Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Mushishi – episode 25

September 13, 2006 on 12:14 am | In Mushishi | 2 Comments

“Fortune Eye and Misfortune Eye”

It’s fitting that an episode about vision is particularly beautiful.

Ginko meets a blind woman who “saw” the mushi ganpaku. Thereafter she could see: first her surroundings, then through walls, then past mountains … eventually, even with her eyes closed, she could see the futures and pasts of people who consulted her.
However, she has also foreseen the death of her eyes and asks Ginko to take the ganpaku and dispose of them wisely.

It is not amazing that Mushishi is so consistently good, or that it can move even the hardest of souls to thoughtfulness. Consistency is nothing if not consistent. That’s in the running for stupidest sentence I’ve ever written.

This episode is about two pilgrimages. The nature of Amane’s discovery of her father’s corpse caught me off guard: I thought that she had foreseen her father’s death but, as it turned out, she saw across the country to where he was. The level of Amane’s sight was nothing short of mind boggling and I cannot begin to imagine precisely how she could process all that was placed before her.

That is precisely the point of this episode, though: a human is not equipped to be able to see everything. Seeing things even with your eyes closed is enough to send you insane, and it’s amazing that this did not happen toAmane. She’s that strong, I think you’ll find.

The other pilgrimage, of course, is that of Ginko. Ganpaku is another mushi that is not “evil”, but it does have the power to ruin a person’s sanity. There is nothing that Amane could have done to change any of her situations, and so she did not begrudge the mushi.
Amane’s closing statement really summarises exactly the right way to consider this sort of situation:

I don’t think it would be bad to live in the darkness, remembering the light.

That sort of attitude will take her far.