Mushishi Review

Hiroshi Nagahama's adaptation is built almost entirely out of restraint. There is no ongoing plot, no antagonist and very little movement; each episode is a self contained case in a mountain village, and the show's whole technique is atmosphere. Artland's backgrounds are watercolour landscapes held on screen longer than television usually allows, the sound design runs on cicadas, running water and wind through cedar, and Toshio Masuda's score stays out of the way for minutes at a stretch.

The writing is the reason it lasts. Mushi are not evil and the show never lets them become monsters. They are simply alive and indifferent, and the horror comes from ordinary people caught in a process that has no intention toward them. The Green Seat gives a boy a hand that makes anything he writes grow and shows him exactly what that costs. The Light of the Eyelid puts a girl in a dark house because daylight will blind her.

The Traveling Swamp follows a woman a marsh has taken for its vessel. Ginko is the deliberate flat spot: white haired, one eyed, smoking a cigarette that repels mushi, and written to be an explanation rather than a person, which is why the show cannot be graded on its cast. Roughly a third of the cases end badly, and it declines to apologise. Almost nothing else in the medium is this quiet on purpose.