Analyzing "Shiki's" Women: Episodes 7-12
Episode 7
This episode contains my all-time favorite scene in the entire series!!
Unfortunately it’s got no women in it, so I can’t comment on it.
What I CAN talk about is the bit where Kaori gets together with Akira and Natsuno and they all make plans for what to do about the vampires. Natsuno suggests digging up Megumi’s grave, and Akira is gung-ho about this while Kaori is hesitant-she really really doesn’t want to desecrate her friend’s grave. She gets pretty emotional about it too. So we have Akira and Natsuno playing the part of the shounen boy heroes who gleefully charge into the unknown, while Kaori is their timid female friend.
Episode 8
Early on in the episode, Sunako visits Seishin, and brings up the fact that he likes to portray the “forsaken” in his novels. In their own ways, of course, both Sunako and Seishin are “forsaken:” Sunako because she’s a woman/vampire, and Seishin because he’s a loner/possibly gay (more on this anon).
In this episode, Kaori, Akira, and Natsuno go to dig up Megumi’s grave. Kaori spends a lot of time musing on Megumi’s death and getting increasingly freaked out by the thought that Megumi might be buried there. She notes at one point that Akira is acting cheerful, and Akira chides her for acting like a scared little kid, when Kaori replies that digging up someone’s grave because you think she’s a vampire is pretty childish in itself.
When they finally get to Natsuno, he hands Akira a shovel while Kaori gets a hoe she uses to level the ground. The two boys go into the grave to dig; she stays on the surface. There’s one point at which Akira tells Kaori to level some dirt, to which Kaori replies: “You don’t get to boss me around.” This may be foreshadowing for Akira’s increasing willingness to take the (manly) initiative throughout the series, which I’ll be talking more about later.
Oh, and Kaori gets accosted by a vampire, but she wards him off using a good-luck charm she left at Megumi’s grave (she actually calls upon Megumi’s name for protection) in just enough time for Natsuno to bash the vampire with a shovel, knocking him out. So they leave him in the grave, though of course he gets up and walks away. Kaori even admits as much when she goes to sleep in Akira’s room out of fear (both kids were having trouble sleeping for fear of vampires).
This is also the episode where Shizuka, a little girl vampire with a ventriloquist puppet, appears. She comes to the door of Natsuno’s residence and asks to be let in. At first, his father tries to get her to go away, but she eventually convinces him otherwise when she throws the puppet she’s been speaking through into their home. She’s basically “contaminated” their residence with her doll, and the only thing they can do now is go whole hog and let her come in. What’s more, Natsuno’s mother, Azusa Koide, is the one who convinces his father to let her in in the first place, making this, essentially, a scene of women conspiring to override the wishes of a man.
Episode 9
Oooooh, god…THIS episode!
This is the episode where Toshio Ozaki’s wife, Kyoko, appears. It’s also our first formal introduction to Toshio Ozaki’s mother. She’s a domineering woman who bosses Toshio Ozaki around for not always living up to his name as the last heir of the Ozaki family, and she’s upset that he and his wife have no interest in giving her grandchildren-to which he replies that he can always adopt a child, or else his mother can remarry. Toshio Ozaki may be a traditionally manly man, but he’s not as traditionalist as his mother.
His mother appears to be the classic domineering evil mother on the surface, but she’s actually not as malevolent as she seems to be at first. However, she doesn’t like Kyoko, whom she disparages for her failure to dress and act like a lady. Kyoko’s kind of an interesting case here-in some respects she’s clearly a feminine woman: she wears frilly, sexy dresses and she’s voiced by the lovely Jamie Marchi with all that implies. At the same time, though, she has a job (apparently she works in a shop, which she runs independently of her husband), and is apparently pretty useless at housework (at one point Ritsuko explains to her sister Midori that she’s not a good cook). It could be said that she’s feminine, but not as feminine as someone like Sunako.
We also get to see the recrudescence of Nao, who appears at the clinic trying to get to her mother-in-law, Setsuko. Setsuko mentions that she’s been having “dreams” about Nao, and that she wishes Nao would come back to her, to which Toshio Ozaki replies that she needs to simply make the most of being alive. For a while, Toshio Ozaki is able to fend Nao off (“This is MY clinic!”), and for a while, Setsuko’s condition even improves. Of course, “Shiki” being “Shiki,” he can’t hold her off forever. Although most of the vampires can’t get into the clinic, Tatsumi can, and he’s able to first cut the power, and then go inside to attack Toshio Ozaki and grab Setsuko. Nao then runs to greet her mother-in-law before biting her, and she’s soon joined by everyone else.
Actually, this bears a bit more unpacking. Tatsumi is able to get into the clinic, and it’s implied that the reason for this is that Kyoko let him inside: earlier in the episode we see her going out to greet Tatsumi, because she’s bored with Toshio Ozaki (who’s too busy to make time for her) and hopes he’ll “keep [her] company.” We don’t learn what exactly this “company” consists of, and we don’t see what she and Tatsumi do together (other than that she passes on a bit of information Tatsumi gives her to her mother-in-law, just to see her reaction), but the obvious analogy is having an affair-even though the narrative neither implies nor states that anything sexual happens between Kyoko and Tatsumi.
Oh, and Megumi is off to kill Natsuno.
Episode 10
The first bit of this episode takes us back a bit to revisit the raid on Ozaki’s clinic from the vampires’ point of view. We learn that the vampires are under orders to kill Natsuno, which Megumi is none too pleased with. She tries to protest to Tatsumi, but Tatsumi refuses to listen. Nao attempts to comfort Megumi by suggesting that Natsuno could rise up as a vampire, but Megumi reminds Nao that her husband and son never rose up, causing Nao to burst into tears. This is around the time it becomes clear that Nao is targeting her family because she’s hoping they’ll rise up and join her.
On the subject of Nao, it’s worth pointing out that although she demonstrates that she still has a personality, she now looks a lot more feral than she did at her first appearance: that prim, proper hairstyle she once wore is now ruined by a giant lock of hair right in the middle of her face.
Anyway, Megumi goes off to kill Natsuno in violation of Tatsumi’s orders. She claims she doesn’t care if she gets punished as long as she’s the one to kill him. I will say this for her: for all her flaws, she’s a strong-willed girl.
Last episode, Shizuka appeared to Natsuno’s parents and asked them if her “brother” could come to greet Natsuno. In this episode we learn that said “brother” is none other than Toru, Natsuno’s old friend slash possible crush. Toru really doesn’t want to kill Natsuno, and so Megumi catches up with him and volunteers to take his place. The scene between them is really interesting, because it reveals some important details about both characters: first of all, we learn that even Megumi is put off by Tatsumi’s sadism (since he convinced Toru to attack Natsuno by threatening his family). Even more importantly, Megumi makes the case that Toru is, in effect, trading Natsuno’s life for his family’s, which hints at the rather selfish decisions Toru will make throughout the rest of the story, despite being at heart a good person. Additionally, Megumi says to Toru that when she goes to kill Natsuno, “I won’t hesitate.” Megumi, for good or for ill, is more strong-willed than Toru, in violation of the oh-so-popular stereotypes about male and female agency.
Anyway, the episode ends when Toru finally does bite Natsuno, against Megumi’s wishes but in accordance with Tatsumi’s overall plan.
Episode 11
This episode is actually a pretty good illustration of gender politics, as its overarching plot follows Ikumi, an elderly shaman. Ikumi reveals early on in the episode that she was once married to a man she didn’t love, and her only surviving relative is her grown daughter. Tellingly, when she’s relating her past and talking about the death of her husband, she says “my life as a woman was over.” With her husband dead and her daughter grown, she no longer acts as a housewife whose job is to serve her men and children (the job of every “woman” in traditional Japanese society-or most any patriarchal society, really). She had a couple of sons, but they died in infancy, something which can’t have been good for her considering the pressure on traditional Japanese women to provide their families with sons in particular.
That brings me to another point: Ikumi is one of the few mothers in “Shiki” of any kind of importance who does not have at least one living son (or at any rate, whose son died of some cause unrelated to vampires before the series began). Nao and Motoko, the most significant mothers, have sons, as does Chizuko (inevitably, their sons all die, which I don’t think is a coincidence). Right now this is slightly off-topic, but I’ll bring it up again in future.
Back to Ikumi. She’s a shaman who’s suspected right from the beginning that Kanemasa and the Kirishikis were bad news, and she foretells the destruction of the village (which actually happens). She decides that she must save the village, and so she goes around trying to convince the other villagers that the residents of Kanemasa are actually okiagari, a Japanese word meaning “risen” (as in, risen from the grave). But the villagers don’t listen to her, with everyone, including her own daughter, dismissing her as a hysterical lunatic.
Eventually, she brings her grievances to Toshio Ozaki, and despite the fact that Toshio Ozaki is aware that vampires are behind the deaths in Sotoba, he dismisses her claims that the Kirishikis are okiagari (which does make sense in context, as he wants to prevent panic by keeping quiet until he’s sure what can be done about it), and offers to demonstrate by going to Kanemasa and checking the pulse of one of them. So all the villagers, including Ikumi, go to Kanemasa, and Toshio Ozaki does take the pulse of one of the Kirishikis-Seishirou, who is an ordinary human, and thus has a pulse AND is not affected by the things Ikumi uses to ward off spirits. Ikumi is, of course, entirely correct to suspect the Kirishikis, but because she’s a hysterical woman who speaks of urban legends like okiagari and tries to ward them off with ritual charms and totems (instead of trying to collect scientific evidence like our resident manly doctor Toshio Ozaki) she’s denied the satisfaction of being proven right, with everyone accepting the word of Toshio Ozaki against hers.
The episode ends with some people who are implied to be vampires coming to Ikumi’s door asking for help in warding off the okiagari. By the next episode both Ikumi and her daughter have disappeared.
There’s also a minor subplot in which Sunako visits Seishin, who explains the term “shiki,” which he coined to describe the undead creatures in his novel. Sunako acts really excited by this development, taking it to mean that the undead aren’t just uniformly soulless monsters but that “they’ve found a life of their own!” See, Seishin understands and sympathizes with what it’s like to be “forsaken,” something she has to endure because she’s a) a vampire and b) a woman in a patriarchal society. At one point, as Sunako looks like she’s about to bite Seishin, Seishin asks Sunako if she’s a “shiki,” to which Sunako replies “you are certainly the romantic.”
Episode 12
So, early on in this episode Kaori and Akira go to visit Natsuno, who reveals that he’s been bitten and begs the two of them to get out of town. This time, both Kaori and Akira refuse, saying they want to help in any way they can. Later, when Natsuno confronts Toru and offers him his blood, Sunako and Chizuru provide commentary about how hard it is to resist the temptation of drinking blood, and how all vampires soon learn to treat it as natural because it’s so hard to resist.
So Natsuno gets sicker and sicker, and the main action of the episode involves Kaori and Akira trying to convince Natsuno’s intractable father to accept charms and talisman he can use to keep vampires out of Natsuno’s room, with Mr. Yuuki refusing because he believes the okiagari are just a legend concocted by superstitious village people. He clearly suffers from hubris (dare I suggest, male hubris?), believing that only the “scientific” way of looking at things matters, a view his wife confirms under the influence of the vampires. He’s thus yet another man (along with Toshio Ozaki) who exemplifies male hubris despite not having a traditionalist outlook on life. As Kaori and Akira walk away from his house, they make plans to fight vampires. Akira says: “I’ll bring a hatchet” and Kaori says “And I’ll…bring a skillet.” And so we see that expectations of gender roles seem to be coded into even their choice of weapons.
In other news, Tatsumi tells Megumi to kill Kaori’s and Akira’s father. She initially has reservations, but when Tatsumi mentions that Natsuno has been collaborating with Kaori and Akira he’s able to play to her jealousy and she agrees to do it. She goes and bites him a little while later. The scene is actually somewhat amusing because Mr. Yoshikazu Tanaka is walking down the street at night when he sees Megumi, and for a while the two have a perfectly normal conversation before Yoshikazu remembers that Megumi is supposed to be dead. It’s then that she wraps her arms rather suggestively around his neck and bites him.
This episode contains my all-time favorite scene in the entire series!!
Unfortunately it’s got no women in it, so I can’t comment on it.
What I CAN talk about is the bit where Kaori gets together with Akira and Natsuno and they all make plans for what to do about the vampires. Natsuno suggests digging up Megumi’s grave, and Akira is gung-ho about this while Kaori is hesitant-she really really doesn’t want to desecrate her friend’s grave. She gets pretty emotional about it too. So we have Akira and Natsuno playing the part of the shounen boy heroes who gleefully charge into the unknown, while Kaori is their timid female friend.
Episode 8
Early on in the episode, Sunako visits Seishin, and brings up the fact that he likes to portray the “forsaken” in his novels. In their own ways, of course, both Sunako and Seishin are “forsaken:” Sunako because she’s a woman/vampire, and Seishin because he’s a loner/possibly gay (more on this anon).
In this episode, Kaori, Akira, and Natsuno go to dig up Megumi’s grave. Kaori spends a lot of time musing on Megumi’s death and getting increasingly freaked out by the thought that Megumi might be buried there. She notes at one point that Akira is acting cheerful, and Akira chides her for acting like a scared little kid, when Kaori replies that digging up someone’s grave because you think she’s a vampire is pretty childish in itself.
When they finally get to Natsuno, he hands Akira a shovel while Kaori gets a hoe she uses to level the ground. The two boys go into the grave to dig; she stays on the surface. There’s one point at which Akira tells Kaori to level some dirt, to which Kaori replies: “You don’t get to boss me around.” This may be foreshadowing for Akira’s increasing willingness to take the (manly) initiative throughout the series, which I’ll be talking more about later.
Oh, and Kaori gets accosted by a vampire, but she wards him off using a good-luck charm she left at Megumi’s grave (she actually calls upon Megumi’s name for protection) in just enough time for Natsuno to bash the vampire with a shovel, knocking him out. So they leave him in the grave, though of course he gets up and walks away. Kaori even admits as much when she goes to sleep in Akira’s room out of fear (both kids were having trouble sleeping for fear of vampires).
This is also the episode where Shizuka, a little girl vampire with a ventriloquist puppet, appears. She comes to the door of Natsuno’s residence and asks to be let in. At first, his father tries to get her to go away, but she eventually convinces him otherwise when she throws the puppet she’s been speaking through into their home. She’s basically “contaminated” their residence with her doll, and the only thing they can do now is go whole hog and let her come in. What’s more, Natsuno’s mother, Azusa Koide, is the one who convinces his father to let her in in the first place, making this, essentially, a scene of women conspiring to override the wishes of a man.
Episode 9
Oooooh, god…THIS episode!
This is the episode where Toshio Ozaki’s wife, Kyoko, appears. It’s also our first formal introduction to Toshio Ozaki’s mother. She’s a domineering woman who bosses Toshio Ozaki around for not always living up to his name as the last heir of the Ozaki family, and she’s upset that he and his wife have no interest in giving her grandchildren-to which he replies that he can always adopt a child, or else his mother can remarry. Toshio Ozaki may be a traditionally manly man, but he’s not as traditionalist as his mother.
His mother appears to be the classic domineering evil mother on the surface, but she’s actually not as malevolent as she seems to be at first. However, she doesn’t like Kyoko, whom she disparages for her failure to dress and act like a lady. Kyoko’s kind of an interesting case here-in some respects she’s clearly a feminine woman: she wears frilly, sexy dresses and she’s voiced by the lovely Jamie Marchi with all that implies. At the same time, though, she has a job (apparently she works in a shop, which she runs independently of her husband), and is apparently pretty useless at housework (at one point Ritsuko explains to her sister Midori that she’s not a good cook). It could be said that she’s feminine, but not as feminine as someone like Sunako.
We also get to see the recrudescence of Nao, who appears at the clinic trying to get to her mother-in-law, Setsuko. Setsuko mentions that she’s been having “dreams” about Nao, and that she wishes Nao would come back to her, to which Toshio Ozaki replies that she needs to simply make the most of being alive. For a while, Toshio Ozaki is able to fend Nao off (“This is MY clinic!”), and for a while, Setsuko’s condition even improves. Of course, “Shiki” being “Shiki,” he can’t hold her off forever. Although most of the vampires can’t get into the clinic, Tatsumi can, and he’s able to first cut the power, and then go inside to attack Toshio Ozaki and grab Setsuko. Nao then runs to greet her mother-in-law before biting her, and she’s soon joined by everyone else.
Actually, this bears a bit more unpacking. Tatsumi is able to get into the clinic, and it’s implied that the reason for this is that Kyoko let him inside: earlier in the episode we see her going out to greet Tatsumi, because she’s bored with Toshio Ozaki (who’s too busy to make time for her) and hopes he’ll “keep [her] company.” We don’t learn what exactly this “company” consists of, and we don’t see what she and Tatsumi do together (other than that she passes on a bit of information Tatsumi gives her to her mother-in-law, just to see her reaction), but the obvious analogy is having an affair-even though the narrative neither implies nor states that anything sexual happens between Kyoko and Tatsumi.
Oh, and Megumi is off to kill Natsuno.
Episode 10
The first bit of this episode takes us back a bit to revisit the raid on Ozaki’s clinic from the vampires’ point of view. We learn that the vampires are under orders to kill Natsuno, which Megumi is none too pleased with. She tries to protest to Tatsumi, but Tatsumi refuses to listen. Nao attempts to comfort Megumi by suggesting that Natsuno could rise up as a vampire, but Megumi reminds Nao that her husband and son never rose up, causing Nao to burst into tears. This is around the time it becomes clear that Nao is targeting her family because she’s hoping they’ll rise up and join her.
On the subject of Nao, it’s worth pointing out that although she demonstrates that she still has a personality, she now looks a lot more feral than she did at her first appearance: that prim, proper hairstyle she once wore is now ruined by a giant lock of hair right in the middle of her face.
Anyway, Megumi goes off to kill Natsuno in violation of Tatsumi’s orders. She claims she doesn’t care if she gets punished as long as she’s the one to kill him. I will say this for her: for all her flaws, she’s a strong-willed girl.
Last episode, Shizuka appeared to Natsuno’s parents and asked them if her “brother” could come to greet Natsuno. In this episode we learn that said “brother” is none other than Toru, Natsuno’s old friend slash possible crush. Toru really doesn’t want to kill Natsuno, and so Megumi catches up with him and volunteers to take his place. The scene between them is really interesting, because it reveals some important details about both characters: first of all, we learn that even Megumi is put off by Tatsumi’s sadism (since he convinced Toru to attack Natsuno by threatening his family). Even more importantly, Megumi makes the case that Toru is, in effect, trading Natsuno’s life for his family’s, which hints at the rather selfish decisions Toru will make throughout the rest of the story, despite being at heart a good person. Additionally, Megumi says to Toru that when she goes to kill Natsuno, “I won’t hesitate.” Megumi, for good or for ill, is more strong-willed than Toru, in violation of the oh-so-popular stereotypes about male and female agency.
Anyway, the episode ends when Toru finally does bite Natsuno, against Megumi’s wishes but in accordance with Tatsumi’s overall plan.
Episode 11
This episode is actually a pretty good illustration of gender politics, as its overarching plot follows Ikumi, an elderly shaman. Ikumi reveals early on in the episode that she was once married to a man she didn’t love, and her only surviving relative is her grown daughter. Tellingly, when she’s relating her past and talking about the death of her husband, she says “my life as a woman was over.” With her husband dead and her daughter grown, she no longer acts as a housewife whose job is to serve her men and children (the job of every “woman” in traditional Japanese society-or most any patriarchal society, really). She had a couple of sons, but they died in infancy, something which can’t have been good for her considering the pressure on traditional Japanese women to provide their families with sons in particular.
That brings me to another point: Ikumi is one of the few mothers in “Shiki” of any kind of importance who does not have at least one living son (or at any rate, whose son died of some cause unrelated to vampires before the series began). Nao and Motoko, the most significant mothers, have sons, as does Chizuko (inevitably, their sons all die, which I don’t think is a coincidence). Right now this is slightly off-topic, but I’ll bring it up again in future.
Back to Ikumi. She’s a shaman who’s suspected right from the beginning that Kanemasa and the Kirishikis were bad news, and she foretells the destruction of the village (which actually happens). She decides that she must save the village, and so she goes around trying to convince the other villagers that the residents of Kanemasa are actually okiagari, a Japanese word meaning “risen” (as in, risen from the grave). But the villagers don’t listen to her, with everyone, including her own daughter, dismissing her as a hysterical lunatic.
Eventually, she brings her grievances to Toshio Ozaki, and despite the fact that Toshio Ozaki is aware that vampires are behind the deaths in Sotoba, he dismisses her claims that the Kirishikis are okiagari (which does make sense in context, as he wants to prevent panic by keeping quiet until he’s sure what can be done about it), and offers to demonstrate by going to Kanemasa and checking the pulse of one of them. So all the villagers, including Ikumi, go to Kanemasa, and Toshio Ozaki does take the pulse of one of the Kirishikis-Seishirou, who is an ordinary human, and thus has a pulse AND is not affected by the things Ikumi uses to ward off spirits. Ikumi is, of course, entirely correct to suspect the Kirishikis, but because she’s a hysterical woman who speaks of urban legends like okiagari and tries to ward them off with ritual charms and totems (instead of trying to collect scientific evidence like our resident manly doctor Toshio Ozaki) she’s denied the satisfaction of being proven right, with everyone accepting the word of Toshio Ozaki against hers.
The episode ends with some people who are implied to be vampires coming to Ikumi’s door asking for help in warding off the okiagari. By the next episode both Ikumi and her daughter have disappeared.
There’s also a minor subplot in which Sunako visits Seishin, who explains the term “shiki,” which he coined to describe the undead creatures in his novel. Sunako acts really excited by this development, taking it to mean that the undead aren’t just uniformly soulless monsters but that “they’ve found a life of their own!” See, Seishin understands and sympathizes with what it’s like to be “forsaken,” something she has to endure because she’s a) a vampire and b) a woman in a patriarchal society. At one point, as Sunako looks like she’s about to bite Seishin, Seishin asks Sunako if she’s a “shiki,” to which Sunako replies “you are certainly the romantic.”
Episode 12
So, early on in this episode Kaori and Akira go to visit Natsuno, who reveals that he’s been bitten and begs the two of them to get out of town. This time, both Kaori and Akira refuse, saying they want to help in any way they can. Later, when Natsuno confronts Toru and offers him his blood, Sunako and Chizuru provide commentary about how hard it is to resist the temptation of drinking blood, and how all vampires soon learn to treat it as natural because it’s so hard to resist.
So Natsuno gets sicker and sicker, and the main action of the episode involves Kaori and Akira trying to convince Natsuno’s intractable father to accept charms and talisman he can use to keep vampires out of Natsuno’s room, with Mr. Yuuki refusing because he believes the okiagari are just a legend concocted by superstitious village people. He clearly suffers from hubris (dare I suggest, male hubris?), believing that only the “scientific” way of looking at things matters, a view his wife confirms under the influence of the vampires. He’s thus yet another man (along with Toshio Ozaki) who exemplifies male hubris despite not having a traditionalist outlook on life. As Kaori and Akira walk away from his house, they make plans to fight vampires. Akira says: “I’ll bring a hatchet” and Kaori says “And I’ll…bring a skillet.” And so we see that expectations of gender roles seem to be coded into even their choice of weapons.
In other news, Tatsumi tells Megumi to kill Kaori’s and Akira’s father. She initially has reservations, but when Tatsumi mentions that Natsuno has been collaborating with Kaori and Akira he’s able to play to her jealousy and she agrees to do it. She goes and bites him a little while later. The scene is actually somewhat amusing because Mr. Yoshikazu Tanaka is walking down the street at night when he sees Megumi, and for a while the two have a perfectly normal conversation before Yoshikazu remembers that Megumi is supposed to be dead. It’s then that she wraps her arms rather suggestively around his neck and bites him.