redwoodalchan

Holy crap, this got long!

Aah, “Shiki,” how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that “Shiki” is probably my favorite horror anime ever, and I've seen a lot of horror anime in my time, including such heavy-hitters as “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” “Elfen Lied,” and “Hellsing” (the original series, anyway). So, it was a little hard for me to decide how to write this without giving in to the temptation to gush all over its face, but I'll do my best.

Additionally, there's really no way to discuss the plot or characters of the story without giving it away, so you were warned.

My experience of “Shiki” began when I put in a request in one of the My Anime List forums for stories featuring “seme females,” as the responder put it (looking back, I assume she meant Megumi, though she could also be referring to Chizuru or Sunako). At the time it had no English dub, so I was about to give up on it when I noticed that Funimation had licensed the show and would be releasing it dubbed in 2012 (or possibly 2011; this was awhile ago). That was when I revisited it, and I was taken in by one review, which went on about how interesting it was that the show played the old vampire legends straight, and how smart and philosophical the show itself was. At that point, I was sold, largely because after being inundated by Twilight and other stupid vampire romance (with the only significant counterpoint being “Hellsing”), I was starving for something—anything--that was different. I was not disappointed.

The plot of “Shiki” is simple. It takes place in a remote rural village in a mountainous region of Japan, with a large mansion just up the hill from where the villagers live. At the beginning of the story a mysterious family, the Kirishiki family, moves into the mansion, and then, because the Kirishikis are vampires, the villagers start getting bitten and killed one by one, with some proportion of them rising up as new vampires known as “shiki.” So, it's up to a young doctor named Ozaki (voiced by David Wald) and a monk who writes novels named Seishin (voiced by John Burgmeier) to figure out what's going on and how best to save the town. THEN the plot thickens.

Yeah. It's even better than it sounds. It's intelligent, and will have you thinking quite a bit after you've finished watching it. And there's enough thrills and chills to satisfy the cravings of any horror fan.

No discussion of “Shiki” would be complete without a discussion of its characters. I confess, for the first few episodes I was skeptical of the characters in “Shiki” and didn't really like any of them much (besides Ozaki and Seishin) because I thought they were either annoying assholes or bland placeholders and stereotypes. By the end of the story, though, I realized that in fact the heart, soul, and backbone of the story lies with its characters. Pretty much every character of any real importance in this story is well-rounded and beautifully-rendered. The cast is motley and diverse, and I'm virtually certain that just about everyone could relate to at least one of the characters. I'm equally certain that there is someone out there who can relate to every single character in the show. And just who are some of these characters, you ask? Let me take you through some of the ones who most stood out to me.

Before we continue, I'm personally of the opinion that you shouldn't take my interpretation of the characters, or anyone else's, as gospel. “Shiki” and its characters are things to be experienced, not to hear about second hand. I'll be talking about my views on the characters, but if any of them sound good to you, I strongly encourage you to watch the show yourself and draw your own conclusions about them. Because, as with a show like “Baccano!” (another favorite of mine), the whole of the characters are often greater than the sum of their parts, and people won't necessarily agree on what to make of any given character. Also, SPOILERS!!

So let's start with Ozaki and Seishin, the characters I initially pegged as my unquestioned favorites. Now, I love the fact that so much of “Shiki” is seen through the eyes of those of an intellectual bent—I think it's a real testament to the show's overall intelligence. Since Ozaki is a doctor who is called upon to treat and investigate those bitten by vampires, through him we get to see not just what is going on with the vampires or how it happens, but why it happens. For one example, it's revealed early on that the only things that can kill a vampire are decapitation or a stake through the heart. Later, Dr. Ozaki discovers why this is—vampires have magic blood and cannot bleed to death, so the only way to kill them is to destroy the flow of blood to the brain (though, you won't like how he goes about discovering this fact). I also love Dr. Ozaki's steady spiraling into insanity as he gets more and more desperate and unable to save those around him—it really made him a treat to follow throughout.

And then there's Seishin. Now, at first I loved Seishin—I loved how composed and tender-hearted he seemed, and I thought it was a nice touch that he was writing a novel about vampires at the same time as the vampires were starting to attack the village. I'd expected that I would like him all the way through because he reminded me a bit of myself (except for how he tried to commit suicide once, something that's talked about but never fully explained). But over time, he grew less and less appealing to me. Not because he became unpleasant or annoying to watch particularly, and I'm a little more inclined to be charitable toward him siding with the vampires than some are, since it's clear he doesn't actually want anyone to die, vampire or otherwise. Actually, what happened is he just got overshadowed, as other characters became more interesting and grabbed more spotlight roles. In the end, I feel like Seishin became little more than a replacement servant for the sole surviving vampire, after the death of her old servant Tatsumi.

Which brings us to Tatsumi. I love Tatsumi. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that I've since put him down as one of my new favorite villains. There is absolutely nothing about this character that I do not adore—he's sexy, badass, highly cunning, and best of all, he's got a fluid and yet entirely consistent personality that lends him a lot of presence and depth. Tatsumi is a werewolf-like creature called a “jinrou”, voiced by (of all the people in the world!) Ian Sinclair. He's deeply devoted to serving the vampire family who moves in, and he often does their dirty work, including commanding the villagers-turned-vampires. The most fascinating thing about Tatsumi, and what makes him such a joy to watch, is how the different sides of his personality play out. He often appears super friendly, helpful, and happy-go-lucky, at least at first; but he also has a way of tormenting the new vampires, often for little to no reason other than that he seems to like it. He's actually kind of scary in places, the way he breaks down the defenses of the characters he interacts with using his happy-go-lucky affect and then torments, threatens or even kills them. He helps organize the death of various human characters, whom he sees as little more than food (if they don't know of the vampires) or obstacles (if they do). Yet he does have a softer and more benevolent side, since he's deeply committed to and respectful of the vampire family he's served for many years now. He's a really well-written character. The fact that he spends so much time wearing low-cut and/or skin-tight tops, often without sleeves, and skin-tight pants or shorts probably helps too (also, suits).

And just who are the vampires in this story? The Kirishiki family is actually comprised of two female vampires, Chizuru and Sunako (voiced by Lydia Mackay and Cherami Leigh, respectively), and one man, Seishiro (voiced by J. Michael Tatum), who wishes to be one of them--none of which are related by blood (if you'll excuse the pun). Each one of them has a backstory, which helps to flesh them out. At one point, Sunako reveals that she's probably been alive for at least about a century, and has been wandering since she was turned as a preteen or young teenage girl, killing people for food because she's terrified of dying herself. Chizuru, who poses as a mother figure to Sunako (despite the fact that Sunako seems to be her boss), used to be a housewife to a man who went off to war and never came back; we don't actually get to see how she became a vampire. Even Seishiro, the least important and developed of the three, has a reason for his behavior—he's attracted to the power that comes from being a vampire, and since his father killed a lot of people as an ordinary human, he doesn't see why it's so wrong for vampires to kill either.

Sunako is the most important Kirishiki and has the largest role, spending most of her time talking to Seishin and discussing novels or philosophy with him. Over time, though, I found I started to get a bit frustrated with Sunako, particularly as she spent more and more time fearing for her “life” and soul and going on about how really, she hadn't become a murderous vampire by choice. In the last couple of episodes, she breaks down over whether or not she'll get killed like every other character. While I could understand that she didn't become a vampire by choice, and while I wouldn't exactly call her unsympathetic or unlikable in the grand scheme of things, I felt like she was protesting far too much and had trouble feeling really sorry for her. After all, she's been alive for at least a century, and has probably seen many others die around her. So why couldn't she take the thought of her own death more in stride? Especially since so many of the villagers that turned into vampires were teenagers or young adults when they turned and didn't live for more than a couple months afterward.

But just who are these vampire-villagers, you may ask? Well, there are several of them, and all the ones of any real importance get fleshed out pretty well. One vampire who gets quite a bit of good characterization and development is Nao (voiced by Cynthia Cranz), who starts off as a young mother. She spends a good portion of the series trying to kill her surviving relatives in the hopes that they'll come back too, and being distressed when they don't. There is a heart-wrenching scene at one point in the story where she drinks her mother's blood as Ozaki and Seishin, who have been watching her at the clinic, are powerless to do anything to stop her. We later get a bit more backstory on Nao, and it turns out that her real parents were abusive alcoholics and so she considers the parents of her husband to be her real family, hence why she's so desperate to have one of them with her. She's also, inadvertently, the first character we see demonstrating the rule that vampires can't enter a house they're not invited into, since she's the one who originally invites Chizuru Kirishiki over to her house.

Another vampire I quite like and sympathize with is Toru, voiced by Chris Burnett. As a vampire, he stands out for being constantly regretful about the fact that he has to kill people to survive, so much so that he has to cut a deal with his best friend (whom Tatsumi had assigned him to kill) before he's willing to drink his blood. Yet Toru kills people anyway, and it's really something to see him trying desperately to uphold his old image as a clean-cut nice guy, while he gets these murderous urges. I actually have a lot more love and appreciation for Toru in retrospect than I did while I was watching the show, especially in light of a blog post from someone who hadn't seen beyond the first 6-8 episodes, who speculated that Toru wouldn't come back because he was too nice. And a lesser series wouldn't have brought him back, but "Shiki" did. It really helped to drive home the point of how Toru was, after all, a clean-cut, nice, caring young man—who just happened to be a vampire.

One of the best scenes Toru gets to be involved with comes very close to the end. A young nurse named Ritsuko (voiced by Colleen Clinkenbeard), who had been a major character and Toru's crush for quite some time, comes back as a vampire, and Toru is instructed to make sure she kills one of her own coworkers in preparation for her new role as a vampire. The scene is heart-rending, as Toru screams for Ritsuko to kill her coworker while Ritsuko consistently refuses to do so and demands that she be let go. Ritsuko thus becomes the first and only vampire who never drinks human blood, shortly before she and Toru both die together. In the context of the story I guess I can see why they would do this, since it was in character for Ritsuko to be that selfless, and this scene happens near the end of the series, when all vampires die anyway; but I couldn't help but have my willing suspension of disbelief stretched by how Ritsuko so steadfastly refused to drink blood, after Toru had spent so long being unable to stop himself despite his regrets, and after Sunako had gone out of her way to point out how painful it is to resist the urge to drink. Regardless, it's still a great scene, and it made me love Ritsuko and Toru all the more.

There's two other vampires who deserve mention, and I bring them up not just because they're important but also because I have the most mixed feelings about them (as people; as characters they rock).

One of these is Megumi, voiced by Tia Ballard. Megumi is the viewpoint character of the first episode, and she starts off as a Bella Swan wannabe—a rich girl who lives in the country but wants to be in the city, and thinks that all the people in the town are a bunch of uncouth, uneducated hicks. If you couldn't guess, she's annoying as hell. It's maybe for this reason that she's the first person we see get bitten and killed by a vampire (after she stupidly goes up to the vampire mansion). But she comes back as a vampire, and proceeds to torment people. I'm not entirely convinced we were supposed to find her particularly sympathetic or likable. She does get one rather sympathetic scene when she sees how conflicted Toru is about having to bite someone, and she volunteers to go bite him instead (since he was her crush); and it's cool how cunning she eventually shows herself to be. On the other hand, any character development or improvements that she acquires throughout the story, all steps she took to becoming tolerable and likable, all got ruined by the time of her death, where she's killed in a horribly bloody scene, all while insulting the townspeople who are killing her about how stupid and backwards they are and how much she'd rather be in the city—which brought back every bit of the annoyance I felt for her in the first episode. I really wanted to like Megumi, but in the end, I just couldn't, which is a shame, because she's one of the very few characters I didn't like.

And on that note, there's also Masao, voiced by Todd Haberkorn. For the longest time now, I've been spending way too much time and energy trying to intellectualize my liking for this character. Because by all rights, there's nothing about him that's likable. At least at the beginning he's an utterly annoying and creepy asshole who antagonizes everyone, throws childish temper tantrums on a regular basis, and pretty much embodies the Offspring song “Cool to Hate.” He stands out as one of the very, very few characters Todd Haberkorn has played that isn't badass, heroic, cute, comical, or some combination of the four. And yet, I just can't bring myself to dislike this character. I'll probably go into a bit more detail about some of these things in future articles, but for now, I'll just point out that while unpleasant and annoying, he is significant. In the same way that Megumi was the first character we saw get killed by vampires, Masao is the first character we see get bitten by a vampire more than once (since Shikiverse vampires don't kill their victims with a single bite), as well as the first we see Tatsumi interacting with as a newborn vampire, in what is probably the greatest scene either of them gets (though I'm biased because it meant I got to see Todd Haberkorn and Ian Sinclair interacting again, just as they did in “Baccano!” and “Hetalia”). One interesting detail about Masao is that while he definitely looks the part of a vampire (he's got a pale, gaunt face, beady eyes, and rather long, stringy dark hair—and he wears a pair of fangs quite well) he's also the only vampire of much importance whom we never see do anything vampire-related. We never see him bite or kill anyone, and even in the scene of him as a newborn, when Tatsumi offers him a fresh human to feed on, all we see is him drinking from a cup of blood. He never attacks his family either, no matter how much he may hate them (he actually hates his cute little eight-year-old nephew (Maxey Whitehead) enough to want him killed by vampires—which is indeed what happens, but at that point Masao is still alive and has nothing to do with it). Quite possibly, he may be intended to represent the sort of person who can hate but would rather not actually take the steps to cause serious harm (as a contrast to the sadistic Megumi perhaps?).

Aaand, last but not least, we have Natsuno (voiced by Jerry Jewell), a teenage boy who hates his parents and wishes to be back at his old home in the city. Officially, he's the third main character (after Ozaki and Seishin), and seems to appear prominently in most of the series' artwork. I fiercely disliked Natsuno early in the story, because I thought he was an annoying, pushy asshole who hated everyone around him for no clear reason. But after the vampires start to appear, he becomes more likable, stepping up to the plate to do something about it. What really made me start to like him was the scene in which Toru comes back to him with orders to drink his blood and kill him. By the time he sacrifices his life so that Toru can drink his blood without guilt, I was practically crying for the guy. And he does get a pretty epic fight scene against Tatsumi at the end, when he himself comes back as a jinrou. Although, his personality never really mellows out for any length of time, and I still think it's just as well that he had to die.

Other noteworthy human characters include two village children, Kaori and Akira (voiced respectively by Alexis Tipton and Luci Christian) who investigate the vampires and try to put a stop to them. They're two of the very, very small handful of characters who never become vampires or die—but I was relieved to see that they also weren't the ones to save the day. Akira was eager to track down and kill vampires, but though he had the spirit and the effort the way plucky children like him tend to, he was largely ineffectual in the face of the real vampires he encountered, which I thought was refreshingly realistic. Kaori was the more subdued and cautious of the two, and toward the end of the story I found myself growing really, really sympathetic to her plight as her fear of death at the hands of the vampires became more and more real (there's actually a scene of her digging her own grave and begging Seishin to help her prepare in case she gets killed).

So as you can see, “Shiki” has a really, really large cast. I've only touched upon the characters I thought were the most significant and memorable, but there are more out there, and they each have their roles. The Shikiverse is a morality kitchen sink in which the closest thing to a purely good character may be Ritsuko, while the closest thing to a purely evil character might be...well-nigh impossible to pin down, actually. There's virtually no one of any importance in “Shiki” who doesn't get at least one marginally sympathetic scene, not even among the most obnoxious and contemptible of its cast members. You're left with the impression that “Shiki” really wants you to love and enjoy all of its characters, and not to write any of them off as entirely unlikable or irredeemable (though it's clear whom you're supposed to like, for the most part, and whom you aren't all the same).

Sometimes I got the impression that the show tried just a little too hard to flesh out the characters by resorting to flashback techniques and similar. There were flashbacks that were genuinely relevant and well-placed, but others felt almost like “Tenjou Tenge” style flashbacks—thrown in for no apparent reason other than that Backstory Was Needed. However, I can't fault the show too much for this, since it's clear that it loves its characters and wants them to come off as well-rounded and believable.

So, if there's so many important characters who are human, and so many important characters who are vampires, then just how does the story balance sympathy for all of them when the vampires must kill the humans to live? Well... the truth is, I'm not sure if it exactly does, at least not consistently. The story does wax philosophical on numerous occasions about whether or not it's so wrong of the vampires to drink human blood, whether or not it's any different from humans killing and eating livestock, or whether or not creatures that have their old personalities and didn't change by choice could be truly considered monsters. But overall, I felt like the story was better at posing the questions than it was with actually coming up with a definitive answer. These conflicts never really get resolved—the show ends with the remaining villagers going on a murderous rampage, killing well nigh every single vampire and then (so far as we can see) getting burned to death from a fire that spreads throughout the mountains until there is only a small handful of survivors left at the end of the last episode.

There is dialogue about whether or not it's possible for humans and vampires to coexist, whether the vampires can feed on humans without killing them, etc. but the show never really does justice to any of those concepts—in fact, the characters never even consider any other arrangement besides the vampires killing people and drinking their blood until the humans wise up and hunt them down in any meaningful way. I get that maybe such an arrangement wouldn't be possible, but I do consider it a fairly serious flaw that the humans and vampires never even try to talk through their differences or work out a compromise, or anything of that nature. Instead everyone just dies, and that's that.

For a long time now I've been talking about how sympathetic the vampires are (and they are). But if you actually watch the show, you'll find out that they're also scary as hell, especially early on before the vampires become major characters. In fact, in retrospect I'm considerably more disturbed by the vampires' behavior early on when we're just getting to know them, than I am by any of the gory scenes we get in the second half of the story.

One way in which this plays out has to do with their feeding habits. Now, I realize that a vampire that wandered up to you and tore out your throat, licking the blood from the gaping, spurting wound would be gross; but the thought doesn't scare me that much. Nor, truthfully, does the thought of a vampire sinking sharp, neat fangs into you and sucking you dry in a manner of minutes, though it sounds more painful. But either way, at least it's over reasonably quickly.

Not so in “Shiki.” Shikiverse vampires kill their victims slowly, over a manner of days (usually four). This generally involves hypnotizing the victims into allowing the vampires to feed on them and not fighting back or turning them away, and the victim slowly wastes away while his or her friends and family are (at least initially) powerless to do anything to stop it—if they even notice at all. Toru gets bit by Megumi, and for the next couple of days his parents notice that he's spending an unusually large amount of time playing his video games rather than greeting his friends. Then before they can do anything sensible, he's dead. Masao's death manages to be even worse (or would be, anyway, if he wasn't such an asshole), because after we see him first get bitten we actually watch the vampire come to his room and feast on his blood over several days, while he gets feebler and feebler, until his friends come to call and he's too weak to stand up and answer the door. This probably bothers me more than it would most people because I kind of have a deep-seated fear of prolonged, wasting deaths.

Now, it's my suspicion that part of the reason why the “Shiki” vampires are able to be scary has to do with the fact that their behaviors and physical capabilities come across as more “realistic” than I'd come to expect from a typical vampire story. As far as we can tell, Shikiverse vampires have the advantage over ordinary humans in that they can fly or levitate (possibly), see in the dark, move very quietly, hypnotize people they bite, and not die naturally (except, possibly, by starvation). Those are the only special capabilities they have, though—other than that, they can't do anything an ordinary human couldn't do. They can't even dig themselves out of their own graves. But what this means is that there's nothing to distract the audience from how scary they can be. In a show like “Hellsing” Alucard is super sexy and super badass and a great shot with a gun and has all these special powers—and the end result is that he never really seemed all that scary to me. There were just too many extra bells and whistles to go along with the fact that he was a horror monster.

Now, jinrou do get special powers—they're stronger and more able-bodied than normal humans and have more acute senses, as well as the ability to come out in the day. However, while they can eat anything humans can they won't maintain their maximum levels of strength unless they drink human blood. It's maybe just as well that the proportion of jinrou in the cast is relatively small. Exactly what causes people to come back as jinrou rather than as ordinary vampires (“shiki” or “okiagari”) is never made clear.

Nor, in fact, is it made clear why some people don't come back as vampires at all. That's another disturbing thing about “Shiki,” if you really think about it. If vampires drink the blood of a human, that human may come back as a vampire. But he or she may not. And that is unsettling. Because whichever fate you would prefer—whether you would want to come back as a vampire or not—whether or not you actually do come back as one is entirely outside of your own control. There are some segments in which characters discuss or think on what may determine whether or not you come back as a vampire, but none of them are ever confirmed—for all we know, it could be pure chance. Of course, the notion of who comes back and who doesn't plays a large role in the story, and there's even a bit toward the end where some vampires kill a character without drinking her blood just so that she doesn't rise from the dead.

One other interesting thing about the Shikiverse vampires, which I discussed a little in the plug I did of “Shiki” on LiveJournal's Twilight Sucks community, is that Shikiverse vampires don't seem to be in any way sexualized—which in and of itself feels like a departure from the standard way of presenting them even before Twilight and its ilk came into the picture. Sure, some of them, like Megumi and Chizuru, do wear sexy outfits; but Chizuru seems to do it deliberately, and Megumi wore sexy outfits to begin with, even before she was a vampire. Vampires in “Shiki” aren't disproportionately attractive, and a character who was unattractive before he or she became a vampire won't suddenly become attractive for becoming a vampire. Vampires in “Shiki” bite characters to whom they have no sexual attraction at all. We see vampires bite their own families, as well as little kids. And most memorably, there's Megumi biting Toru specifically because she was jealous of Toru and thought he was in the way of Natsuno returning her affections (to be fair, she planned to bite Natsuno as well down the line).

Now, I mentioned already that the main reason why I heard of this show is because I specifically asked for shows with strong female characters, in the hopes that at least some of them would be truly feminist. So, how does “Shiki” stack up? Well... I wouldn't exactly call it sexist, but I don't think it's a model of feminism either. There certainly are a lot of female characters, with diverse personalities and roles; but there are a lot of characters in “Shiki” in general, and it seems, over the course of the story, that the most powerful agents are male (unless you take into account that Sunako quite possibly engineered the entire plot). Certainly, of the officially-recognized protagonists (Ozaki, Seishin, Sunako, and Natsuno) only Sunako is female, and episode to episode she doesn't do a whole lot more than discuss books and philosophy with Seishin, while the others are more action-oriented. This is not to say that female characters in “Shiki” are all or even mostly ineffectual—male or female, all the characters have their own niches. To cite a few examples, I was taken in by how ruthlessly efficient and clever Megumi managed to be as a vampire; and Kaori, while she's hesitant at first, does step up to the plate to defend herself from vampires in the end. And Ritsuko, of course, proves to be a strong and admirable character in her refusal to drink blood even as a vampire. None of them are badasses on the level of Integra or Seras, for sure; but badassitude in “Shiki” is a secondary concern, if that; whereas in a show like “Hellsing” it's the most important of all character traits.

One small way in which “Shiki” does score (some) points in the feminist department is that it grants representation to female characters who aren't conventionally attractive. Not every female character in the show is hot, just like not every male character is hot; and while female characters who aren't pretty tend to be in secondary or relatively minor roles, their voices are still heard when it counts (and most really major male characters tend to be at least a little bit cute, too). It's also a bit annoying how skimpy the outfits of characters like Chizuru or Megumi can get, but the fact that Tatsumi wears skimpy clothing himself works to balance that out a little.

And there you have “Shiki.” Strangely enough, it's probably the closest thing to a “traditional” Halloween show I've seen this year. Now, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it's objectively “better” than some of the other intelligent horror anime out there, like “Paranoia Agent” or, indeed, “Neon Genesis Evangelion;” but I haven't gotten this involved in an anime for a long time. This is a show that has rewatch potential. In fact, I'm seriously considering going back next Halloween and watching it again, just to see if there's anything about it that I missed the first time around (and that's REALLY not something I do lightly). If you like vampires, hate stupid romanticized Twilightpires, or just want to see a smart show full of amazing complex characters that keeps you on the edge of your seat and coming back for more, watch “Shiki.”

See the first OP here:

Awesome! XD

Wouldn't you love to watch something like that? I know I did.

Go on; you know you want to watch it!