through the door, and his immediate reaction when the child-ghosts make their moves, I'd say he was fully aware of the demon-ghost in residence and that this may even be the reason he entered. It certainly doesn't seem to be very ambiguous about his sensitivity to the demon-ghost's existence.)
When he states the Form out loud, his exorcism-sword closes its mouth with a sudden clack, which appears to indicate the Form has been accepted. Taking the sword in hand, he presents it, sheathed, and requests everyone present tell him the backstory and how they feel about it (okay, not in so many words but that's really what it amounts to).
But, important note, this is not asked/commanded of the demon(s), but of the human players. With minor variation, this appears to be the basic formula; the first part is the preface, which sometimes get phrased one way, then another, each story, if amounting to same meaning. The second part (with kana/romajii) is the formula, and does not appear to vary overmuch.
Certain conditions must be met for the sword of exorcism to be drawn. If Katachi, Makoto, and Kotowari are not present, it cannot be unsheathed. The intertwined fates of men give the Mononoke its Form, Truth is the natural state of all things, and Regret is everpresent in men's hearts.
Katachi: Form. I guess this is pretty straightforward, as I've not seen any translation-debates online about it.
Makoto: Truth. This word apparently has the connotation of an objective truth, in which case the english word 'truth' is probably the best fit. (We don't really have different designations, word-wise, for "truth that is subjective" versus objective.)
The stickiest one is 'kotowari'. From what I've found, it also means truth, but in a subjective sense. One translator had been using 'fixation' but said that 'reasoning' may work better in context; the Shinsen-subs I found used 'regret'. One might even say that Kusuri-uri is effectively asking for the motivation, which has a definite judicial ring although somewhat less poetic and a bit too police-like for the story's mood.
If there were a single (english) word that could incorporate the notion of forgiveness or compassion -- but not the actual, more of the potential for it -- then that might be the 'subjective truth' that would fit kotowari. Failing that, I think (with writer hat on, not with any real translation credentials) that regret is possibly the best word choice.
Because it's the emotional truth of a situation, but it also implies the potential for resolution; to regret is to look back at the past with both a clear sense of what happened, yet overlaid with a strong emotional tone that could engender one to seek forgiveness, if possible, to resolve the lingering emotion.
The medicine seller then concludes with the same phrase each time:
よって、皆々様、真と理、お聞かせ願いたく候
Yotte, minamina-sama, makoto to kotowari, okikasenegaitaku-sourou.
Therefore, ladies and gentlemen: the Truth and the Regret, I pray you please tell me them.
A note: the sourou-style is apparently just a literary form that's archaic, quite formal, and usually only used in writing, like letters, official/public documents, applications, and suchlike. It dates from the Edo period (roughly 1600s) and I suppose would be sort of like seeing Shakespearean English used in text, today -- except that these stories are set in the Edo period, so they'd sound contemporary to those listening. [I think it's supposed to be soro with long dash over both o's, but those seem to get eaten when I upload, so I went with the alternate ou romanicization. If I got that wrong, let me know and I'll edit.]
Incidentally, if you watch the series, the translations won't match what I used. Most of the time, yotte is translated as "and so" which works, but lacks the formality in my ears. Minamina-sama is a polite form of "everybody", but as CP noted, it's not just "everyone" but more like "EVERYone," as in -- "even those of you who've been keeping your traps shut to this point."
Given the ultra-polite honorific in there, again, "everyone" works but my original guess from context was that I personally would go with "ladies and gentlemen". (Turns out that's the dictionary's suggestion given the combination, as well.)
Okay, so this entire side-point amuses me because it makes me think of the distinction in the Deep South between "ya'll" (one person, or maybe a couple at most) and "all ya'll" (a whole bunch of people).
CP: What about the y'inz?
Me: They don't count. They're Yankees.
Ahem.
The verb okikasenegaitaku shows up in the dictionary as "desire; wish; request; prayer; petition; application". When I consider the formality and politeness of the request, the personality of the speaker, the historical context, and the tone, I'd say "I pray you" or "I desire you" fits better than the simpler-flatter "I ask you". What he's doing is asking, yes, and "begging" doesn't even close to match his tone or delivery, but... it's like he's giving a command (tone-wise) and being utterly polite about it (grammar-wise).
It really does take formal phrasing, in nearly any language, to get that lovely mix of asking someone a polite question that is not really a question and most definitely is not open to negotiation. Like Queen Victoria saying, "please, do tell." Although I think "I request you" may work as well, but it lacks the old-school connotations of "I pray you".
Anyway, I had CP listen, and his immediate reaction was that it's a specific formula, like the mystical version of repeating a prayer/charm in a certain way to produce specific results. That's one more place where a Buddhist-style element shows up, in the use of sutras, mantras, and other magically-imbued repeated, set phrases (and underlines as well the fact that you can't really break west/east into sound/writing, because most every culture uses a mix of both, so the conversation is more academic for the purposes of world-building as a writer).
One thing about kotowari that really struck me as a westerner was that it does not have to be expressed by the guilty party.
It can be expressed by anyone, from the way the stories play out. What's important isn't that the perpetrator feels guilty, or wishes to make amends, or even admits they did wrong: in at least two stories, the perpetrator refuses to do so (or may not even believe, still, that his actions were wrong). But someone present feels this regret, and in expressing it thereby fulfills Kusuri-uri's third requirement.
(In several of the stories, a Truth or Regret is offered and the sword does not shut its mouth; it's as though Kusuri-uri is not the judge of truth/falsehood, the sword is.)
I might even go so far as to note that, again with writer-hat on, one might think of forgiveness as severing one's Self from the regrets that drag you down and keep you tied to the past. It's not just the Buddhists who see compassion for wrong-doing as means to release those lingering negative emotions; I think that's a human understanding and is probably expressed in a great many cultures/religions even if not in so many words. But it's also a stark contrast to the Western fantasy-genre, the demon-infused storytelling on this end of the cultural spectrum, where forgiveness... well, it just doesn't always enter into the equation.
There's wanting -- as a western reader -- to see the bad suffer for their crimes as a form of amending and to consider this a crucial part of any resolution. It's another thing altogether to see suffering as almost irrelevant (certainly, Kusuri-uri seems to treat it as so, at least in the sense that inflicting such or making sure of such doesn't seem to be within his domain or even worry), and rather to require forgiveness in the resolution.
This is probably well-muddled by this point, but that's part of what I meant when I talked about pantheons and how religious frameworks inform our assumptions about Right and Wrong, and what it takes to return the world to Stability/Harmony. A number of writing-texts and essays have the simple, if somewhat accurate, summary of nearly every story, where A = "life is good" and B = conflict.
Either the story is:
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branchandroot pointed out is the more adult version), A2 is a result of A1 as influenced/marked by B. The original status quo does not return (ie, "everything goes back to normal") but that a new stability is achieved in the wake of B's passing.
One thing I'd taken for granted that I'm questioning here is that this A2 is expressed as stability. Not harmony.
Many of the stories in Mushishi, like pretty much every story in Mo No No Ke, end on an uncertain note that would probably leave a fair number of western viewers going, say hunh? Because the question of a return to stability is left wide-open: where will you go now, what will you do, what the hell happens now? But the question of harmony has been answered, and the main players are at peace... even if the overall stability (of the results of A+B) remains in question.
There are plenty of major Western novels that use this device in some form or another; curiously, the only ones that spring immediately to my burnt brain are those of Raymond Chandler. I recall reading his novels and ending each with the question, but... how do things go back to normal, now?
Yes, the bad guy was revealed and there is a strong trend of showing regret (if not forgiveness) for the base actions of which humans are capable. But rarely do his stories have any major degree of television-style tag, in which everyone gathers together after the last commercial break and says, "well, now Timmie's been adopted by the Smiths, and the cat is recuperating nicely, and the Wilsons are rebuilding their house," in a kind of contrived "all's well that ends well" wrap-up. (I hated those. I still do.)
Reminds me of when I wrote my first novel and was so very pleased with the fact that I'd left all sorts of stability-styled questions unanswered (not that I precisely thought of it that way, so much as I like that kind of ending), and the biggest critique complaints were that I'd not "finished the story". The problem there, I think, is that in most genre/pulp-fiction (which I should note I had not yet read much of so wasn't overly familiar), you expect 'return to stability', you expect a pat delivery of A2. If you want to skip A2, then you should go write literary fiction, where devices like that are tolerated.
Action/mystery stories -- which are the heart of most urban fantasy, really -- are deeply rooted in the "life is stable, catastrophe happens and is dealt with, life returns to stable" formula.
Not counting stories with gaps allowed for a sequel -- "who was that person in the last scene?" That lingering question works best when the overall stability-issue has been addressed. From what I've seen, readers don't flip out at smaller unanswered questions; they don't seem to mind such intrigues so long as the little questions don't add up to enough to put the bigger resolution in doubt.
But before I go further, there's one really important thing, that of the eastern equivalent to the western Bad Thing (demon, ghost, spirit, Other, whatever) as represented in Mo No No Ke.
Everything I can find is rather muddy, with even the most academic discussions/essays indicating there's major debate among Japanese folklore-scholars for terms like ayakashi and mononoke. The more accessible (read: popularized) essays are blunt about it not being a clear-cut thing, that few people really know the distinctions, and that definitions vary as well by region, by religious framework, by time period of the folklore origins.
It doesn't help that in popular modern use, several of the terms have either shifted away from original use, or have become almost interchangeable. On top of that, Kusuri-uri himself isn't exactly the most forthcoming about the exact ins and outs of what makes an ayakashi (usually considered a vengeful spirit) or a mononoke (which literally means 'strange/freakish thing'). One of the few times he gives any details, he explains "the Form that the demon takes on comes from the hatred and grudge it bears towards humans."
Thing is, far as I can figure out, it works something like this. When a human dies bearing a grudge of some sort -- or even potentially when still alive but severely repressing/denying vengeful or angry feelings -- it becomes an ayakashi, a vengeful spirit. Mononoke is the anglicization of mono [thing] no [possessive] ke [from the Chinese 怪, guai: monstrous, strange, freakish].
Kusuri-uri explains that ayakashi are akin to gods in that there are countless numbers of each. "Just as there are men and beasts and birds in this world, there are many types of Ayakashi, which exist outside of our plane." In some cases, ayakashi are ghosts of dead people; in other cases, tools and instruments used for a certain length of time (usually 99 years) can gain a kind of soul/sentience, and thereby become a kind of ayakashi. However, "no matter how they come into existence, an ayakashi's reasons for being is beyond human understanding."
Another character provides an explanation about mono no ke, that 'mono' refers to the divine state of a thing (or perhaps divinity in general) and 'ke' has a root that means 'disease': so mono no ke might be translated as 'divine disease'... which ties into ayakashi being as numerous as gods, I suppose. Kusuri-uri asks, "vengeance, hatred, fear: what if an ayakashi were to unite with a strong human emotion? It would become incredibly powerful, unhindered by attempts to seal it."
I have no idea how close or far off the mark I might be, but the gist I'm getting seems to go like this: ayakashi are non-corporeal entities whose origins are mysterious and whose actions are mysterious. If, somewhere in there, the ayakashi either brings along a bundle of strong negative human emotions OR happens to run into a human's strong negative emotions (even if the human emoting is technically still alive), the confluence of the two -- spirit + emotion -- seems to create a mononoke. OR... perhaps it's that the emotions then twist/enpower the ayakashi somehow, like catching something contagious. Based on the stories in the series, and comments by Kusuri-uri, the 'mononoke' is not a separate demon but is somehow the result of a transformation... maybe.
If this seems like a lot of information to be throwing around just to talk about comparisons with western literary fantasy-genre traditions, having the above information means this point may make a bit more sense (well, as much as it can make given that what's in the previous few paragraphs is probably as clear as freaking mud).
In the western fantasy tradition, you seem to get one of two choices about how non-human bad guys show up. Either, like vampires, it's a human infected by some kind of badness (or just plain non-human-ness), or it's something inherent that isn't contagious. Frex, most stories don't have humans 'becoming' elves, unless they were secretly elves the entire time.
I'm sure there are one or two exceptions out there, but most of our shared-modern folklore pretty much assumes that once a vampire, always a vampire -- and, of course, if you're born an elf, you die an elf, and demons are demons. (Though for some authors, resolving a demon means 'saving' it, and that's usually with a working assumption that demons are simply fallen angels, and thus can be resolved by un-falling them.)
This is completely the opposite of what Kusuri-uri seems to be doing with ayakashi and mononoke. In the west, the goal is to command, compel, defeat the demon, and get rid of it -- banish it, or kill it outright. The (amateur) translators for the Bakeneko story and for all of Mo No No Ke translated Kusuri-uri's words as "kill," as in "kill the demon/mononoke." But that's not the verb he's using, which would be korosu or something like that (I know the sound, not the spelling!); instead, Kusuri-uri tells the beleaguered characters that his goal is kiri, which would be 'cut' or 'sever'.
In other words, ayakashi are as multitudinous as grains of sand, but upon intersection with (negative) human emotions, the ayakashi become infected, transformed, into mononoke -- at which point (and what may be part of the confusion), the ayakashi is then referred to as a mononoke. Kusuri-uri's task is to sever these two, which returns the ayakashi to its original state -- and that's the reason the regret must be known, because that regret is what resolves, somehow, the powerful swirling instinct of vengeance, hatred, or fear.
There isn't a goal of destroying or banishing the ayakashi, and the sword does not even truly kill the ayakashi, per se: because the ayakashi in and of itself may not be evil. It only becomes evil as a result of being infected by these human emotions. In at least three of the stories, there's an implication that the ayakashi-mononoke, upon resolution, returns to being an ayakashi... and yet is no longer of any concern to Kusuri-uri, not to the degree that he's going to chase it down and slice it into a bazillion pieces.
That's just so totally opposite the Western dominant framework. I mean, imagine a sorcerer-priest in traditional-historical, or urban-contemporary, fantasy saying, "oh, we don't have to actually destroy the demon, we just want it to, y'know, calm down, get it away from this upset human."
But beyond that, in the western framework, demons are seen as independent evil, most often: an active force of evil, one that seeks out trouble for the sake of trouble. What did that kid do, to deserve to be possessed? The kid didn't have to do anything, because demons are just like that -- the demon bears the entirety of the guilt, by definition of being, well, a damn demon. So to speak.
But in Ginko's story, and in Kusuri-uri's, that which performs the role of demon-ghost is not actually evil. Temporarily twisted, yes, but not evil. There is no hell to banish the demon-ghost back to, and there's no heaven to send it onward having cured it. Certainly, the mononoke-ayakashi are malicious and destructive, acting out the grudges contained in the negative infecting emotions -- but even this is seen as a product of the intertwining fates of gods and men (or ayakashi and humans).
The first story begins on a rainy night; a woman, Shino, arrives at an inn only to find all the rooms are all booked. Shino begs/threatens that if she's not allowed to stay she'll be dead by morning and it'll be on the innkeeper's head -- so the proprietress shows her to a room on the uppermost floor, one not normally used for guests. They've not even begun traversing the long twisting stairs before Shino is already hearing children's excited laughter off in the distance, children's voices, and she just thinks it's other guests and their families.
Alone in the magnificent -- but hardly a guest room -- quarters, Shino starts seeing strange things, like dolls that appear and disappear, and a bright-yellow child-creature that demands she return the doll. (It's really creepy, even with the backdrop of lurid entire-rainbow color and pattern in every direction.)
Shino is pregnant by the son of a samurai family and being chased by an assassin dispatched by the family. He tracks her down, but midway through his murder attempt, he's ripped apart by unseen forces and she's spared. The sudden movement of these unseen forces -- the demon-ghosts -- also alerts Kusuri-uri, who arrives in the upper-room to investigate.
The demon-ghost is a zashiki-warashi, which is a combination of an old term for a tatami room, and an archaic term for 'child'. It's a child-ghost that haunts a house, and seems to fill the spot of the household brownie for Japanese folklore. (Personally, I have to wonder about the notion of a dead child being considered good luck, but anyway.) In most folklore I've found on the zashiki-warashi, they're relatively harmless if mischevious creatures, a sort of low-key poltergeist. But still, they're not of this world... which is at least half of the required parameter for Kusuri-uri to consider them something to handle.
[There is a lot more, a lot more in this story that plays on culture and literary device and visual device -- but I'll try to leave that for any posts specifically on each episode, since they're tangential to my intended points here.]
Here's a picture of the upstairs room where Shino is taken to spend the night. (The far-end wall may not be that clear in this image, but it's a massive painting of Kwan-Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion and mercy.) The second shot is the other end of the room, during the flashback sequences, and then the same end, in the present.
In the 'past sequence', all the walls in the room are patterned with these diamonds. I was on my second, still-baffled, viewing before I got the meaning, and only then did the final image in the episode make any sense.
The inn had once been a whorehouse. Any time one of the prostitutes got pregnant, the baby was forcefully aborted by the madam in that room. The childrens' bodies were cremated in the fireplace, then the ashes put into doll-like containers (similar to the shape of Russian nesting dolls, but a particular type of doll often associated with prostitutes, or so I've read). The diamonds are the fronts of the drawers where the dolls were stored, mausoleum-like. When the place was converted to an inn, these funereal walls were covered over with the gorgeous paintings.
And so, when the dust settles and the zashiki-warashi are dispatched or resolved or severed from the drive for vengeance and now at peace, we get this final image.
I kept thinking, why the hell is he standing there petting the painting? (A close-up of the image follows, showing just his hand making gentle strokes across the painting; I used that for an icon in a previous post if you want to see the up-close.) That second time around, I realized, he's either comforting or grieving or maybe simply communing with the tiny cremated bodies of the zashiki-warashi. It's not just pity, but simple compassion; it's a reassuring motion, like "there, there".
For some reason this struck me as both very right for the story (or just even more right given how few non-annoyed emotions Kusuri-uri ever displays). That to characterize his words as "kill the demon" instead of "sever the relationship/dynamic between human and mononoke/ayakashi" was doing the story no justice -- because why then, if the demon-ghost has been banished or exorcised, would he stand over there and pet the freaking painting?
It's compassion, comfort, for the aborted-children ghosts, I think.
Whether the demon-ghosts remain is hard to tell -- more ambiguity -- or whether they got banished and/or blown away... I dunno. But then, in several of the other stories, he's seen taking a moment to be with, or there for, the once-mononoke. In his own way, it's an expression of regret, but the only time you see Kusuri-uri's face in that moment is the final story (which I won't spoil), and... well, it says a great deal.
What it does not say -- in that story or any other -- that there is any kind of retribution or punishment further for the mononoke/ayakashi to suffer. Whether or not the story (or Kusuri-uri) bears any sense that the ayakashi/mononoke has suffered enough, or that karma will take care of the rest, well, that's not stated one way or another. The only thing that I'm seeing implied is that having severed the mononoke from those violent human emotions, Kusuri-uri undoubtedly extends both kindness and compassion, at the end.
And perhaps in some ways, it may also be a compassion to free the ayakashi from the terrible, divine, disease.
Much of these thoughts began over dinner, while CP was bouncing some of his grad-program ideas off me. My focus at college was mostly (not of my own choice, sadly, but just because it was a small school first time around) on Western modern theology, so if we want to get into Barth or Bonhoeffer or Weil, I can throw some of that stuff around on demand, even if it has been [censored] number of years.
(Besides, having CP studying a similar coursework keeps me on my toes, but it'd still take a lot of cold hard cash to get me to ever read Sartre again.)
For the most part, these days I approach with writing/genre over religio-philosophical. I explained what I'd figured out after rewatching the first storyline, and we both pondered for several minutes whether either of us could think of movie, book, or television show that fits. One where "casting out a demon" doesn't involve a huge battle of wills with the demon specifically. One that doesn't have a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo as part of the flash. And one that doesn't end with casting the demon back into hell. And finally, doesn't have the sorcerer or priest completely exhausted at the end but satisfied that all's well that ends well and devils begone. Etc.
CP: Unless you get thrown down eight flights of stairs in Georgetown.
Okay, so, yeah, much of the time there's also a 'cost' involved, which (at least in movies) involves either the elderly expert dying, or whatever young person had sex the night before. And some genre-books, like many of the (stupider) movies, will have that last lurking shot that opens the door to sequels because you just know the demon's coming back somehow and this time it'll be all personal and crap.
In the meantime, the characters lucky enough to survive brush themselves off and congratulate each other and we get the usual A2 as the credits roll.
But what if you didn't see the demon as demonic? What if there were no designation of evil? What if the demon's actions were incomprehensible, certainly, but created not by the demon's own nature as a deceitful lying hell-critter, but by its head-first collision with humanity's potent negative emotions?
What if, in fact, the demon was the victim?
Neither of us could think of any genre (horror or magical-laden fantasy/action) in which there is compassion for the demon. Maybe sometimes a certain amount of pity, but compassion... I drew a blank. So did CP.
Because when you stop and think about it, the entire framework of the western dominant paradigm is built on a foundation of "this is Good, and that is Bad." It's further reinforced with rebar called "god is fundamentally good, and humans are fundamentally deserving of grace/redemption". But if you have a system in which both the ruling-power and the ruled are essentially good at heart, then evil must come from somewhere.
Those potent negative emotions, ah, the devil made me do it. The drive for vengeance, hatred, fear, the thirst for retribution when done wrong, these are evulll! It's temptation from some external source, classified as demon and stamped on the forehead with a Vatican-provided UPC code.
To say that demons are not, in fact, evil would be to turn the western paradigm completely on its head. If the obstacles and conflicts and cruel actions are not the work of external unseen forces but a result of human agency, then it's most definitely the ayakashi/demons who need, and deserve, compassion. They would be the victims -- trebly if it's human agency that refuses to bear responsibility or show regret for the havoc it's caused.
I just realized, in writing that last bit, the answer to Kayo's question when she wonders whose side Kusuri-uri is really on. Oh, the mononoke is resolved/severed, but getting there was something like using a gasoline-and-fertilizer mix to kill a housefly. If Kusuri-uri shows any true affection or emotional bond with anyone, it's not the people around him...
It's the ayakashi. That's who's side he's on.
I think when he's severing them from the mononoke -- from the contagious and destructive human instincts twisting the ayakashi into something unrecognizable -- he's not acting with the goal of protecting the humans, but in freeing the ayakashi.
Although Kusuri-uri refers to himself as 'human' twice (both in the Ayakashi-Bakeneko storyline), it's not like Buddhism doesn't contain traditions of those who achieve enlightenment moving out of the mud and into an elevated state -- even in Kwan-Yin's legends it can be hard to tell whether s/he began as a human or was an imported god/dess, or shows him/herself as an avatar or is just an energy force, and maybe it doesn't matter. There are at least six Kwan-Yins, after all, but I won't muck about in the symbolism and references and homages in this post.
Thing is, it's an open question. There are no explanations, and that's just one more note of ambiguity. Whether Kusuri-uri is an enlightened being who became an ayakashi, or became an ayakashi and then reached enlightenment, or was once in the distant past a human raised into deity-status, or what... it's intriguing and makes me turn things over in my head about how we represent and understand good and evil in a western paradigm...
But I must also add that if, somewhere along the way, the screenwriter or director are interviewed and the answer is that Kusuri-uri is an ayakashi, I would rather this than the route that he's a buddhist protector-deity (even if he does have an awful lot of trappings and associated symbols in common with two or three of them). Because doesn't that kind of reduce the risk (for him)?
Regardless of all that and the random academic ponderings late at night, obviously the storyline(s) raise more questions than answers. Underneath that, though, are three frameworks at our fingertips, now: the western-xtian, the shinto-shamanistic, the buddhist. One divides the world into good and evil, one does not divide the world at all, and one divides the world but without classifying any as inherently evil, or inherently good.
When I think of urban-fantasy/genre stories I've read, how could one revise them to remove that designation of this group being default to good guys, and that group being default to bad guys, and could it be possible to write it (with any accessibility and/or approachability for western-minds) without just doing a complete flip? That would be no more than the same paradigm reversed, and that's not the same as subverted.
Or we could just sum it all up as: if you meet the Kusuri-uri on the road, slice him.
When I'm rambling like this, the point isn't really to persuade anyone, though I know I can take that tone like I'm an authority of some sort & trying to bring you 'round to believe in my point. (Sorry.)
Maybe it doesn't matter if there's a hundred-percent bulletproof logic to anything I'm positing, maybe it doesn't matter if there are half again as many exceptions to prove every rule, so long as maybe someone (other than me, because it'd suck to be doing this all by my lonesome) stops and says, what else have I taken for granted, that's built into our cultural biases?
You know that old joke about the woman who cuts the top foot off her broom handle because that's the way her mother and grandmother did, and the history revealed is that her grandmother did it because a broom wouldn't fit in the pantry without being shortened? We all write short brooms, and sometimes that's just a quirk of our world-view thanks to our culture, our research, our own personalities -- but that doesn't mean it's bad (in my opinion, at least) to sometimes ask, just why the hell am I automatically shortening the broom?
About language: on my wall, I have a long-life blessing given by a Chinese friend. At the top is the ancient character for 壽, shou, life, and below that the character is written out in all its ancient variations, a hundred times. This type of scroll is sometimes called "a hundred lives" or "a hundred years of life" or similar wish/charm for longevity. Contrast that with the idea of a large poster that says this:
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE LIFE
If anyone's asking me, I'd say it'd look pretty funky on a wall. I can't imagine looking at it and thinking immediately, oh, yeah, that's a blessing for long life. More likely, I'd be thinking, okay, who let the pop-art fanatic in here? Because when I stop and really look at it, I'm not seeing "life, life, life" (let alone thinking that the repetition equals "lots of lives"), I'm seeing a whole bunch of Ls, Is, Fs, and Es.
[Which is what I meant in the earlier post that you can't really deconstruct kanji/hanzi as a process of reading it: you see the entire character as a distinct unit. If, say, 'Q' meant 'horse' then seeing Q Q Q Q you would think, "lots of horses" -- not, "oh, it's an O with a strange quirk at the bottom" or "someone wrote their Ps backwards".]
I can't think of a single example in my entire life in which someone has given a poster or picture with a single word where the intention is to act as a good-luck charm or a blessing. I mean, outside of bad sixties pop-art or catchy inspirational phrases. Sure, plenty of people needlework or cross-stitch biblical quotes and hang them on their wall, but there's a different nuance to that, I think.
The written word there is an echo, somehow; it's not a charm in and of itself. It's more like a reminder of what we want or should be, rather than something that in and of itself carries power to get us there. We tend to rely more on symbols over using written language (though the use of symbols like statues and other paraphenilia is common all over the globe) -- I'm thinking of things like a Catholic crucifix, or the Magen David. There may be words on/with the symbol, be that YHVH or ICXC, but it doesn't seem like this inclusion is mandatory considering how often I've seen crucifixes and magen davids without the attendant letters.
Part of what's swirling in my head that's relevant to storytelling is remembering the bit from... oh, damn, now I can't remember the movie. (CP would know, but he's already left for class. Hrk.) It's a vampire movie, and one of the humans tries to ward off an attacking vampire by brandishing a cross. The vampire replies, "that doesn't work on me, boy: I'm Jewish."
-- see replies for clarification on correct quote & source --
If an author writing urban fantasy gets to the fight scene(s) and is focused on knowing the name to command/have power, or on using a magical or modern word to enact power... would this work against someone who isn't natively fluent in the language? Or deaf? What about someone with damaged hearing? (Like me, who will reconstruct sounds that aren't full comprehensible and thus 'mishear' things on a regular basis -- "carolling stops" for "car in the shop" for instance. No, I'm not just being weird or obtuse; I've met other folks with similar types of damage and they report misinterpreting in a similar fashion.)
Would a blind person be immune to written charms? If someone has spent his life plunked down in front of the television and/or computer, doesn't like to read books, and has never had a newspaper subscription, would written charms have less efficacy because of the person's own disinclination? What if the person is the one casting the written charm, but isn't really that big on reading/writing, doesn't have the largest vocabulary, will this reduce the charm's power?
If someone's culture relies most strongly on written charms, does this render blind people unable to do magic in that culture -- how can you write a charm you can't see? What about deaf people working in a sound-based magical culture? Can you sign a charm? Would that count as written, or as a moving symbol like some kind of magical performance art? And what if it's a sound-charm person up against a word-charm person? Will the two cancel each other out, or be rendered useless against the other who doesn't work on the same wavelength?
And, as CP pointed out, there's also the risk of an ethnocentric bigotry similar to the crucifix being used on Jewish vampires: if we can reasonably assert that the western culture leans towards "what is spoken" being the most powerful and "what is written" being something less attention-worthy (which might have extra-strength right now, given the current trend towards characterizing the educated as ivory tower eggheads...) then it would certainly qualify as ethnocentric bigotry to have your spoken-word sorcerer besting the sorcerer who's waving around little signs with 50-cent SAT words.
Why would one automatically be better than the other? Or alternately, if one is better than the other, why would this automatically be that from one's own culture?
Not that I can think right this instant of books that show one or the other example (and I wouldn't quote them anyway), because me asking isn't to show up some author or to taunt anyone about being ethnocentrically tunnel-visioned. We all do that, one way or another. It's hard to step outside your culture.
Nope, the only reason to ask questions like that is because I want to keep it in mind for the next time it's me who's writing that fight scene. I can't be the only person who considers it important to stop and say, well, what if there were Jewish vampires? Why must it always be a sign of the cross? ...well, not the question about vampires because I don't write 'em and only read them if they're secondary and frankly would like them retired about now... but you get the point. I hope.
For those of you now curious about Mushishi, I should clarify that I mildly glossed the description in the previous post. It's far more nuanced than I think I really gave it shrift in my review/description, and although Ginko follows the peddler-route in the story, he's more of a doctor-peddler. In other words, as he travels, the depth of his knowledge may not be fully understood (or exactly what he deals with, mushi being a mystery to most folks), but he doesn't truly enter as a complete unknown, not in the strictest sense of the peddler-who-is-really-a-sorcerer (but doesn't tell anyone until the last minute).
However, Ginko remains ambiguous for other reasons, like the question of just how much the mushi have affected him, and why it is that he can relate to them -- and perceive them -- so easily and calmly. At the same time, there is still an exchange; he's often shown receiving some kind of payment for his work. Sometimes it's in trade, and a few times it's not quite the most above-board trade, in that his patients may not be aware of what he's taking away.
Ginko is also much more conversational about what's going on, far less cryptic with mundane/folks. He uses simple analogies that are comprehensible, even if what is being described is incomprehensible.
To explain mushi, he holds up his hand and says, imagine your body is the entirety of life. On your hand, the fingers would be animal life, and the thumb would be plant life. Humans occupy this space at the very farthest tip of the middle finger. Now, follow the veins backwards down the palm, the wrist, the forearm, as the veins meet at their branches, retracing the route to the heart. As these veins join up, at some point it becomes harder to distinguish between plant-life and animal-life, until eventually they're virtually the same thing. Closer and closer to the heart, the main source pumping out life's blood, and at the very heart of things is the mushi.
(Which from the perspective of a 21st century person, is an amazingly apt scientific description, too, considering that I seem to recall that of the life-forms on this planet, don't single-celled and simple-celled organisms make up like 80% of it, or something? It's a wildly massive number, given that these are things you can't even see -- mostly -- with the naked eye.)
Also of note: while CP and I agree that the main character in the other series, the Medicine Seller in Mo No No Ke gives us the distinct impression he's not entirely of human origin (or if he was, it's far in the distant past), CP took away from Mushishi that Ginko is a human, albeit one with additional sensitivities and abilities. Me, not quite so much.
Very early in the series, Ginko deals with the results of an interrupted shifting from human to mushi (an event prompted/created by mushi themselves). The problem, he says, is that as one moves closer to the state of being wholly mushi, one loses that human awareness and consciousness. It's moving beyond being human, but going with the analogy of the body's blood, it's also regressing to a simpler form of life. Language, courtesies, societies, would all strip away (I would guess) and reduce down to instinct, then farther down than that...
I got the impression that Ginko may have begun life as a human but at some point, apparently thanks to significant interaction with mushi, he's not entirely human any more. He straddles the line between human and not, and while this more-than-human status may be roughly similar to the Medicine Seller's, Ginko has become more-than-human but retains his human awareness somehow.
The other series, Mo No No Ke, is crammed to the brim with symbolism and nods and homages to folklore. But if Mushishi leans hard to Shinto, then I'd say Mo No No Ke is the Buddhist answer to Ginko's story. I originally thought to just list all the symbolism I noted, and see if anyone else could think of stuff I'd missed, but that would involve a lot of spoilers... so I'm breaking that post out into its own.
Alright, in this post I will end up (partially) spoiling the first episode in the arc, but believe me, knowing these details won't reduce the emotional impact. (It may hit hard regardless, because I'm not telling you anything about the form of resolution, so no fear reading.)
Both Mushishi and Mo No No Ke use a certain storytelling style (though the latter to a much stronger degree) which is apparently rooted in traditional Noh theater, where the aesthetic sense is that things from the past have a relevant beauty that outshines the crassness of direct, current conflict. Hrm, a better way to put it (because I can't find the translated quote): well, again with that cultural preference for subtlety over in-your-face moments.
Strangely, these stories sort of straddle that, because while the demon-ghosts in each story (or the living people involved) in some way retell the past history, concurrently Kusuri-uri is doing battle on some level with the demon-ghost in the present. But for the traditions of Noh, it's the reflections on the past that give the present its poignancy.
The Medicine Seller (Kusuri-uri, which literally just means 'medicine seller') was first introduced in the third story of a bundle, titled Ayakashi: Classic Samurai Horror. I've seen the first episodes of the first two stories in the arc, and they may be classic Japanese horror but to me they were classically... well... boring. The third story is an original work, and boy, does it show: it's a wonderful amalgamation of folklore, some esoterica, intensely-cultural visuals, and modern storytelling in terms of tension and revelations.
The first two stories in Ayakashi are based on traditional ghost stories, and from a Westerner's eyes, a lot of Japanese 'classic' stories can be reduced to "rocks fall, everyone dies," and I mean that quite literally. There's no conflict visible enough for Western tastes; a demon appears, a bunch of people die, and... it ends. I simplify but that's pretty much how a lot of the traditional Japanese stories come across. Yawn.
The three stories are completely independent of each other, and I think it may have even been different teams working on them, because the styles are radically divergent. The first is unattractive, the second is mainstream and passable but nothing to write home about, and then you get to the third. If you've not seen the icons I've been posting, or the trailer-AMV embedded from youtube, here's a single picture that doesn't say a thousand words. More like a gazillion and all of them shouted at the same exact instant. Good luck with it.
Here's one of the other DVD covers, but for this one I trimmed it to just focus on Kusuri-uri. Helps with the headache inducing wildness, at little. I hope.
(Strangely, this crazy over-colorful visual-packed style actually works for a horror/ghost story. It's like being in a freaking funhouse, or something.)
It appears that Ayakashi may have used its third story -- Bakeneko [bah-kay-neh-ko, goblin/demon cat] -- as a kind of pilot to lead into a series that focuses on Kusuri-uri, as fans prefer to call him. The spin-off, Mo No No Ke [moe-noe-noe-kay] is five stories told over twelve episodes. Like Mushishi, it's entirely episodic with the separate arcs being completely unrelated to each other (although a character from the original Bakeneko storyline reappears in one of the Mo No No Ke storylines).
Kusuri-uri is implied to travel from place to place, peddler's box on his back, but we only see him arrive/leave, never mid-journey; in contrast, the majority of Ginko's stories show him crossing significant distances before he reaches that story's happening-place. But like many detective-styled stories the world over, when you see Kusuri-uri appear, you know there's probably a demon/ghost somewhere around. It's like having Jessica Fletcher sighted at your local diner: someone's gonna be a dead body by dawn.
Unlike Ginko -- who does introduce himself as a mushishi, or 'mushi master' (even if this is dismissed by mushi-unaware humans) -- Kusuri-uri simply appears and offers his wares. When his pack is rifled by a suspicious household, they find medicine and drugs (though, Kusuri-uri says, none are poisons), and some children's toys, and... pornography. Ahem.
[No, I'm not making that up. It's a pretty funny scene: you see a quick glimpse of two hands holding a colored book open to a rough print of what looks like a couple making out, and the soundtrack is of several guys doing the suddenly-adolescent "hehehehehe" ala Beavis, then a slight cough as they regain their composure.]
That's the other major characterization difference between Ginko and Kusuri-uri: I really can't recall any episode in which Ginko evinces any significant romantic (let alone sexual) interest in anyone or even *ponderponder* any where someone else shows such interest in him. It's like he holds himself distinct from that, removed, but in keeping the world at the arm's length of a passing traveller, he treats all people with the same basic levelness. Kusuri-uri, though, several times produces a rather heated reaction from female characters -- nothing overt, mind you, but those are definite blushes on their cheeks.
Which had me a bit wierded out at first, because the tone of voice and delivery Kusuri-uri uses is... well, the only word that really fits is sinister. Where Ginko slurs his words and speaks in a conversational, amiable tone, Kusuri-uri has a sort of flat delivery that's as precisely enunciated as any theater-trained actor might have. And his phrases are loaded with implication, even when the phrasing itself (at least in English) is really very simple: "things may become quite... dangerous."
Not entirely a pregnant pause, because the actor's voicing doesn't drop in pitch as though delivering a final wham! in the line. Instead, such pauses come with the same basic level inflection, and the tone then becomes more of a kind of amused (maybe sometimes even delighted) distance.
I think of someone watching a friend pour gasoline on the grill in hopes of getting the charcoal going, and the observer remarks, "well, this is going to be... interesting."
That dry, deadpan delivery that can make it hard to tell when Kusuri-uri is actually being deadpan (which he does do, sometimes) versus when he's being deadly serious. Compared to Ginko, Kusuri-uri keeps himself under a great deal more control. His expressions stay within a much smaller range: from neutral, to annoyed, to... definitely annoyed.
Once or twice, he evinces a kind of curiosity. From the illustration's subtle details in eyebrow and mouth I might even say there's a note of amusement in there.
With maybe three notable exceptions, that's about it. I don't know what else could possibly sum up so well this character's quirks as those images, so there you go. He may ultimately be there to help, but he comes across as doing it because, well, here he is and here's the mononoke, so let's get this over with. He certainly does not seem like the kind to look someone up in a year when he's back in the neighborhood (again unlike Ginko, who's invited to do such and implies once or twice that he accepts the invitation).
Kusuri-uri just isn't cuddly at all, in act, word, or tone of voice. That's not to say he doesn't show a kind of subtle fondness for one or two characters, but with such a deadpan delivery that the characters probably have to take it completely on faith that Kusuri-uri is teasing, and not truly annoyed.
Quick example: in the second storyline, Kusuri-uri meets up again with Kayo, a servant-girl from the original Ayakashi (Bakeneko) story. After their ship is attacked by an Ayakashi & dispelled by Kusuri-uri, the second episode opens with Kayo sitting beside Kusuri-uri (who reclines with his back to her, looking like he'd be napping if given the choice). She's silent, but giving serious thought to what she knows of Kusuri-uri, and frowning intently over the question of just who's side he's really on. He interrupts her thoughts with the comment, "with a face like that, it will be a wonder if you ever marry."
Kusuri-uri isn't about to win any popularity contests, that's for sure. I don't know if Ginko would consider the issue any more than Kusuri-uri, but I would expect Ginko to be momentarily taken-aback upon rejection. (A few times other characters refuse Ginko in some way -- either his company, or his help, or cures, etc -- and he tends to display a bit of startled "oh, well, if you say so," kind of shrugging-off after slight startlement.)
When it comes to characterization, Kusuri-uri would be damn hard to write from a western viewpoint because he is both a tabula rasa in terms of his history/backstory, and completely opaque in terms of any current motivations. His external characterization is consistent, but with almost no other information about him, a reader would be left to fill in a truckload of gaps.
Also of note (as bearing on the discussion about word vs. sound in magic) is one of his major tools, the o-fudo. This is a printed charm that creates a barrier (a common enough use of them in animanga, if slightly less common in the real world). In Mo No No Ke, they have four stages. At first they appear blank; then (I guess) they get charged somehow -- and black printing appears on the paper, only to shift almost immediately into a symbol-based image. Last, they appear to activate when kicked into gear by a demon's presence, and that's when they shift to red and the symbols expand.
Sometimes Kusuri-uri places these on the wall, one at a time. In other cases, he can present a sheaf of them like an old-time poker player producing aces from his sleeve, at which point Kusuri-uri throws the o-fudo top speed and covers entire walls in this mystical barrier, at a single throw.
Btw, he doesn't say a word when he does so -- another part of that sound vs image thing I was talking about, in the earlier post. (Just what might be represented in the second and third stages, I'll leave for some other time. Hint: probably going to take thirty words or more.)
In that Western/European version I posited, the peddler-sorcerer would spend a lot of time figuring out the demon's name. Kusuri-uri pegs the situation as a Zashiki-warashi relatively soon after the demon-ghost first acts. (Given his actions of setting up protective charms throughout the inn from almost the moment he walks through the door, and his immediate reaction when the child-ghosts make their moves, I'd say he was fully aware of the demon-ghost in residence and that this may even be the reason he entered. It certainly doesn't seem to be very ambiguous about his sensitivity to the demon-ghost's existence.)
When he states the Form out loud, his exorcism-sword closes its mouth with a sudden clack, which appears to indicate the Form has been accepted. Taking the sword in hand, he presents it, sheathed, and requests everyone present tell him the backstory and how they feel about it (okay, not in so many words but that's really what it amounts to).
But, important note, this is not asked/commanded of the demon(s), but of the human players. With minor variation, this appears to be the basic formula; the first part is the preface, which sometimes get phrased one way, then another, each story, if amounting to same meaning. The second part (with kana/romajii) is the formula, and does not appear to vary overmuch.
Certain conditions must be met for the sword of exorcism to be drawn. If Katachi, Makoto, and Kotowari are not present, it cannot be unsheathed. The intertwined fates of men give the Mononoke its Form, Truth is the natural state of all things, and Regret is everpresent in men's hearts.
Katachi: Form. I guess this is pretty straightforward, as I've not seen any translation-debates online about it.
Makoto: Truth. This word apparently has the connotation of an objective truth, in which case the english word 'truth' is probably the best fit. (We don't really have different designations, word-wise, for "truth that is subjective" versus objective.)
The stickiest one is 'kotowari'. From what I've found, it also means truth, but in a subjective sense. One translator had been using 'fixation' but said that 'reasoning' may work better in context; the Shinsen-subs I found used 'regret'. One might even say that Kusuri-uri is effectively asking for the motivation, which has a definite judicial ring although somewhat less poetic and a bit too police-like for the story's mood.
If there were a single (english) word that could incorporate the notion of forgiveness or compassion -- but not the actual, more of the potential for it -- then that might be the 'subjective truth' that would fit kotowari. Failing that, I think (with writer hat on, not with any real translation credentials) that regret is possibly the best word choice.
Because it's the emotional truth of a situation, but it also implies the potential for resolution; to regret is to look back at the past with both a clear sense of what happened, yet overlaid with a strong emotional tone that could engender one to seek forgiveness, if possible, to resolve the lingering emotion.
The medicine seller then concludes with the same phrase each time:
よって、皆々様、真と理、お聞かせ願いたく候
Yotte, minamina-sama, makoto to kotowari, okikasenegaitaku-sourou.
Therefore, ladies and gentlemen: the Truth and the Regret, I pray you please tell me them.
A note: the sourou-style is apparently just a literary form that's archaic, quite formal, and usually only used in writing, like letters, official/public documents, applications, and suchlike. It dates from the Edo period (roughly 1600s) and I suppose would be sort of like seeing Shakespearean English used in text, today -- except that these stories are set in the Edo period, so they'd sound contemporary to those listening. [I think it's supposed to be soro with long dash over both o's, but those seem to get eaten when I upload, so I went with the alternate ou romanicization. If I got that wrong, let me know and I'll edit.]
Incidentally, if you watch the series, the translations won't match what I used. Most of the time, yotte is translated as "and so" which works, but lacks the formality in my ears. Minamina-sama is a polite form of "everybody", but as CP noted, it's not just "everyone" but more like "EVERYone," as in -- "even those of you who've been keeping your traps shut to this point."
Given the ultra-polite honorific in there, again, "everyone" works but my original guess from context was that I personally would go with "ladies and gentlemen". (Turns out that's the dictionary's suggestion given the combination, as well.)
Okay, so this entire side-point amuses me because it makes me think of the distinction in the Deep South between "ya'll" (one person, or maybe a couple at most) and "all ya'll" (a whole bunch of people).
CP: What about the y'inz?
Me: They don't count. They're Yankees.
Ahem.
The verb okikasenegaitaku shows up in the dictionary as "desire; wish; request; prayer; petition; application". When I consider the formality and politeness of the request, the personality of the speaker, the historical context, and the tone, I'd say "I pray you" or "I desire you" fits better than the simpler-flatter "I ask you". What he's doing is asking, yes, and "begging" doesn't even close to match his tone or delivery, but... it's like he's giving a command (tone-wise) and being utterly polite about it (grammar-wise).
It really does take formal phrasing, in nearly any language, to get that lovely mix of asking someone a polite question that is not really a question and most definitely is not open to negotiation. Like Queen Victoria saying, "please, do tell." Although I think "I request you" may work as well, but it lacks the old-school connotations of "I pray you".
Anyway, I had CP listen, and his immediate reaction was that it's a specific formula, like the mystical version of repeating a prayer/charm in a certain way to produce specific results. That's one more place where a Buddhist-style element shows up, in the use of sutras, mantras, and other magically-imbued repeated, set phrases (and underlines as well the fact that you can't really break west/east into sound/writing, because most every culture uses a mix of both, so the conversation is more academic for the purposes of world-building as a writer).
One thing about kotowari that really struck me as a westerner was that it does not have to be expressed by the guilty party.
It can be expressed by anyone, from the way the stories play out. What's important isn't that the perpetrator feels guilty, or wishes to make amends, or even admits they did wrong: in at least two stories, the perpetrator refuses to do so (or may not even believe, still, that his actions were wrong). But someone present feels this regret, and in expressing it thereby fulfills Kusuri-uri's third requirement.
(In several of the stories, a Truth or Regret is offered and the sword does not shut its mouth; it's as though Kusuri-uri is not the judge of truth/falsehood, the sword is.)
I might even go so far as to note that, again with writer-hat on, one might think of forgiveness as severing one's Self from the regrets that drag you down and keep you tied to the past. It's not just the Buddhists who see compassion for wrong-doing as means to release those lingering negative emotions; I think that's a human understanding and is probably expressed in a great many cultures/religions even if not in so many words. But it's also a stark contrast to the Western fantasy-genre, the demon-infused storytelling on this end of the cultural spectrum, where forgiveness... well, it just doesn't always enter into the equation.
There's wanting -- as a western reader -- to see the bad suffer for their crimes as a form of amending and to consider this a crucial part of any resolution. It's another thing altogether to see suffering as almost irrelevant (certainly, Kusuri-uri seems to treat it as so, at least in the sense that inflicting such or making sure of such doesn't seem to be within his domain or even worry), and rather to require forgiveness in the resolution.
This is probably well-muddled by this point, but that's part of what I meant when I talked about pantheons and how religious frameworks inform our assumptions about Right and Wrong, and what it takes to return the world to Stability/Harmony. A number of writing-texts and essays have the simple, if somewhat accurate, summary of nearly every story, where A = "life is good" and B = conflict.
Either the story is:
- A → B → A
- A1 + B = A2
or it's:
branchandroot pointed out is the more adult version), A2 is a result of A1 as influenced/marked by B. The original status quo does not return (ie, "everything goes back to normal") but that a new stability is achieved in the wake of B's passing. One thing I'd taken for granted that I'm questioning here is that this A2 is expressed as stability. Not harmony.
Many of the stories in Mushishi, like pretty much every story in Mo No No Ke, end on an uncertain note that would probably leave a fair number of western viewers going, say hunh? Because the question of a return to stability is left wide-open: where will you go now, what will you do, what the hell happens now? But the question of harmony has been answered, and the main players are at peace... even if the overall stability (of the results of A+B) remains in question.
There are plenty of major Western novels that use this device in some form or another; curiously, the only ones that spring immediately to my burnt brain are those of Raymond Chandler. I recall reading his novels and ending each with the question, but... how do things go back to normal, now?
Yes, the bad guy was revealed and there is a strong trend of showing regret (if not forgiveness) for the base actions of which humans are capable. But rarely do his stories have any major degree of television-style tag, in which everyone gathers together after the last commercial break and says, "well, now Timmie's been adopted by the Smiths, and the cat is recuperating nicely, and the Wilsons are rebuilding their house," in a kind of contrived "all's well that ends well" wrap-up. (I hated those. I still do.)
Reminds me of when I wrote my first novel and was so very pleased with the fact that I'd left all sorts of stability-styled questions unanswered (not that I precisely thought of it that way, so much as I like that kind of ending), and the biggest critique complaints were that I'd not "finished the story". The problem there, I think, is that in most genre/pulp-fiction (which I should note I had not yet read much of so wasn't overly familiar), you expect 'return to stability', you expect a pat delivery of A2. If you want to skip A2, then you should go write literary fiction, where devices like that are tolerated.
Action/mystery stories -- which are the heart of most urban fantasy, really -- are deeply rooted in the "life is stable, catastrophe happens and is dealt with, life returns to stable" formula.
Not counting stories with gaps allowed for a sequel -- "who was that person in the last scene?" That lingering question works best when the overall stability-issue has been addressed. From what I've seen, readers don't flip out at smaller unanswered questions; they don't seem to mind such intrigues so long as the little questions don't add up to enough to put the bigger resolution in doubt.
But before I go further, there's one really important thing, that of the eastern equivalent to the western Bad Thing (demon, ghost, spirit, Other, whatever) as represented in Mo No No Ke.
Everything I can find is rather muddy, with even the most academic discussions/essays indicating there's major debate among Japanese folklore-scholars for terms like ayakashi and mononoke. The more accessible (read: popularized) essays are blunt about it not being a clear-cut thing, that few people really know the distinctions, and that definitions vary as well by region, by religious framework, by time period of the folklore origins.
It doesn't help that in popular modern use, several of the terms have either shifted away from original use, or have become almost interchangeable. On top of that, Kusuri-uri himself isn't exactly the most forthcoming about the exact ins and outs of what makes an ayakashi (usually considered a vengeful spirit) or a mononoke (which literally means 'strange/freakish thing'). One of the few times he gives any details, he explains "the Form that the demon takes on comes from the hatred and grudge it bears towards humans."
Thing is, far as I can figure out, it works something like this. When a human dies bearing a grudge of some sort -- or even potentially when still alive but severely repressing/denying vengeful or angry feelings -- it becomes an ayakashi, a vengeful spirit. Mononoke is the anglicization of mono [thing] no [possessive] ke [from the Chinese 怪, guai: monstrous, strange, freakish].
Kusuri-uri explains that ayakashi are akin to gods in that there are countless numbers of each. "Just as there are men and beasts and birds in this world, there are many types of Ayakashi, which exist outside of our plane." In some cases, ayakashi are ghosts of dead people; in other cases, tools and instruments used for a certain length of time (usually 99 years) can gain a kind of soul/sentience, and thereby become a kind of ayakashi. However, "no matter how they come into existence, an ayakashi's reasons for being is beyond human understanding."
Another character provides an explanation about mono no ke, that 'mono' refers to the divine state of a thing (or perhaps divinity in general) and 'ke' has a root that means 'disease': so mono no ke might be translated as 'divine disease'... which ties into ayakashi being as numerous as gods, I suppose. Kusuri-uri asks, "vengeance, hatred, fear: what if an ayakashi were to unite with a strong human emotion? It would become incredibly powerful, unhindered by attempts to seal it."
I have no idea how close or far off the mark I might be, but the gist I'm getting seems to go like this: ayakashi are non-corporeal entities whose origins are mysterious and whose actions are mysterious. If, somewhere in there, the ayakashi either brings along a bundle of strong negative human emotions OR happens to run into a human's strong negative emotions (even if the human emoting is technically still alive), the confluence of the two -- spirit + emotion -- seems to create a mononoke. OR... perhaps it's that the emotions then twist/enpower the ayakashi somehow, like catching something contagious. Based on the stories in the series, and comments by Kusuri-uri, the 'mononoke' is not a separate demon but is somehow the result of a transformation... maybe.
If this seems like a lot of information to be throwing around just to talk about comparisons with western literary fantasy-genre traditions, having the above information means this point may make a bit more sense (well, as much as it can make given that what's in the previous few paragraphs is probably as clear as freaking mud).
In the western fantasy tradition, you seem to get one of two choices about how non-human bad guys show up. Either, like vampires, it's a human infected by some kind of badness (or just plain non-human-ness), or it's something inherent that isn't contagious. Frex, most stories don't have humans 'becoming' elves, unless they were secretly elves the entire time.
I'm sure there are one or two exceptions out there, but most of our shared-modern folklore pretty much assumes that once a vampire, always a vampire -- and, of course, if you're born an elf, you die an elf, and demons are demons. (Though for some authors, resolving a demon means 'saving' it, and that's usually with a working assumption that demons are simply fallen angels, and thus can be resolved by un-falling them.)
This is completely the opposite of what Kusuri-uri seems to be doing with ayakashi and mononoke. In the west, the goal is to command, compel, defeat the demon, and get rid of it -- banish it, or kill it outright. The (amateur) translators for the Bakeneko story and for all of Mo No No Ke translated Kusuri-uri's words as "kill," as in "kill the demon/mononoke." But that's not the verb he's using, which would be korosu or something like that (I know the sound, not the spelling!); instead, Kusuri-uri tells the beleaguered characters that his goal is kiri, which would be 'cut' or 'sever'.
In other words, ayakashi are as multitudinous as grains of sand, but upon intersection with (negative) human emotions, the ayakashi become infected, transformed, into mononoke -- at which point (and what may be part of the confusion), the ayakashi is then referred to as a mononoke. Kusuri-uri's task is to sever these two, which returns the ayakashi to its original state -- and that's the reason the regret must be known, because that regret is what resolves, somehow, the powerful swirling instinct of vengeance, hatred, or fear.
There isn't a goal of destroying or banishing the ayakashi, and the sword does not even truly kill the ayakashi, per se: because the ayakashi in and of itself may not be evil. It only becomes evil as a result of being infected by these human emotions. In at least three of the stories, there's an implication that the ayakashi-mononoke, upon resolution, returns to being an ayakashi... and yet is no longer of any concern to Kusuri-uri, not to the degree that he's going to chase it down and slice it into a bazillion pieces.
That's just so totally opposite the Western dominant framework. I mean, imagine a sorcerer-priest in traditional-historical, or urban-contemporary, fantasy saying, "oh, we don't have to actually destroy the demon, we just want it to, y'know, calm down, get it away from this upset human."
But beyond that, in the western framework, demons are seen as independent evil, most often: an active force of evil, one that seeks out trouble for the sake of trouble. What did that kid do, to deserve to be possessed? The kid didn't have to do anything, because demons are just like that -- the demon bears the entirety of the guilt, by definition of being, well, a damn demon. So to speak.
But in Ginko's story, and in Kusuri-uri's, that which performs the role of demon-ghost is not actually evil. Temporarily twisted, yes, but not evil. There is no hell to banish the demon-ghost back to, and there's no heaven to send it onward having cured it. Certainly, the mononoke-ayakashi are malicious and destructive, acting out the grudges contained in the negative infecting emotions -- but even this is seen as a product of the intertwining fates of gods and men (or ayakashi and humans).
The first story begins on a rainy night; a woman, Shino, arrives at an inn only to find all the rooms are all booked. Shino begs/threatens that if she's not allowed to stay she'll be dead by morning and it'll be on the innkeeper's head -- so the proprietress shows her to a room on the uppermost floor, one not normally used for guests. They've not even begun traversing the long twisting stairs before Shino is already hearing children's excited laughter off in the distance, children's voices, and she just thinks it's other guests and their families.
Alone in the magnificent -- but hardly a guest room -- quarters, Shino starts seeing strange things, like dolls that appear and disappear, and a bright-yellow child-creature that demands she return the doll. (It's really creepy, even with the backdrop of lurid entire-rainbow color and pattern in every direction.)
Shino is pregnant by the son of a samurai family and being chased by an assassin dispatched by the family. He tracks her down, but midway through his murder attempt, he's ripped apart by unseen forces and she's spared. The sudden movement of these unseen forces -- the demon-ghosts -- also alerts Kusuri-uri, who arrives in the upper-room to investigate.
The demon-ghost is a zashiki-warashi, which is a combination of an old term for a tatami room, and an archaic term for 'child'. It's a child-ghost that haunts a house, and seems to fill the spot of the household brownie for Japanese folklore. (Personally, I have to wonder about the notion of a dead child being considered good luck, but anyway.) In most folklore I've found on the zashiki-warashi, they're relatively harmless if mischevious creatures, a sort of low-key poltergeist. But still, they're not of this world... which is at least half of the required parameter for Kusuri-uri to consider them something to handle.
[There is a lot more, a lot more in this story that plays on culture and literary device and visual device -- but I'll try to leave that for any posts specifically on each episode, since they're tangential to my intended points here.]
Here's a picture of the upstairs room where Shino is taken to spend the night. (The far-end wall may not be that clear in this image, but it's a massive painting of Kwan-Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion and mercy.) The second shot is the other end of the room, during the flashback sequences, and then the same end, in the present.
In the 'past sequence', all the walls in the room are patterned with these diamonds. I was on my second, still-baffled, viewing before I got the meaning, and only then did the final image in the episode make any sense.
The inn had once been a whorehouse. Any time one of the prostitutes got pregnant, the baby was forcefully aborted by the madam in that room. The childrens' bodies were cremated in the fireplace, then the ashes put into doll-like containers (similar to the shape of Russian nesting dolls, but a particular type of doll often associated with prostitutes, or so I've read). The diamonds are the fronts of the drawers where the dolls were stored, mausoleum-like. When the place was converted to an inn, these funereal walls were covered over with the gorgeous paintings.
And so, when the dust settles and the zashiki-warashi are dispatched or resolved or severed from the drive for vengeance and now at peace, we get this final image.
I kept thinking, why the hell is he standing there petting the painting? (A close-up of the image follows, showing just his hand making gentle strokes across the painting; I used that for an icon in a previous post if you want to see the up-close.) That second time around, I realized, he's either comforting or grieving or maybe simply communing with the tiny cremated bodies of the zashiki-warashi. It's not just pity, but simple compassion; it's a reassuring motion, like "there, there".
For some reason this struck me as both very right for the story (or just even more right given how few non-annoyed emotions Kusuri-uri ever displays). That to characterize his words as "kill the demon" instead of "sever the relationship/dynamic between human and mononoke/ayakashi" was doing the story no justice -- because why then, if the demon-ghost has been banished or exorcised, would he stand over there and pet the freaking painting?
It's compassion, comfort, for the aborted-children ghosts, I think.
Whether the demon-ghosts remain is hard to tell -- more ambiguity -- or whether they got banished and/or blown away... I dunno. But then, in several of the other stories, he's seen taking a moment to be with, or there for, the once-mononoke. In his own way, it's an expression of regret, but the only time you see Kusuri-uri's face in that moment is the final story (which I won't spoil), and... well, it says a great deal.
What it does not say -- in that story or any other -- that there is any kind of retribution or punishment further for the mononoke/ayakashi to suffer. Whether or not the story (or Kusuri-uri) bears any sense that the ayakashi/mononoke has suffered enough, or that karma will take care of the rest, well, that's not stated one way or another. The only thing that I'm seeing implied is that having severed the mononoke from those violent human emotions, Kusuri-uri undoubtedly extends both kindness and compassion, at the end.
And perhaps in some ways, it may also be a compassion to free the ayakashi from the terrible, divine, disease.
Much of these thoughts began over dinner, while CP was bouncing some of his grad-program ideas off me. My focus at college was mostly (not of my own choice, sadly, but just because it was a small school first time around) on Western modern theology, so if we want to get into Barth or Bonhoeffer or Weil, I can throw some of that stuff around on demand, even if it has been [censored] number of years.
(Besides, having CP studying a similar coursework keeps me on my toes, but it'd still take a lot of cold hard cash to get me to ever read Sartre again.)
For the most part, these days I approach with writing/genre over religio-philosophical. I explained what I'd figured out after rewatching the first storyline, and we both pondered for several minutes whether either of us could think of movie, book, or television show that fits. One where "casting out a demon" doesn't involve a huge battle of wills with the demon specifically. One that doesn't have a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo as part of the flash. And one that doesn't end with casting the demon back into hell. And finally, doesn't have the sorcerer or priest completely exhausted at the end but satisfied that all's well that ends well and devils begone. Etc.
CP: Unless you get thrown down eight flights of stairs in Georgetown.
Okay, so, yeah, much of the time there's also a 'cost' involved, which (at least in movies) involves either the elderly expert dying, or whatever young person had sex the night before. And some genre-books, like many of the (stupider) movies, will have that last lurking shot that opens the door to sequels because you just know the demon's coming back somehow and this time it'll be all personal and crap.
In the meantime, the characters lucky enough to survive brush themselves off and congratulate each other and we get the usual A2 as the credits roll.
But what if you didn't see the demon as demonic? What if there were no designation of evil? What if the demon's actions were incomprehensible, certainly, but created not by the demon's own nature as a deceitful lying hell-critter, but by its head-first collision with humanity's potent negative emotions?
What if, in fact, the demon was the victim?
Neither of us could think of any genre (horror or magical-laden fantasy/action) in which there is compassion for the demon. Maybe sometimes a certain amount of pity, but compassion... I drew a blank. So did CP.
Because when you stop and think about it, the entire framework of the western dominant paradigm is built on a foundation of "this is Good, and that is Bad." It's further reinforced with rebar called "god is fundamentally good, and humans are fundamentally deserving of grace/redemption". But if you have a system in which both the ruling-power and the ruled are essentially good at heart, then evil must come from somewhere.
Those potent negative emotions, ah, the devil made me do it. The drive for vengeance, hatred, fear, the thirst for retribution when done wrong, these are evulll! It's temptation from some external source, classified as demon and stamped on the forehead with a Vatican-provided UPC code.
To say that demons are not, in fact, evil would be to turn the western paradigm completely on its head. If the obstacles and conflicts and cruel actions are not the work of external unseen forces but a result of human agency, then it's most definitely the ayakashi/demons who need, and deserve, compassion. They would be the victims -- trebly if it's human agency that refuses to bear responsibility or show regret for the havoc it's caused.
I just realized, in writing that last bit, the answer to Kayo's question when she wonders whose side Kusuri-uri is really on. Oh, the mononoke is resolved/severed, but getting there was something like using a gasoline-and-fertilizer mix to kill a housefly. If Kusuri-uri shows any true affection or emotional bond with anyone, it's not the people around him...
It's the ayakashi. That's who's side he's on.
I think when he's severing them from the mononoke -- from the contagious and destructive human instincts twisting the ayakashi into something unrecognizable -- he's not acting with the goal of protecting the humans, but in freeing the ayakashi.
Although Kusuri-uri refers to himself as 'human' twice (both in the Ayakashi-Bakeneko storyline), it's not like Buddhism doesn't contain traditions of those who achieve enlightenment moving out of the mud and into an elevated state -- even in Kwan-Yin's legends it can be hard to tell whether s/he began as a human or was an imported god/dess, or shows him/herself as an avatar or is just an energy force, and maybe it doesn't matter. There are at least six Kwan-Yins, after all, but I won't muck about in the symbolism and references and homages in this post.
Thing is, it's an open question. There are no explanations, and that's just one more note of ambiguity. Whether Kusuri-uri is an enlightened being who became an ayakashi, or became an ayakashi and then reached enlightenment, or was once in the distant past a human raised into deity-status, or what... it's intriguing and makes me turn things over in my head about how we represent and understand good and evil in a western paradigm...
But I must also add that if, somewhere along the way, the screenwriter or director are interviewed and the answer is that Kusuri-uri is an ayakashi, I would rather this than the route that he's a buddhist protector-deity (even if he does have an awful lot of trappings and associated symbols in common with two or three of them). Because doesn't that kind of reduce the risk (for him)?
Regardless of all that and the random academic ponderings late at night, obviously the storyline(s) raise more questions than answers. Underneath that, though, are three frameworks at our fingertips, now: the western-xtian, the shinto-shamanistic, the buddhist. One divides the world into good and evil, one does not divide the world at all, and one divides the world but without classifying any as inherently evil, or inherently good.
When I think of urban-fantasy/genre stories I've read, how could one revise them to remove that designation of this group being default to good guys, and that group being default to bad guys, and could it be possible to write it (with any accessibility and/or approachability for western-minds) without just doing a complete flip? That would be no more than the same paradigm reversed, and that's not the same as subverted.
Or we could just sum it all up as: if you meet the Kusuri-uri on the road, slice him.