Analyzing "Shiki's" Women: Episodes 13-18

[sweettalkeress]

Episode 13

Fairly early on in this episode, Dr. Toshio Ozaki is approached by his mother, who informs him that Kyoko isn’t doing well. Toshio Ozaki goes to check on her to find that, sure enough, she’s been bitten. Toshio Ozaki’s mother reacts pretty badly when he orders her to fetch his staff so they can help, and she makes a note that “when Kyoko wakes she owes me.” Ehehehehehe. Throughout the rest of the episode, his nurses try to ask him what’s going on and offer to help. They don’t think Kyoko stands much of a chance of surviving, but Toshio Ozaki refuses to let them help. One nurse, Kiyomi, says of Toshio Ozaki that “[i]t’s nice to see him finally showing emotion.”

There’s also a sequence at the Tanaka house, where Megumi shows up to torment Kaori and the like, going on about how “Making someone I hate suffer is amaaaaaziiiiing!” Because she’s a psychopathic asshole like that. Anyway, Mr. Tanaka has predictably been doing worse, and Mrs. Sachiko Tanaka isn’t taking it well, complaining that he’s spending too much time working and at one point accusing him of going to the bar instead. She also snaps at Kaori when she (Kaori) announces that she’ll be going to bed, and asks her to close the windows (“I’m not your housekeeper!”). This is the second time this episode that a mother has snapped at her child for trying to tell her what to do-except this time the child is female, so I’m not sure what to make of that. But Mrs. Tanaka does note that her husband brought home a business card for the clinic the vampires have set up.

Oh, and Azusa Koide, wife of Mr. Yuuki, has gone missing, leaving him only a note announcing that she believes Natsuno is dead.

This is ALSO the episode where we meet Motoko Maeda, whose husband has been attacked. She doesn’t have anything much to do right now, but she’ll become important in time.

Episode 14

THIS EPISODE! OH MY GOD!

This episode contains the infamous scene in which Kyoko, having died, is experimented on by her husband so he can determine how to stop the vampires.

But one thing at a time. Early on in this episode we get a great scene (if “great” is the right word) in which nurse Satoko announces that Yuki (another nurse) has gone missing to Toshio Ozaki, and when he blows her off, she gets very upset. Yasuyo tries to comfort Satoko by saying that Toshio Ozaki is under a lot of stress what with his wife’s hospitalization and everything, but Satoko insists that he’s still being cold. This will come up again.

We also get a scene in which Toshio Ozaki’s mother tries to advise him, and suggests that he call Kyoko’s parents. The entire scene, she makes everything about how it’s totally inconvenient for her that all this is happening, and she’s only suggesting that her son call Kyoko’s parents because she doesn’t want them getting involved, but she does it so often it actually makes me less convinced that that’s all there is to it-not more. On the whole, she’s actually not a bad mother figure in this scene, and it lays to rest the idea that she’s ever going to turn out to be genuinely malevolent.

Speaking of Kyoko, after several days of keeping her corpse in his hospital, Toshio Ozaki takes her into the operating room when she awakens and proceeds to perform vivisection on her (he does try to give her anesthetics, but of course they don’t work on vampires). This scene is…actually pretty rapey, if you think about it. First he draws blood from her while she’s asleep and doesn’t notice, which he proceeds to manipulate in various ways and mix with a drop of his own blood. Sounds basic enough, but later we see him covering her mouth with tape so he can’t hear her try to talk to him (the most accepted in-universe reason being that he doesn’t want to be reminded who it is he’s experimenting on), and then a little later he takes a scalpel and slashes open her femoral artery, which is located on the inside of the leg. I really don’t think it’s a coincidence that we see him targeting that artery, as opposed to the carotid (neck) artery or brachial (arm) artery. And of course, he ultimately stakes her to death. Stakes are a traditional method for killing vampires, of course; but they’re also a form of violent penetration. Just like rape. More on this down the road. And OF COURSE we have to hear Kyoko screaming and whimpering and begging Toshio Ozaki (to the best of her ability) to stop….

We also get a great line from Toshio Ozaki, where he says “It’s impossible to injure her with ordinary methods.” See, because all misogynists secretly fear women and realize that they’ll never be entirely content to be subservient, and that at the same time, they’re not going anywhere.

While all this is going on, we get a segment in the vampires’ camp, where Megumi approaches a female werewolf named Yoshie and asks if Natsuno is likely to be around now that he’s been “killed.” Yoshie points out to Megumi that if Natsuno was indeed sent away to the big city, as their sources suggest, he’s likely been cremated. Megumi breaks down crying for a bit at this news, and lays a smackdown on Masao, who’s thrilled by the idea that Natsuno won’t be back. It’s worthy of note that Megumi disparages Masao for (it’s heavily implied) his lack of willingness to kill. Although she doesn’t come out and say that Masao has never killed anyone, she does refer to him as a “bottom-feeder,” and vampires who can’t feed for themselves in general as “worthless.” The main purpose of this sequence seems to be illustrating that Masao is so pathetic he can actually get beaten up by a girl (who’s younger and shorter than him, no less) and be entirely powerless to fight back. I don’t think it’s Megumi being a tsundere toward Masao, because while tsundere anime girls who beat on their boyfriends for comic relief are common in anime, they’re actually not all that common in “Shiki.” It’s not meant to be cute or funny-just to reinforce how pathetic Masao is, and how unhinged Megumi is.

It irks me that there are people who watch this scene and insist that it makes Megumi look better. Yes, I know I’m a total Masao fangirl who hates to see her precious baby get abused (except when I don’t) but even if you don’t like Masao, the fact remains that Megumi is reinforcing YET AGAIN that she thinks vampires who kill lots of people are strong and manly and cool, and those who are squeamish about hunting people are weak and useless. And just for the record, those scenes of Megumi tormenting Kaori and stating that she likes it happen BEFORE this scene (actually, there’s one earlier in this episode too, where Megumi shows up at Kaori’s house to inform her that her father is dead and laugh about it afterwards). Meaning there’s no reason to think she just snapped and started doing evil to cope with the shock of losing Natsuno. SHE HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT WAY! Yes, she has her sympathetic moments. THIS IS NOT ONE OF THEM!

And breathe....

There’s also a scene early on in an episode, where the mother of Tomio Ookawa tells on Atsushi Ookawa for smoking, and Tomio responds by hitting his son. Atsushi goes outside to sulk, when he comes across Chizuru, dressed as Lady Gaga (of course she is!), who immediately starts putting the moves on him. He, of course, falls for it at once, and tells her to come into his room. I bet you can see where this is going.

Oh, and there’s a bit in which Dr. Toshio Ozaki calls Yasuyo to inform her that he’s closing the clinic, and so we get a scene of Yasuyo wearing sexy underwear and lipstick, in bed with what appears to be a man. That’s another way in which “Shiki” is unusual-it does things with women who aren’t conventionally-attractive which most series would not do.

Episode 15

So, this episode begins with the aftermath of Kyoko’s death, in which Seishin arrives, and, when he expresses his disgust at what Toshio Ozaki has done, Toshio Ozaki defends his actions by saying “I can’t allow their contamination to spread unchecked.” This is significant because women in most cultures are considered to be agents of pollution in some sense or other (see the various taboos against menstrual blood, for instance). So we have a manly man who plans to curtail the “contamination” caused by women through symbolic rape. Get it?

Moving along, later in the episode we get the scene where Chizuru, dressed in a sexy outfit that seems to be comprised of strips of orange tape, finally meets Toshio Ozaki when he goes to challenge the vampires working in the office of the late Yoshikazu Tanaka, and she informs him that “I prefer to feed exclusively on virile young men,” like Toshio Ozaki himself. In other words, Chizuru is the classic femme fatale-she uses sex appeal as a weapon to trap men, and then she literally kills them. You see some traces of this with Megumi as well, but Chizuru has it down to an art form. Chizuru does not bite Toshio Ozaki just yet, though-that comes later.

This episode actually contains two separate funerals, and while only one features women prominently, I think both deserve mention. The first is the funeral for Atsushi Ookawa, which is orchestrated by a new vampire named Hayami (voiced by Sonny Strait, FYI). Hayami may be the closest thing to a true comic-relief character “Shiki” has, and he’s yet another effeminate “Shiki” vampire, as he dresses in pink and likes to throw large, flamboyant parties in his funeral home. Although there’s a certain callousness to the way he has such fun at funerals (Tomio Ookawa’s mom comments on how his displays are “just disgraceful”), it’s Tatsumi who reins him in with the equally-callous, dispassionate explanation that the purpose of funerals is for families to “indulge in sentimentalities” (I’m quoting from memory, here).

The reason why Tomio Ookawa couldn’t have his son buried by the temple, it turns out, is because the temple is booked for poor Kyoko’s funeral. The nurses show up but are dismissed by some of the elderly women of the village, and Kiyomi supposes that they don’t want the nurses there for fear that they’re “carriers” of whatever killed Kyoko. Toshio Ozaki’s mother predictably starts bossing the nurses around, which causes Satoko to rather awesomely call out both her and Toshio Ozaki himself (“You can’t order us around like servants!”), as she’s still angry about Toshio Ozaki’s failure to show concern at Yuki’s disappearance. The next scene, Kiyomi delivers Satoko’s letter of resignation to Toshio Ozaki, and she chews him out still further for his lack of caring. THIS is why “Shiki” is so good! Yes, Toshio Ozaki is a manly man, and manly men are callous and only look at things through their own emotionless, manly lens. This causes him to MAKE MISTAKES, and THE WOMEN CAN AND DO CALL HIM OUT ON THOSE MISTAKES! Furthermore, THEY’RE PRESENTED AS THE SYMPATHETIC PARTY, and Toshio Ozaki is clearly shown to be in the wrong! Attention, all you John Waynes and Miranda Leeks: you could learn something from “Shiki!” Macho Sue Toshio Ozaki is not!

Chapter 16

This chapter has a number of good scenes in it.

The first is a bit where we get Nao’s backstory. We learn that she grew up in an abusive household, and her parents abandoned her when she was just six years old-a fact she believes explains her having risen up as a vampire. So in point of fact, she only ever appeared to be a happy housewife, when really she had this deep, dark secret. She’s the only member of her new family to have risen up, and she laments the fact that (as far as she can tell) she’s now condemned to never enjoy the happy afterlife she suspects the rest of her family can enjoy.

Nao is a castrating mother. She’s a close relative of the likes of Mrs. Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and she fits the bill much better than Takae Ozaki, despite the fact that this isn’t obvious at first. At the start of the story she was the happy mother of a little boy; now she’s literally killed and consumed that boy, in the (inevitably futile) hope that he could be her little boy forever (because if he did rise up as a vampire, then he’d never grow old). I’m sure Freud would have a field day with Nao-and with Takae Ozaki as well, incidentally.

I also just love the fact that Nao’s gotten to play such a larger role than either her husband or her son. Partly because that’s really rare (usually mothers are unimportant), but also partly because it’s not what you’d expect at first, given her family’s history: Mikiyasu, her husband, was friends with Toshio Ozaki and Seishin when they were children, while Nao was not even born in the village. So “Shiki” gets to kill two birds with one stone here: it presents a mother in a really major role, and it ALSO establishes this character who gets little screen time and dies early on as important, reinforcing that all “Shiki” characters are in this together, no matter how big or small a role they play.

I’ll be revisiting Nao down the road, but for now I’d like to digress and talk about Sunako’s backstory, which is the other one presented in this episode. Sunako used to live a happy life with a loving family, and judging from the scenes we get of her in flashbacks, she was almost certainly born after the Meiji Restoration took place, since, despite the fact that she had to have been Japanese (probably), she nevertheless lived in a Western-style house, and she and her family wore Western-style clothes.

There’s an evocative scene in the flashback in which Sunako relates that for a number of years she was kept locked in a storeroom, her only contact with the outside world being the servants who came to bring her food (she killed them all, of course). It calls to mind ideas of the madwoman in the attic, a popular literary device with Victorian-era women, which was used to anthropomorphize the desperation they felt at their own confinement in male-dominated society. The scene of Sunako reading books in the storeroom calls to mind Virginia Woolf’s essay series “A Room of One’s Own,” in which her narrator goes to the library to research books written by men about women.

Sunako is actually telling her backstory to Toru, whom she’s invited over for tea. When Toru asks Sunako why she’s told him her backstory, she says, “I thought you, of all people, would understand that little girl. I thought you would understand how she felt.” I’m not exactly sure what to make of this quote out of universe, though in-universe Sunako is chiding Toru about his reservations about killing (which do not, for the record, in any way prevent him from killing). She suggests pointedly that if Toru doesn’t like killing people he should kill himself instead. But it’s pretty obvious that she has no realistic expectation of his ever doing so, and indeed he never does.

Another really great scene is one in which Megumi approaches the recently-risen Yoshikazu Tanaka and suggests that he kill his family, telling him that as far as she can tell, whether you come back as a vampire runs in the family. Mr. Tanaka is understandably upset that Megumi killed him, but she brushes it off by saying that he’s killed too, something he can’t deny. What finally convinces him is that Megumi says that if he does not kill his family, someone else will, since they’ve been investigating the vampires. Interestingly, Megumi lets slip that she didn’t attack her own parents, apparently because she doesn’t think they’re worthy of joining her.

Oh, and Masao has been hiding in the bushes watching them, and utters his famous “Women sure are scary!” line. Replace “women” with “femininity” and you’ll have figured out exactly half of “Shiki’s” gender politics. More on this to come.

So late that night Mr. Tanaka returns to his house to attack his family. Mrs. Sachiko Tanaka comes to the door, and she actually tells him to go away. Unfortunately for her, he can still reach across the door’s threshold. I’m going to take the bait and say that this may have something to do with the fact that he used to own the house, being the family’s patriarch, and so it can’t completely shut him out the way it could another vampire (especially a female one-note that we never see Megumi try to enter their home). And he bites her in a somewhat rapey scene. Now, the vampire bites in “Shiki” have no overtly sexual connotations, at least not in-universe (given that we’ve seen vampires attacking their own parents or children). That said, the sexual aspect of vampire bites is so firmly ingrained into our subconscious by now that this show has to be aware of it, and there are times when it plays it up intentionally.

This proves to be the last straw for Kaori and Akira, though, who decide it’s time to take up arms and fight the vampires. Akira jumps at the chance to exterminate the vampires, ordering Kaori to make stakes, which she does. He then grabs a bunch of stakes and goes out to kill some vampires, but he gets ambushed by Tatsumi. Kaori, meanwhile, is safe in her house, where she can bide her time. Once again, manly derring-do fails to pay off.

Here’s something else I should mention: as Akira’s going to fight the vampires, he encounters some older women who are having a conversation. They laugh about the body count and Akira gets angry at them, to which they explain that they have no choice but to laugh because they feel so lost. One of the older women lets slip that since Akira’s father is dead, he’s now the man of the house, which is reflected in the more serious way he’s handling things now (though it does him no good anyway).

Episode 17

So much to talk about in this episode….

Okay, so the first scene that features women in any real role is when we get a scene of Toshio Ozaki’s remaining nursing staff. Kiyomi lets slip that Junko Yasumori is dead, having been last seen visiting the clinic of the vampire Ebuchi. This, for the record, has always been the freakiest thing about these vampires for me. The mere fact that they can hypnotize you into letting them feed on you and never fighting back is terrifying, and the fact that the vampires can pose as doctors, who are supposed to stop you from dying, makes it all the worse.

Anyway, Ritsuko expresses worry that the patients aren’t coming to their clinic anymore, but Yasuyo reassures her by saying that Toshio Ozaki will work on getting their patients back. We then cut to a scene in which Toshio Ozaki is inspecting Tae Yano, mother of Kanami Yano, who’s been attacked by vampires and is dying. Kanami asks Toshio Ozaki if her mother is dying because of an epidemic, to which Toshio Ozaki replies that there is no epidemic. Ritsuko, who’s come along, is shocked by this, and as she remembers seeing the undead Nao nigh these many episodes ago, the little light bulb goes on in her head. She approaches Toshio Ozaki afterward and asks him what he meant by claiming that there was no epidemic, but he (inevitably) ignores the question.

While all this is going on, Kaori, dressed in her famous track suit and clearly terrified out of her mind, goes to Seishin. She explains that everyone else in her family’s gone, and she’s sure that she’ll be the next to die, so she asks Seishin for a posthumous name to put on her grave. Seishin declines, telling her that she should just make the most out of being alive because actually, she has no way of knowing when she’ll die. Oh, and we’re treated to a scene of her digging her own grave. Not long after this scene, Seishin’s mother, Miwako, calls Toshio Ozaki, informing him that Seishin has disappeared.

And then night falls and things really start to pick up. Ritsuko gets a call from Kiyomi, who informs her that she’s being held hostage in her home. Ritsuko heads outside quickly to come to the rescue, only to find Kiyomi being taken away in the Kirishikis’ moving truck, and while she’s distracted, a couple of vampires sneak up on her and bite her. Toshio Ozaki, whom she had informed of her plans to find Kiyomi, comes to rescue her, but by then she’s already been hypnotized, and she informs him that she’s quitting the clinic with tears in her eyes. She was one of the last innocent village adults in a major role, and now she’s become a victim herself.

In other news, Chizuru shows up at Toshio Ozaki’s clinic. He returns from his trip with Ritsuko to find her holding his knife-real subtle castration metaphor there-and he tries to stab her with a stake before Seishiro shoots it to pieces through the window. We actually cut to Seishiro, who says: “I can’t believe I’m helping her. It’s degrading.” He doesn’t want to share his woman with anyone else, but he has no choice-both Chizuru and Sunako have more power than he does. Toshio Ozaki asks Chizuru why Seishiro is helping her, given that he’s NOT A VAMPIRE, and Chizuru explains that he’s staying of his own free will. This will be explained down the road.

Chizuru chats Toshio Ozaki up a bit before biting him. Before she does so, though, Toshio Ozaki tells her that he wants to see the village burn because they ignored him and dismissed his theories. Kind of like how they ignored and dismissed Ikumi despite the fact that she was entirely right to suspect the Kirishikis. Upon biting Toshio Ozaki, Chizuru tells him to destroy his hospital records, and says: “When I find a man I like, I don’t let him go easily. I make him mine,” in yet another reference to her nature as a femme fatale.

Episode 18

So much happens in this episode!

Okay, so fairly early on in this episode we see Chizuru, who’s riding in an off-road vehicle with Atsushi Ookawa, who’s now risen up as a vampire. Atsushi is probably the only really manly vampire of any sort of real importance in this story. Anyway, Megumi lets slip to Masao that Atsushi is so glad he’s no longer under his father’s thumb, and that he’s found his “true calling” in killing people. Masao is predictably annoyed by Atsushi, and suggests telling Yoshie to rein him in.

Speaking of Yoshie, we then cut to a scene of her taking Toru aside and telling him that Sunako likes him. She then escorts him to a shack in the woods where a newly-risen Ritsuko is just waking up. Yoshie instructs Toru to give Ritsuko clothes and tell her how to feed, leaving him to it with a snide remark about how he shouldn’t peek when she’s changing like this is all perfectly normal.

Ritsuko, of course, has already figured out what’s what, and she’s able to figure out how to speak without being instructed. We don’t know how she’s figured this out, but ultimately that doesn’t matter. What DOES matter is that she refuses Toru’s clothes and insists that she won’t be feeding, that in fact she’d rather starve to death than kill people-much to the chagrin of Toru, who’s been killing people this entire time and just feeling bad about it afterwards.

In other werewolf news, Tatsumi pays a visit to Natsuno. This scene doesn’t feature women, but it’s notable, I think, because it establishes the werewolves as, essentially, a more “manly” type of monster than the regular vampires. Think about it: there are many female vampires, including their leader, but there’s only one female werewolf that we ever get to see. Furthermore, Tatsumi is easily one of the manlier characters in the show (possibly to an even greater extent than Toshio Ozaki), and Natsuno is the manliest guy in his own social circle (prior to, you know, that whole vampire thing). Werewolves, unlike vampires, can go out in the sun, breathe and have a pulse, and can eat normal human food-though if they don’t drink blood, they lose their super strength, super senses, and the like. In other words, the manlier monster in this series is easier to disguise itself and less inherently dangerous, since werewolves don’t need to kill anyone to survive. This relates to the idea of women being more monstrous than men, particularly since your gender is a hard thing to disguise (if you think about it, the first distinction most people learn to make is between genders).

And of course, there’s the great (for a given definition of great) bit later in the series when Toshio Ozaki plans to have Chizuru exposed as a vampire. See, Chizuru may have bitten Toshio Ozaki, but he’s protected against her mind control because Natsuno bit him too! We even get treated to a scene of Toshio Ozaki struggling manfully against Chizuru’s mind control powers while he lies in bed with an IV in his arm, which is feeding him blood. We then get kind of a sweet scene of Toshio Ozaki chatting amiably with Chizuru and inquiring about her old life, and she reveals that as a human she was married to a man who went off to war and never came back. It humanizes her quite a bit, but what’s telling is that Chizuru, in this scene, talks a lot about how close they are to creating an entire village of vampires, where she won’t have to hide who she truly is. Sure. She admits that according to Sunako, the last part of this plan will be the hardest part, but they’ve come this far, so they’re not going to give up. Oh, you mean kind of like the feminist movement, which has gone through numbers of iterations to gain women individual rights, and now is working on the more arduous task of dismantling patriarchal mindsets altogether?

Anyway, Toshio Ozaki suggests that Chizuru accompany him to the village’s Kagura dance, and Chizuru, while she has reservations, eventually accepts, on the grounds that it’ll be more fun that staying inside all night. So they go to the festival, Toshio Ozaki making snide remarks about how he’s powerless to resist her and Chizuru not knowing that Toshio Ozaki actually isn’t under her control. And for a while, Chizuru actually gets along pretty well with the villagers. Tellingly, there is one point at which someone asks Chizuru about her “illness,” to which Chizuru replies that she’s safe as long as she stays inside, but on this night she couldn’t help but go out. You know, like how women will be raped if they don’t stay in the kitchen, and therefore if they go out and get raped it’s their fault?

I’m serious-these things aren’t even difficult to unpack!

Anyway, as Toshio Ozaki and Chizuru get closer to the festival gates, with all their religious iconography, Chizuru predictably starts to get more and more anxious. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is ALSO the point at which Toshio Ozaki has her surrounded by more and more men, including the fathers of Megumi and Masao.

What follows is interesting, because Toshio Ozaki gradually reveals that he’s not actually under Chizuru’s control, when Chizuru tries to order him to take her away and he ignores her. Essentially, Toshio Ozaki has had to play the part of the scheming wife pretending to be subservient to her man-except now the genders are reversed. The trope is turned on its head. This actually follows quite logically from where Toshio Ozaki has been for a little while now. Earlier on, back when Ikumi was around, people dismissed her fears about Kanemasa on the grounds that she was a hysterical woman. A little later, when Toshio Ozaki said something to suggest that he was agreeing with her, his (male) friends dismissed his words, claiming that it wasn’t “rational.” And since then, Toshio Ozaki, with Natsuno’s help, has been trying to dupe the vampires into making them think he’s playing by their rules, and they’ve bought his ruse and played into his hands.

Of course, now the secret is out, and the villagers know what Chizuru is. Megumi’s father is the first one to realize it, since he recognizes Chizuru’s perfume as the same kind that he smelled in Megumi’s room just before she died. The village men start grabbing her and accosting her in increasingly rapey ways, and there’s no way for her to escape them. And, as we shall soon see, Toshio Ozaki is now able to reclaim his rightful place as the manly head of this village whom everyone respects and admires like the good father figure he is.