Winter Reverie: A Single, Vital Episode of <i>Mushishi</i>

Last week, the long-delayed winter finally, properly, arrived in Japan. Aomori, a famed skiing destination, was swamped in its inevitable snow. Some say Aomori is the snowiest city in the world, receiving around 312 inches (792 cm) annually. Given the state of the world, that may change. There was almost a palpable sense of relief this year when the snow arrived, albeit late.

My little city in northwest Tottori prefecture is slightly less dramatic. However, Yonago borders Mount Daisen, a snowcapped stratovolcano, to the East, the Sea of Japan to the North, and Nakaumi, a brackish lake, to the West. When winter arrives in Yonago, it does so with gusto. As a northern Michigander raised on lake-effect squalls, blizzards generally do not scare me. Even so, I know that stepping outside in arctic conditions requires caution.

I can’t bike to work on snowy days, and roll-stepping over frozen roads takes at least twice as long as a typical walk. Recently my commute has stretched as long as the days are short, allowing me more time to think, for better or worse. I think about stories and personal obligations. I admire the way snow drapes so prettily over the rooftops of the more traditional houses, and I chuckle at the bulbous trees in the Japanese gardens that look like they are wearing snowy berets. Profanities stream from my mouth when my left boot leaks. And I reminisce about trudging through the slush as a kid, and about the story of my mother slipping on the ice and breaking her ankle when she was in college, and so on, and sooner or later, inevitably? 

I think about death. And about one specific episode of what is possibly the single best anime series ever made: Mushishi.

The Unseen, All Around Us

As bold as such a statement may seem, anyone who has seen Mushishi would be hard-pressed to argue. If there is a single anime I would recommend to any human being, it is Mushishi. It is always atmospheric, by turns haunting and beautiful, and organic in a way that few stories are. Watching Mushishi feels somehow anachronistic, as if you, like Ginko, the solitary, wandering protagonist, are lost in a world displaced in time. Mushishi feels like stepping into a bittersweet memory.

Though I would urge anyone to go watch the full series or read Yuki Urushibara’s gorgeous manga rather than relying on my poor summary, the premise is as follows: the world we see is not the only world there is. All around us, at all times, tiny biological forms that exist somewhere between fungi and parasites float through the environment. These are called mushi, the Japanese word for insects, and though in any other work they might feel magical, in this one, somehow, they are natural organisms. Mushi are a part of the world, as fundamental as mold, and, like mold, can be dangerous to humans.

A mushi that breeds in darkness may nest beneath a child’s eyelid, causing blindness. Another mushi devours sound and causes hearing impairments in its hosts. Another craves sunlight and burrows into dead animals for protection if sunlight is in short supply, and may, incidentally, reanimate the corpse of a human loved one.

Ginko, the protagonist, is the titular mushi-shi, an expert in mushi and treating those afflicted by them. Ginko himself lost one eye and his memories to a mushi, and ever since his empty eye socket has attracted them. As a result, Ginkgo lives a nomadic life, traveling far and wide to help others impacted by these mysterious creatures but never staying long. 

Ginko’s wanderings are the subject of two beautiful seasons of the series, the first of which aired in 2005 and the second almost ten years later, in 2014. The show is episodic but tonally consistent, with Ginko himself often the sole recurring character, the thread woven through these stories, helping where he can. And yet mushi have as much right to live as human beings do. 

Any one of these episodes could be a stunning novel. Each family or community impacted feels genuine and human, and the consequences of mankind impeding on the natural world and vice versa provide fertile ground for gorgeous, bittersweet introspection. As a rule, Mushishi is the opposite of bingeable. Every story is lovely and heavy enough to merit longer digestion. Therapists might have grounds to prescribe an episode or two a day.

There are so many brilliant episodes of Mushishi, and arguably not a single bad one. However, among my friends who adore the show, every person has a different favorite.

The episode of Mushishi that haunts me during slushy walks is the third episode of season two, “Beneath the Snow.”

Beneath the Snow

Every year, someone in my remote hometown dies in a winter-specific accident. Sometimes, it’s a snowmobile crash or a bad fall in an icy parking lot. Sometimes it’s drowning while ice-fishing, or sliding into a ditch while avoiding a deer in the road. The neighboring town of Houghton Lake has, for years, hosted a dubious event known as Tip-Up Town, during which vendors set up stalls on the frozen lake. There’s a fishing contest and a Polar Bear Dip, which invites volunteers to jump into the frigid water in exchange for a t-shirt. Snowmobile shows and a temporary amusement park are par for the course, as are tons of beer and liquor. Tourists who join the festivities are more likely to get into drunken brawls than plummet through the lake’s surface, but it is not unheard of for vehicles to sink. 

All this is to reiterate that winter disasters are a mundane part of life in my neck of the woods.

I was not interested in ice fishing, but I did not escape this reality. When I was seven or so, while following my brother and his friends across a frozen swamp in our subdivision, I fell through to my knees in the icy slurry. I pulled myself out and ran home, terrified and ashamed. I pretended it had never happened, because it should not have. I knew better than to play on the ice. I knew, and I had played there anyway as if the rules did not apply to me. It was the first gentle brush with mortality I ever had. Thereafter, I became obsessed with Little Women in part because I could relate to Amy in the ice-skating scene.

In Mushishi’s “Beneath the Snow,” a similar disaster befalls a little family in a lakeside village. While walking home together, a boy named Toki watches his little sister Sachi fall through the ice. He dives in after her, but is too late to save her from the cold.

The mushi does not arrive until later. Huddled at home with his grieving family, Toki imagines he hears Sachi calling his name and rushes to the door to greet her. But his sister is not there, and instead, the unseen mushi enters his body. Thereafter, Toki cannot bear the warmth of fire or even human contact. It begins to snow wherever he goes.

By the time Ginko arrives, Toki and his parents are isolated from the village, buried under meters of snow in a house they cannot heat. Toki’s dear friend, Tae, explains the situation to Ginko, who tells her about several snow-specific mushi: a creature that clings to the warmth in animal footprints and erases them as a result, leading to people getting lost; a mushi that causes avalanches; and finally, a mushi that sticks to a specific animal to sap its warmth.

The lattermost mushi is likely impacting Toki, but the boy rejects Ginko’s attempts to help him. “Things are fine the way they are,” Toki says.

Toki is resigned to his chilly fate. He goes out fishing alone and barefooted, indifferent to the cold, even though he is becoming frostbitten. Eventually, he too slips into the lake and falls asleep at the bottom, blanketed by that strange snow. He does not die, thanks to the mushi possessing him. Ginko and the village folk search for him in vain, and Tae admits that she “thought something like this might happen someday.” When Toki wakes up, he climbs ashore, alive despite giving up. He tells Tae that he wonders whether Sachi might still be sleeping somewhere at the bottom.

Of course, this is not the case, as Tae tearfully reminds him that he did everything he could to save his sister and even brought her ashore, where she died in his arms. It is only once Tae herself falls into the lake that Toki pushes through the agony of human warmth to carry her to safety on his back. As her heat melts away the ice that has overtaken him, he begins to cry, his tears burning through him like fire. 

And that’s more or less the episode. It is the episode that has not left me, and I think the beauty of Mushishi is the way it resonates on such an individual level. Somehow, the show is both universal and personal. When it gets cold outside, I think of Toki and his little sister, and what might have happened had I fallen through the ice of a body of water deeper than a swamp.

Valediction

Grief is a difficult topic for any medium to tackle, but Mushishi manages it with uncanny grace. Anyone who has fallen prey to depression can understand Toki’s indifference to the snow that falls on him and the potential loss of his limbs. In a way, injury is something he feels he deserves. When depression hits hard, it is often impossible to escape its cloud without help, in large part because it is a cloud you can hardly see. Toki cannot believe himself blameless in his sister’s death, no matter how many people tell him as much. 

Toki succumbs to the mushi the way many of us succumb to our demons. He goes about his work and resists those who offer help time and again. He sees himself as a burden when his loved ones see him as another soul already drowning. 

In the episode’s opening scene, Toki and Sachi are walking along the lakeshore. She asks him what becomes of snow that falls in the lake. Toki tells her that it melts and becomes part of the water, and that notion seems to break Sachi’s heart. “Then why doesn’t the snow fall on the shore instead?”

Her big brother smiles at the childish question but does not dismiss it. “Snow doesn’t choose where it falls.”

“Poor snow,” Sachi replies.

Fundamentally, Toki already knows that his sister’s death was not his doing. Just as snow cannot choose where it falls, people cannot choose when they die. But when we sink into the icy lake of depression, common sense and our impulse toward self-preservation often remain afloat on the surface, out of our reach.

The idea that strong emotions, especially negative ones, attract mushi is a common theme in the anime. And doesn’t that make sense? In general, when we are emotionally compromised we make mistakes, fail to care for ourselves, and act on rash decisions. Had Toki not stepped out into the snow chasing his sister’s imagined voice, would the mushi have possessed him? Was he already exhibiting, however unconsciously, risk-seeking behavior?

Similarly, we are all more prone to depression during the long cold of winter. In this episode, we are told that winter has only just begun. Spring is far away. Winter, which can feel so endless and oppressive that it almost instills us with claustrophobia, provides fertile ground for misery. But just like the people in Aomori, northern Michigan, and other wintry places, life must carry on even during a whiteout. We have to get up and fish, or trudge to work, or go to school or birthday parties or baby showers or meetings. We have to live, and try to find joy and warmth wherever we can.

(When I was first diagnosed with depression, it took a dear friend all but shouting at me to get medicated for me to finally face the reality of how poorly I was doing. It was January. I hate January.)

Atmosphere is, arguably, Mushishi’s single greatest strength. The sound direction in this episode is impeccable. We feel the long, windy quiet, and the cold all but permeates the screen. It is gorgeous, but unrelenting. The show always has a muted palette, aside from the verdant greenery and glowing mushi that feature in many other episodes. But Beneath the Snow features only grays and whites accented by a bright blue sky.

Director Hiroshi Nagahama always excels at ambiance. Some of his other remarkable projects include the unforgettable slow-burn horror Flowers of Evil and the batshit controversial delight that was Detroit Metal City. In 2024, he directed the greatest tease of all time when he was responsible for the pilot of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki. The pilot is fantastic, but the rest of the series disappointed fans immensely. Oh, what could it have been had Nagahama remained the director?     

The winters in Japan, as in many places, have been growing milder and stranger due to climate change. In the future, will long walks in the snow become a thing of the past? I hope not. Such walks can make it harder to avoid troubling thoughts or feelings we’ve tucked away. And while confronting those things is daunting, I think this is the reason “Beneath the Snow” resonates with this depressive isolated weirdo: It is an episode that commiserates with our darkest feelings, but with the caveat that we must keep trudging forward.

When Tae, shivering and covered in icy lake water, clings to Toki’s neck, it is her heartbeat that revives him. Every beat is hot and difficult to bear, but it is only because she is alive. And so is he—and that is something worth being, no matter how cold the winter gets.

For my readers, I would say this much: If you have not watched Mushishi, please do. And if you have, please let me know which episodes resonated most with you. Which episodes of this masterpiece come back to you in your darkest or brightest moments?

In a way, Ginko, the mushi-master, is healing more than the characters he meets in the show. We’re transported into this familiar but ethereal world, too, and, if we’re fortunate, gain strength and insight from stories that are as gorgeous as they are uncompromising.