analyzing "Shiki's" Women: Episodes 19-22
Episode 19
So, early in this episode we get a flashback to Chizuru as a housewife with her husband. Chizuru is yet another housewife who was forced by the vampires to become otherwise, and the fact that this is so common among the “Shiki” women suggests that it’s sort-of designed to dispel the sexist notion that a woman will be safest and happiest if she just finds a nice man and settles down with him. Because realistically, not every woman wants that, and even if a woman does, there’s no reason to think it will last. I’ll be getting into this a little more when we revisit Nao.
In this particular flashback, we see Chizuru cut her hand, and cry at the sight of blood. Her husband comes in and reassures her that it’s just a little cut, and she’s overreacting. See, this is ironic because she’s now a vampire who has to drink people’s blood in order to survive!
Oh, and there’s some pretty rapey undertones to Chizuru’s eventual staking too, what with the village men holding her down and driving a stake into her chest while she cries and screams and begs them to stop.
Now the shit has hit the fan, and Toshio Ozaki resumes control of the situation, gathering all the villagers together and rallying them to help him destroy the vampires. He explains to the villagers that “their blood itself is alive,” which I think is significant, because bleeding, if you look at it, is a problem that gets associated with women a lot: both men and women can bleed, but women bleed on a regular basis during menstruation or childbirth (both of which are considered either holy or demonic, depending on the culture), whereas men usually don’t bleed unless they’re severely injured.
While all this is going on with the villagers, we cut to a scene of Sunako, who wants Toshio Ozaki killed, and who regrets not killing him sooner, now that he’s become so much of a threat. We also see Yoshie, the female werewolf, rally the vampires at the same time as the villagers rally themselves. The vampires aren’t divided into defined groups, but the villagers are: we see the men take up the task of actually killing the vampires (again, using violent penetration) while the women dispose of the bodies. The villagers are clinging to rigid gender roles to bring down the vampires: the men hunt, the women clean up.
We later cut to Megumi and Masao. Masao is predictably worried about getting killed, and wants nothing to do with the conflict, instead panicking because the folks at Kanemasa failed to protect him. In an act of unusual kindness, he asks Megumi if she would like to run away with him, but of course Megumi refuses, telling him that “A puny little coward like you could never help anyone.” Again we see that Masao is so weak that even a girl is braver and more competent than he is. Essentially, as has been implied, Megumi isn’t interested in him because he’s too weak to protect her the way a “real man” could.
In other news, Ritsuko still isn’t killing Yasuyo, and Toru is getting increasingly impatient with her. He orders, nags, and begs Ritsuko to kill Yasuyo, telling her that if she doesn’t, he will. But Ritsuko still refuses.
We also have Kaori, who has now been pushed to the edge and resolves to get her revenge on Megumi. She hides out in her house with her dog Love, a flashlight, and a baseball bat. Eventually she hears someone come to the door, and, thinking it’s Megumi, she opens it, prepared to strike-only to find that it’s her father. She hesitates for about a moment before bashing him to a pulp with her bat.
Meanwhile, back in Kanemasa, Seishin is charged with protecting Sunako. Sunako talks with Seishin about his novel, asking him why the man in his novel killed his little brother, and, by extension, why Seishin killed himself. But Seishin doesn’t give her a straight answer just yet.
Episode 20
The fight against the vampires continues in this episode without a whole lot of new developments. We do discover that Atsushi Ookawa has murdered Takae Ozaki in an attempt to avenge Chizuru, and he leaves a bloody message on the wall saying “This woman will never rise up.” Because the vampires killed her without drinking her blood, she’ll never become one of them. A woman who’s come to investigate with Toshio Ozaki and Tomio Ookawa explains all this in a tearful voice, as though she’s sorry that Mrs. Ozaki will never return; but Tomio Ookawa shoots her down, insisting that it’s better to die once and get it over with. Since he’s a traditional manly man, he can’t understand the appeal of having a second life as a monster the way a woman in a patriarchal society can (since women in patriarchal societies are “othered” to begin with).
Elsewhere, Natsuno confronts Seishirou, who reveals his backstory and announces that he wishes to become a vampire but can’t.
We then cut back to Sunako and her friends, who are hiding in Kanemasa’s basement, the main house having been stormed by villagers in the previous episode. Sunako is asleep, since it’s daylight, and Tatsumi tells Seishin that Seishirou is “a human who accepted her [Sunako] as a Shiki.” Essentially, Seishirou is allowed to remain because he accepts that Sunako is a monster and “other” and doesn’t try to oppress her for it, instead allowing her to do what she wants with him.
Aaaand back to Toru and Ritsuko. Ritsuko is still not killing Yasuyo, and Toru insists that she has to kill her because she’s screwed either way-if the villagers find them they’ll kill them both. The actual line that he utters is “They’re not gonna praise you for your purity, they’re gonna stick a stake in your heart!” And that cuts right to the center of the matter here. Ritsuko is a woman who’s perfectly happy and comfortable to live in a patriarchal society-not because she’s subservient or weak or stupid, or wants to see women oppressed, but simply because she wants to make the best of her situation and doesn’t want any problems. But what Toru’s pointing out here (albeit inadvertently) is that now that she’s become so “othered” (by becoming a vampire, though a more metaphorical version inevitably happens to women in patriarchy), no amount of trying to show compassion or sympathy to others (namely, men) is going to help her-she’s doomed no matter what.
And Ritsuko isn’t looking to save everyone by refusing to kill Yasuyo. Toru, with tears in his eyes, explains that if he does anything to betray the other vampires they’ll kill his family. Ritsuko is aware of this, but rather than feed on Yasuyo to ease Toru’s burden, she still demands that he let Yasuyo go. Ritsuko isn’t working for the greater good of all-she’s not trying to heal the world with kindness. She’s just trying to help her friend. All she wants is for Toru to guarantee the safety of one person. Such is the nature of sacrifice in “Shiki”-it’s about refusing to cross lines, more than it’s about giving oneself up to the greater good. It’s not “what would you do” so much as “what wouldn’t you do.” Ritsuko doesn’t expect to accomplish much of anything by refusing to attack Yasuyo, but she refuses anyway, even as she slowly starves to death, because she just couldn’t live with herself if she killed an innocent person (see this article for more information). And at some length, she brings Toru around to her point of view, and he, reluctantly, lets Yasuyo go, explaining that this deed makes him a traitor to “[his] people.”
Meanwhile, back in Kanemasa, things are looking less than rosy for Sunako. She’s now thoroughly convinced that she’s going to die, and she reflects at some length on how much it hurts to be staked, and whether a stake would go through her with one stroke, since she still has the body and bones of a child after all this time. At some length she says, ironically, that “If [she] were a character in a novel,” she’d be saved by a handsome prince. But she doesn’t think anything like that will ever happen. She can’t live up to the fairy-tale story that little girls get fed, that they will be swept off their feet by a handsome prince and all will be well, and it’s because she’s a “monster”-but by the standards of fairy tales, of course, all women are monsters because none of them are really content to be the princess even as they’re told they must be. With that in mind, when Sunako says “I didn’t become a creature like this because I wanted to!” it almost feels like she’s asking for forgiveness for being born a woman-she had no choice over being born female, but because she was, she’s doomed to be a monster.
Episode 20.5
This episode has that “.5” at the end to signify that it’s one of two special OVA episodes that were never aired on TV but that add to the already established story. This one focuses a bit more on Nao, as well as the men who are hunting vampires in the sewers (where they’ve hidden to escape the sun). We see, once again, that there’s a division of labor, with the men going in and killing vampires while the women dispose of the bodies once they’re outside.
The episode begins with a flashback to when Nao is alive, and talking to Mr. and Mrs. Hasegawa in their café. She talks a little bit about how happy she is to be a member of the Yasumori family, and how wonderful and accepting of her they’ve been, and how she also has an adorable little boy. She then pauses to ask the Hasegawas about their family, and they let slip that their children died in an accident. I’m noticing a theme here: many unambiguously sympathetic and innocent characters in this show don’t have the perfect Japanese idea of a family (that is, parents with at least one son, and all adult daughters housewives with sons of their own), or, if they have it at the beginning, they’ve lost it by the end. The Hasegawas lost their children, so they have nobody to carry on their family line. Ritsuko has no sons or brothers (so their family has no proper heirs). Kanami Yano is unmarried and has no children, despite being seemingly as old as her housewife friend Motoko Maeda (more on this later). And Kaori, for a time at least, believes that she’s the last surviving member of her family; both her father and brother have gone away (and the former she eventually KILLS!). The idea seems to be that the traditional Japanese construct of a family, with its patriarchal views, is an illusion that can’t be maintained, or at least isn’t for everyone.
Anyway, Nao and her buddies try to escape from the vampire-hunters but get caught at the end of a narrow tunnel. All this time, Nao is haunted by the specters of her dead family, which she destroyed; and she cries and screams that she’ll never enjoy the same peace that they have found. In effect, the Yasumori family was a traditional Japanese family, and Nao was the black sheep that eventually brought it to ruin by only pretending to be a traditional housewife despite the emotional scars she still has from her past. This family, which summed up everything a good Japanese family should be (according to traditionalist beliefs), was destroyed because a single woman couldn’t completely play by their rules. By this same logic, women who aren’t interested in falling in line with patriarchal systems are a threat to the traditional and patriarchal everywhere.
Oh, and Sadafumi Tamo, who had several relatives that were killed by the vampires and their associates, stabs Nao in the leg with a poker in probably the rapiest scene yet, since after a certain point we stop being able to see where he’s stabbing, but notice only that it’s somewhere below the waist. And Nao, of course, is crying and screaming and begging him to stop….
In the end, the vampires who were hiding in the sewers are all dragged out and tied to trees or poles to burn to death in the sun. This is significant, I think, if you consider that witches were famously burned at the stake. Mr. Hasegawa, though, puts them all out of their misery by stabbing them through the chest as they scream and their faces melt and erupt into putrefying boils of blood and pus.
Episode 21
This episode contains the infamous scene in which a group of women, including Chizuko Murasako, dispose of a bunch of bodies, stopping in the middle of their work to snack on rice balls. Before they can get to that, though, we see Chizuko handily hammer a stake into a still-moving vampire the men have already bundled up for her. It’s at this point that we see that although Chizuko is in many respects a traditionally feminine woman, she isn’t afraid to step outside the traditional gender lines and do a bit of staking of her own, if she sees fit. Indeed, she mentions that the reason why she’s so strong and able to haul bodies around is because she spent so much time helping her husband and father-in-law move heavy bags of rice in the shop.
This becomes significant in a scene much later on, when Masao re-emerges looking for some place to hide. He laments his inability to save Megumi, though of course it’s obvious to everyone else that he was too weak and fragile to stand a chance of doing such a thing. Chizuko, meanwhile, is hiding in her home, changing out of her bloody clothes, when Masao comes to call, and he begs her, in the weepiest and most pathetic voice I’ve ever heard from Todd Haberkorn anywhere, to let him inside, promising that “I’d never hurt you. Ever.” Of course, Chizuko doesn’t buy this, but at length she does invite him inside-where she’s waiting to greet him with a lead pipe (and presumably a stake as well). So, Masao is so very weak and effeminate and monstrous that he’s essentially forced Chizuko into a man’s role, since it’s supposed to be the men’s job to stake the vampires. It’s the men who swing big stakes around and violently penetrate the vampires. Masao, though, gets penetrated violently by a woman. For the record, this is a bit of a change from the manga scene, in which Chizuko is more visibly protecting her daughter, Chika, from Masao by staking him, thus making her into a mama bear and making her seem more feminine (though the manga also depicts the staking, which in the anime happens off-screen). We still get a bit of that here, of course, since she’s essentially trying to get vengeance on the creatures who killed her son.
We also get a bit more from the vampires’ camp. Seishin is still talking to Sunako, who’s feeling a full measure of regret for dragging Seishin into this; but Seishin comforts her by saying that “I understand myself much better because of our friendship,” and that he has been “hiding [his] true self” until he met her. Essentially, he had always known he was monstrous, but he only accepted that because he knew Sunako.
We cut to Yoshie, who, along with some other female vampires, is biting villagers in order to control them. Once again we see women trying to control men by putting a spell on them, since adopting the man’s more straightforward and forceful approach wouldn’t work for them. However, Yoshie soon meets her end when Seishirou, who’s been bitten and hypnotized by Natsuno, blows her brains out.
Yasuyo, meanwhile, has escaped her prison and is now running for the village dressed in only her underwear, being chased by Seishirou’s dogs. She somehow manages to escape without getting killed, and she runs back to the village, where she finds Mrs. Ookawa and Toshio Ozaki and lets slip that the vampires’ main hideout is in Yamairi. So now the villagers know where to concentrate their final offensive.
Back in Kanemasa, Tatsumi devises a way for Sunako to escape: by hiding in a suitcase that protects her from the sun. Poor Sunako-if she wants to stay alive she’s going to have to be confined even further than she has already been before. Seishin asks Tatsumi why, since Tatsumi is so much more physically powerful than Sunako, he serves her rather than the other way around, to which Tatsumi replies that he simply respects Sunako because no matter how much things change or are destroyed, she “confronts the collapse and fights against it.”
Episode 21.5
I love this episode, I really do. This one’s ALL ABOUT the ladies!
So, this episode essentially follows the lives and families of two women: Kanami Yano and (to a greater extent) Motoko Maeda. These two have appeared before, mostly in very minor roles; but here the two of them, and Motoko in particular, take center stage.
Kanami owns the restaurant Chigusa, which is just outside of Sotoba, along with her mother Tae; Motoko works there part time; and the various village women (including Hiroko Shimizu and Sachiko Tanaka) stop in repeatedly to eat and chat. Kanami and Motoko are set up as yet another tomboy/girly girl duo: Kanami lives alone except for her mother and has no man in her life (near as we can tell), she owns a restaurant (owning anything but a home and children is essentially considered “masculine” in patriarchal contexts), and she mostly wears pants. Motoko, by contrast, is a housewife with two children who is always shown wearing dresses (and often an apron).
Like every housewife we meet at the start of the series, Motoko appears to be happy, but there is one qualifier: she’s a bit of a worrier. In the first scene we see her in for this episode, she’s telling her son and daughter, who are in elementary school, that they shouldn’t play near the national road lest they get run over. Hiroko and Sachiko try to get her to calm down by reassuring her that the cars in the village don’t drive that fast, and that Motoko’s children will listen to her if she tells them to be safe; but Motoko worries nonetheless.
Motoko also doesn’t have the best relationship with her family. She lives with her husband, children, and her husband’s mother and father. Her mother-in-law bosses her around, and despite the fact that she chides Motoko for getting scared all the time and worrying too much, she herself acts no less like a hysterical woman: when her husband starts exhibiting symptoms of anemia she accepts his pronouncement that he’s fine on blind faith, and when Toshio Ozaki stops to diagnose his death, she starts yelling and screaming at him in a way that suggests that she has no clue what a doctor DOES, let alone how medicine or diseases work (she refuses to allow her husband to be autopsied, and immediately asks to pay money to get a death certificate, even though Toshio Ozaki hasn’t even made a formal diagnosis). Toshio Ozaki also gets to display his compassionate side when he attempts to shield Motoko from her mother-in-law’s verbal and physical abuse (if a hysterical woman like herself can’t be strong, manly Toshio Ozaki will be strong for her). Motoko later extricates herself and tells her children that she doesn’t want them to go in their grandfather’s room for fear of their getting sick (though she doesn’t say as much to them).
And so it begins. One by one, Motoko’s family members die-first her husband dies, and she brings Kanami over for support, terrified of facing her mother-in-law. They eventually get Toshio Ozaki to come help. But later Motoko’s young daughter, Shihori, falls ill. This time, Motoko is so desperate for help that she runs out of the house with her daughter on her back and races all the way to the Ozaki clinic-only to find that it’s closed, Toshio Ozaki having locked the clinic’s doors to experiment on poor Kyoko in peace. In other words, he’s neglecting a mother who desperately needs his services in order to conduct the manly discipline of science and torture a woman with symbolic rape.
It’s then that Motoko encounters Yoshie, who’s wearing ordinary street clothes and has her hair down, making her look very different indeed from the way she normally looks. She suggests that Motoko visit the Ebuchi Clinic instead, and Motoko runs across the national road to get there-only to find that it’ll be closed until sundown (since Ebuchi is a vampire). By this point she’s so desperate for help, any help, that she starts banging on the doors with her head until blood trickles down her face. It’s then that her mother-in-law catches up with her, and tells her to take her daughter home since she doesn’t even have a fever.
Of course, the next day Shihori is dead and Motoko’s mother-in-law has fallen ill. Motoko, in a fit of rage, begins kicking and screaming at her mother-in-law. At her mother-in-law’s funeral, Motoko talks to some village women who suggest that her father-in-law might have risen from the dead and come to take his family to the other side.
Later, Motoko’s son Shigeki approaches her with a bite mark on his leg. What happens next is interesting. Motoko takes her son, locks both of them in the bathroom together, and holds him close, telling him that “No matter what happens Mommy will protect you.” Thus she sets up a scene which we first saw in an earlier episode, of Motoko huddled in her bathtub with her son’s decomposing body (whether he died of vampire attacks or natural causes is never made clear), looking completely mad. She’s become a madwoman in a confined space, surrounded by death and decay, which calls to mind the archetype of the “madwoman in the attic” that was so prevalent in Victorian literature for women.
While all this is going on, we learn that Kanami’s mother has fallen ill, and at some length she dies. Kanami calls Motoko, but Motoko, having long since lost her sanity, barely responds.
Sometime later, Kanami’s mother returns. Kanami, who is overjoyed to see her mother, takes her inside, but daybreak soon approaches, and poor Tae starts developing telltale burns. Kanami hides her in the dark for the day, and when she comes out at night Kanami offers her oatmeal, which Tae finds that she can no longer eat. She begins to slowly starve, until one day, Kanami cuts her hand on a knife in the sink, and Tae collects some drops of blood on her hands and stares at them hungrily. She’s too ashamed to consume them, though, and rather than drink them she bursts into tears. Kanami then says that she’ll give her mother blood meals as often as she can, though she can’t promise that they’ll be enough, prompting her mother to cry some more.
Things get worse, considerably worse, when Motoko, having discovered that her son is well and truly dead and decomposed, emerges from her confinement and goes to visit Kanami. Kanami invites Motoko inside, and offers to get Motoko clean clothes (since she now smells like dead people)-and it’s at that point that Motoko notices Kanami’s mother sleeping in a back room. Kanami explains the situation, telling Motoko that her mother promised never to attack anyone else. Motoko puts the pieces together and tells Kanami that she’s happy her mother returned-but of course she’s secretly distraught that none of her own family members came back to her.
At that point, Motoko goes for a walk into the main village, now completely consumed by desire for vengeance against her father-in-law-as she walks, she repeats the mantra “damn you old man” over and over again. Obviously she’s referring to her father-in-law, but it could be symbolic of her damning the patriarchy as well, as it promised her a life as a happy housewife that’s now completely gone. We see her walking among the carnage of scenes from earlier episodes, and she accepts a rice ball from Chizuko and her friends, all while continuously muttering “damn you old man…damn you old man…” in an ominous tone. At one point, she even sells out Kanami’s mother to the villagers who are hunting vampires. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, as it’s left ambiguous whether Motoko is doing this intentionally to spite Kanami, or if she’s just so completely insane that she no longer knows what she’s doing. Given what we already know about the series, it could go either way.
In time, Motoko comes to acquire a can of lighter fluid and a lighter, and she makes her way back to her old homestead, amidst the bodies of many staked vampires, and pulls off her dress before dousing it with lighter fluid and setting fire first to her own fist, and then to her dress, reaffirming her status as a madwoman unleashed, since that archetype was so often associated with fire. And as she and everything around her burns, she starts to laugh, and utters a triumphant “I beat you, old man.”
Kanami, for the record, is one of only a small handful of survivors we see at the series’s very end.
Episode 22
The final episode!
This final episode is mostly just a continuation of things that were happening before. Sunako is placed in her suitcase, and Seishin leaves Kanemasa so the two of them can escape to safety.
This is also the episode in which Megumi gets killed, which is meaningful because she’s both the first vampire to rise up in the village AND the last one to die. She first tries to make a run for it and escape to a city, but eventually she’s cornered by a bunch of people with tractors. First she tries to reason with them, and invoke their sympathy by reminding them of who she is-but they disregard her pleas and instead knock her down and run her head over with a tractor, as she cries and screams about how she’s always hated the village and everyone in it because of how “backwards” they are. Maybe she just felt oppressed and suffocated by the patriarchy and wished to escape to a more egalitarian setting where she could be who she wanted to be?
The villagers, meanwhile, debate whether or not she’s a vampire, eventually coming to the conclusion that if she were a regular human she should be dead from HAVING HER HEAD RUN OVER BY A TRACTOR! So they stake her to death. For the record, she’s gotten off relatively easy here compared to the manga, where she was staked no fewer than FIVE TIMES! Given all the times I’ve associated stakings with rape by now…well…you can imagine.
Back to Seishin and Sunako, there’s a bit in which the angry villagers murder Seishin’s mother, as well as Mitsuo and one other woman who helps at the temple, accusing them of conspiring with Seishin to help the vampires. At some length, Seishin and Sunako get separated, and Sunako departs from her suitcase in the night to make her way to the abandoned church, which has caught fire, as the village is burning. Sunako then spends quite a lot of time calling on God to forgive her for killing all those people, and asking God why she was forced to become a monster instead of receiving any sort of protection. Quite possibly, this is an exceedingly subtle criticism of the use of religion to oppress women, as so many religious scriptures contain some sort of sexist or patriarchal instructions (or at least things that can be interpreted as sexist or patriarchal).
As Sunako weeps and begs for salvation, Tomio Ookawa comes on the scene, calling Sunako “demon girl” and telling her that she should have never been allowed to exist. Sunako cries and screams, and at one point tries to bite Tomio, but he’s stronger than her and there’s nothing she can do to extricate herself. In the end, she’s saved by the timely arrival of Seishin, who by this point has transformed into a werewolf. He attacks Tomio Ookawa with a cleaver he got from his house, killing him; and then turns to Sunako. Sunako, by this point, has accepted her fate, and tells Seishin that she’s going to die in the burning church; but Seishin has other plans, telling Sunako that there is no way Sunako could possibly have sinned, since God did nothing to prevent her from engaging in the allegedly sinful behavior in the first place. And with that, he takes Sunako away.
But now the entirety of Sotoba is burning to the ground, meaning that Toshio Ozaki’s plans to save it have come to nothing. To recap, this traditionalist rural village was invaded by vampires, headed by a female, who wanted to take it over for themselves, upending its old ways in the process. To defend their homeland, the traditional villagers resorted to destroying the vampires in ways divided along gender lines, only to find their hard work coming to nothing as one madwoman sets the village on fire, burning it to the ground.
In the end, we see Seishin driving in his car with the suitcase, which presumably carries Sunako, in the back. Other bloggers have commented on the significance of this scene, and one such blogger actually wrote quite a long article expounding upon how she does not think that this is the arrangement that Sunako really wants, but that Sunako would have been perfectly content to have died right then and there, or even actively preferred that, and Seishin forced her to leave against her will. She did not, then, go on to explain the significance of this, but if you view Sunako as trying to oppose the patriarchy, this is very significant indeed. Let’s review what Seishin’s done again: he’s become a werewolf after giving Tatsumi his blood. I’ve spoken earlier about how werewolves are manlier monsters than traditional vampires, and so we see with Seishin: he’s become manlier as a result of his transformation, since before he wouldn’t raise a hand even to protect himself, and now he’s gone and killed Tomio Ookawa to protect Sunako. Unfortunately for Sunako, this also means he’s become more likely to order her around, as opposed to simply doing what she says and sacrificing for her. And at the end of the day, he’s chosen whether or not she lives or dies for her, and stuffed her into a tiny suitcase to take her where he sees fit (with no qualification that she has any say in the matter whatsoever). Potentially, poor Sunako is now trapped in a situation where she’ll be playing second fiddle to Seishin indefinitely, reinforcing the patriarchal stereotypes she sought to overturn.
Of course, there is one small victory for Sunako in all this: she’s the vampire who masterminded the taking of Sotoba, and is also the only survivor of the incident, meaning that she could start again at any time. It’s a neat little affirmation that the monstrous women men in patriarchal society so fear will never be truly gone.
And if you stick around after the final credits roll, you get a scene of Kanami, Kaori and Akira (whom Natsuno rescued) and Natsuno’s dad, as well as Yasuyo and one or two others, boarding a bus which, in all likelihood, will take them out of Sotoba forever. That tiny handful of survivors is apparently all that remains of the town (I think some of the others got away too, including Toshio Ozaki, but it’s ambiguous how many he managed to rescue).
So, early in this episode we get a flashback to Chizuru as a housewife with her husband. Chizuru is yet another housewife who was forced by the vampires to become otherwise, and the fact that this is so common among the “Shiki” women suggests that it’s sort-of designed to dispel the sexist notion that a woman will be safest and happiest if she just finds a nice man and settles down with him. Because realistically, not every woman wants that, and even if a woman does, there’s no reason to think it will last. I’ll be getting into this a little more when we revisit Nao.
In this particular flashback, we see Chizuru cut her hand, and cry at the sight of blood. Her husband comes in and reassures her that it’s just a little cut, and she’s overreacting. See, this is ironic because she’s now a vampire who has to drink people’s blood in order to survive!
Oh, and there’s some pretty rapey undertones to Chizuru’s eventual staking too, what with the village men holding her down and driving a stake into her chest while she cries and screams and begs them to stop.
Now the shit has hit the fan, and Toshio Ozaki resumes control of the situation, gathering all the villagers together and rallying them to help him destroy the vampires. He explains to the villagers that “their blood itself is alive,” which I think is significant, because bleeding, if you look at it, is a problem that gets associated with women a lot: both men and women can bleed, but women bleed on a regular basis during menstruation or childbirth (both of which are considered either holy or demonic, depending on the culture), whereas men usually don’t bleed unless they’re severely injured.
While all this is going on with the villagers, we cut to a scene of Sunako, who wants Toshio Ozaki killed, and who regrets not killing him sooner, now that he’s become so much of a threat. We also see Yoshie, the female werewolf, rally the vampires at the same time as the villagers rally themselves. The vampires aren’t divided into defined groups, but the villagers are: we see the men take up the task of actually killing the vampires (again, using violent penetration) while the women dispose of the bodies. The villagers are clinging to rigid gender roles to bring down the vampires: the men hunt, the women clean up.
We later cut to Megumi and Masao. Masao is predictably worried about getting killed, and wants nothing to do with the conflict, instead panicking because the folks at Kanemasa failed to protect him. In an act of unusual kindness, he asks Megumi if she would like to run away with him, but of course Megumi refuses, telling him that “A puny little coward like you could never help anyone.” Again we see that Masao is so weak that even a girl is braver and more competent than he is. Essentially, as has been implied, Megumi isn’t interested in him because he’s too weak to protect her the way a “real man” could.
In other news, Ritsuko still isn’t killing Yasuyo, and Toru is getting increasingly impatient with her. He orders, nags, and begs Ritsuko to kill Yasuyo, telling her that if she doesn’t, he will. But Ritsuko still refuses.
We also have Kaori, who has now been pushed to the edge and resolves to get her revenge on Megumi. She hides out in her house with her dog Love, a flashlight, and a baseball bat. Eventually she hears someone come to the door, and, thinking it’s Megumi, she opens it, prepared to strike-only to find that it’s her father. She hesitates for about a moment before bashing him to a pulp with her bat.
Meanwhile, back in Kanemasa, Seishin is charged with protecting Sunako. Sunako talks with Seishin about his novel, asking him why the man in his novel killed his little brother, and, by extension, why Seishin killed himself. But Seishin doesn’t give her a straight answer just yet.
Episode 20
The fight against the vampires continues in this episode without a whole lot of new developments. We do discover that Atsushi Ookawa has murdered Takae Ozaki in an attempt to avenge Chizuru, and he leaves a bloody message on the wall saying “This woman will never rise up.” Because the vampires killed her without drinking her blood, she’ll never become one of them. A woman who’s come to investigate with Toshio Ozaki and Tomio Ookawa explains all this in a tearful voice, as though she’s sorry that Mrs. Ozaki will never return; but Tomio Ookawa shoots her down, insisting that it’s better to die once and get it over with. Since he’s a traditional manly man, he can’t understand the appeal of having a second life as a monster the way a woman in a patriarchal society can (since women in patriarchal societies are “othered” to begin with).
Elsewhere, Natsuno confronts Seishirou, who reveals his backstory and announces that he wishes to become a vampire but can’t.
We then cut back to Sunako and her friends, who are hiding in Kanemasa’s basement, the main house having been stormed by villagers in the previous episode. Sunako is asleep, since it’s daylight, and Tatsumi tells Seishin that Seishirou is “a human who accepted her [Sunako] as a Shiki.” Essentially, Seishirou is allowed to remain because he accepts that Sunako is a monster and “other” and doesn’t try to oppress her for it, instead allowing her to do what she wants with him.
Aaaand back to Toru and Ritsuko. Ritsuko is still not killing Yasuyo, and Toru insists that she has to kill her because she’s screwed either way-if the villagers find them they’ll kill them both. The actual line that he utters is “They’re not gonna praise you for your purity, they’re gonna stick a stake in your heart!” And that cuts right to the center of the matter here. Ritsuko is a woman who’s perfectly happy and comfortable to live in a patriarchal society-not because she’s subservient or weak or stupid, or wants to see women oppressed, but simply because she wants to make the best of her situation and doesn’t want any problems. But what Toru’s pointing out here (albeit inadvertently) is that now that she’s become so “othered” (by becoming a vampire, though a more metaphorical version inevitably happens to women in patriarchy), no amount of trying to show compassion or sympathy to others (namely, men) is going to help her-she’s doomed no matter what.
And Ritsuko isn’t looking to save everyone by refusing to kill Yasuyo. Toru, with tears in his eyes, explains that if he does anything to betray the other vampires they’ll kill his family. Ritsuko is aware of this, but rather than feed on Yasuyo to ease Toru’s burden, she still demands that he let Yasuyo go. Ritsuko isn’t working for the greater good of all-she’s not trying to heal the world with kindness. She’s just trying to help her friend. All she wants is for Toru to guarantee the safety of one person. Such is the nature of sacrifice in “Shiki”-it’s about refusing to cross lines, more than it’s about giving oneself up to the greater good. It’s not “what would you do” so much as “what wouldn’t you do.” Ritsuko doesn’t expect to accomplish much of anything by refusing to attack Yasuyo, but she refuses anyway, even as she slowly starves to death, because she just couldn’t live with herself if she killed an innocent person (see this article for more information). And at some length, she brings Toru around to her point of view, and he, reluctantly, lets Yasuyo go, explaining that this deed makes him a traitor to “[his] people.”
Meanwhile, back in Kanemasa, things are looking less than rosy for Sunako. She’s now thoroughly convinced that she’s going to die, and she reflects at some length on how much it hurts to be staked, and whether a stake would go through her with one stroke, since she still has the body and bones of a child after all this time. At some length she says, ironically, that “If [she] were a character in a novel,” she’d be saved by a handsome prince. But she doesn’t think anything like that will ever happen. She can’t live up to the fairy-tale story that little girls get fed, that they will be swept off their feet by a handsome prince and all will be well, and it’s because she’s a “monster”-but by the standards of fairy tales, of course, all women are monsters because none of them are really content to be the princess even as they’re told they must be. With that in mind, when Sunako says “I didn’t become a creature like this because I wanted to!” it almost feels like she’s asking for forgiveness for being born a woman-she had no choice over being born female, but because she was, she’s doomed to be a monster.
Episode 20.5
This episode has that “.5” at the end to signify that it’s one of two special OVA episodes that were never aired on TV but that add to the already established story. This one focuses a bit more on Nao, as well as the men who are hunting vampires in the sewers (where they’ve hidden to escape the sun). We see, once again, that there’s a division of labor, with the men going in and killing vampires while the women dispose of the bodies once they’re outside.
The episode begins with a flashback to when Nao is alive, and talking to Mr. and Mrs. Hasegawa in their café. She talks a little bit about how happy she is to be a member of the Yasumori family, and how wonderful and accepting of her they’ve been, and how she also has an adorable little boy. She then pauses to ask the Hasegawas about their family, and they let slip that their children died in an accident. I’m noticing a theme here: many unambiguously sympathetic and innocent characters in this show don’t have the perfect Japanese idea of a family (that is, parents with at least one son, and all adult daughters housewives with sons of their own), or, if they have it at the beginning, they’ve lost it by the end. The Hasegawas lost their children, so they have nobody to carry on their family line. Ritsuko has no sons or brothers (so their family has no proper heirs). Kanami Yano is unmarried and has no children, despite being seemingly as old as her housewife friend Motoko Maeda (more on this later). And Kaori, for a time at least, believes that she’s the last surviving member of her family; both her father and brother have gone away (and the former she eventually KILLS!). The idea seems to be that the traditional Japanese construct of a family, with its patriarchal views, is an illusion that can’t be maintained, or at least isn’t for everyone.
Anyway, Nao and her buddies try to escape from the vampire-hunters but get caught at the end of a narrow tunnel. All this time, Nao is haunted by the specters of her dead family, which she destroyed; and she cries and screams that she’ll never enjoy the same peace that they have found. In effect, the Yasumori family was a traditional Japanese family, and Nao was the black sheep that eventually brought it to ruin by only pretending to be a traditional housewife despite the emotional scars she still has from her past. This family, which summed up everything a good Japanese family should be (according to traditionalist beliefs), was destroyed because a single woman couldn’t completely play by their rules. By this same logic, women who aren’t interested in falling in line with patriarchal systems are a threat to the traditional and patriarchal everywhere.
Oh, and Sadafumi Tamo, who had several relatives that were killed by the vampires and their associates, stabs Nao in the leg with a poker in probably the rapiest scene yet, since after a certain point we stop being able to see where he’s stabbing, but notice only that it’s somewhere below the waist. And Nao, of course, is crying and screaming and begging him to stop….
In the end, the vampires who were hiding in the sewers are all dragged out and tied to trees or poles to burn to death in the sun. This is significant, I think, if you consider that witches were famously burned at the stake. Mr. Hasegawa, though, puts them all out of their misery by stabbing them through the chest as they scream and their faces melt and erupt into putrefying boils of blood and pus.
Episode 21
This episode contains the infamous scene in which a group of women, including Chizuko Murasako, dispose of a bunch of bodies, stopping in the middle of their work to snack on rice balls. Before they can get to that, though, we see Chizuko handily hammer a stake into a still-moving vampire the men have already bundled up for her. It’s at this point that we see that although Chizuko is in many respects a traditionally feminine woman, she isn’t afraid to step outside the traditional gender lines and do a bit of staking of her own, if she sees fit. Indeed, she mentions that the reason why she’s so strong and able to haul bodies around is because she spent so much time helping her husband and father-in-law move heavy bags of rice in the shop.
This becomes significant in a scene much later on, when Masao re-emerges looking for some place to hide. He laments his inability to save Megumi, though of course it’s obvious to everyone else that he was too weak and fragile to stand a chance of doing such a thing. Chizuko, meanwhile, is hiding in her home, changing out of her bloody clothes, when Masao comes to call, and he begs her, in the weepiest and most pathetic voice I’ve ever heard from Todd Haberkorn anywhere, to let him inside, promising that “I’d never hurt you. Ever.” Of course, Chizuko doesn’t buy this, but at length she does invite him inside-where she’s waiting to greet him with a lead pipe (and presumably a stake as well). So, Masao is so very weak and effeminate and monstrous that he’s essentially forced Chizuko into a man’s role, since it’s supposed to be the men’s job to stake the vampires. It’s the men who swing big stakes around and violently penetrate the vampires. Masao, though, gets penetrated violently by a woman. For the record, this is a bit of a change from the manga scene, in which Chizuko is more visibly protecting her daughter, Chika, from Masao by staking him, thus making her into a mama bear and making her seem more feminine (though the manga also depicts the staking, which in the anime happens off-screen). We still get a bit of that here, of course, since she’s essentially trying to get vengeance on the creatures who killed her son.
We also get a bit more from the vampires’ camp. Seishin is still talking to Sunako, who’s feeling a full measure of regret for dragging Seishin into this; but Seishin comforts her by saying that “I understand myself much better because of our friendship,” and that he has been “hiding [his] true self” until he met her. Essentially, he had always known he was monstrous, but he only accepted that because he knew Sunako.
We cut to Yoshie, who, along with some other female vampires, is biting villagers in order to control them. Once again we see women trying to control men by putting a spell on them, since adopting the man’s more straightforward and forceful approach wouldn’t work for them. However, Yoshie soon meets her end when Seishirou, who’s been bitten and hypnotized by Natsuno, blows her brains out.
Yasuyo, meanwhile, has escaped her prison and is now running for the village dressed in only her underwear, being chased by Seishirou’s dogs. She somehow manages to escape without getting killed, and she runs back to the village, where she finds Mrs. Ookawa and Toshio Ozaki and lets slip that the vampires’ main hideout is in Yamairi. So now the villagers know where to concentrate their final offensive.
Back in Kanemasa, Tatsumi devises a way for Sunako to escape: by hiding in a suitcase that protects her from the sun. Poor Sunako-if she wants to stay alive she’s going to have to be confined even further than she has already been before. Seishin asks Tatsumi why, since Tatsumi is so much more physically powerful than Sunako, he serves her rather than the other way around, to which Tatsumi replies that he simply respects Sunako because no matter how much things change or are destroyed, she “confronts the collapse and fights against it.”
Episode 21.5
I love this episode, I really do. This one’s ALL ABOUT the ladies!
So, this episode essentially follows the lives and families of two women: Kanami Yano and (to a greater extent) Motoko Maeda. These two have appeared before, mostly in very minor roles; but here the two of them, and Motoko in particular, take center stage.
Kanami owns the restaurant Chigusa, which is just outside of Sotoba, along with her mother Tae; Motoko works there part time; and the various village women (including Hiroko Shimizu and Sachiko Tanaka) stop in repeatedly to eat and chat. Kanami and Motoko are set up as yet another tomboy/girly girl duo: Kanami lives alone except for her mother and has no man in her life (near as we can tell), she owns a restaurant (owning anything but a home and children is essentially considered “masculine” in patriarchal contexts), and she mostly wears pants. Motoko, by contrast, is a housewife with two children who is always shown wearing dresses (and often an apron).
Like every housewife we meet at the start of the series, Motoko appears to be happy, but there is one qualifier: she’s a bit of a worrier. In the first scene we see her in for this episode, she’s telling her son and daughter, who are in elementary school, that they shouldn’t play near the national road lest they get run over. Hiroko and Sachiko try to get her to calm down by reassuring her that the cars in the village don’t drive that fast, and that Motoko’s children will listen to her if she tells them to be safe; but Motoko worries nonetheless.
Motoko also doesn’t have the best relationship with her family. She lives with her husband, children, and her husband’s mother and father. Her mother-in-law bosses her around, and despite the fact that she chides Motoko for getting scared all the time and worrying too much, she herself acts no less like a hysterical woman: when her husband starts exhibiting symptoms of anemia she accepts his pronouncement that he’s fine on blind faith, and when Toshio Ozaki stops to diagnose his death, she starts yelling and screaming at him in a way that suggests that she has no clue what a doctor DOES, let alone how medicine or diseases work (she refuses to allow her husband to be autopsied, and immediately asks to pay money to get a death certificate, even though Toshio Ozaki hasn’t even made a formal diagnosis). Toshio Ozaki also gets to display his compassionate side when he attempts to shield Motoko from her mother-in-law’s verbal and physical abuse (if a hysterical woman like herself can’t be strong, manly Toshio Ozaki will be strong for her). Motoko later extricates herself and tells her children that she doesn’t want them to go in their grandfather’s room for fear of their getting sick (though she doesn’t say as much to them).
And so it begins. One by one, Motoko’s family members die-first her husband dies, and she brings Kanami over for support, terrified of facing her mother-in-law. They eventually get Toshio Ozaki to come help. But later Motoko’s young daughter, Shihori, falls ill. This time, Motoko is so desperate for help that she runs out of the house with her daughter on her back and races all the way to the Ozaki clinic-only to find that it’s closed, Toshio Ozaki having locked the clinic’s doors to experiment on poor Kyoko in peace. In other words, he’s neglecting a mother who desperately needs his services in order to conduct the manly discipline of science and torture a woman with symbolic rape.
It’s then that Motoko encounters Yoshie, who’s wearing ordinary street clothes and has her hair down, making her look very different indeed from the way she normally looks. She suggests that Motoko visit the Ebuchi Clinic instead, and Motoko runs across the national road to get there-only to find that it’ll be closed until sundown (since Ebuchi is a vampire). By this point she’s so desperate for help, any help, that she starts banging on the doors with her head until blood trickles down her face. It’s then that her mother-in-law catches up with her, and tells her to take her daughter home since she doesn’t even have a fever.
Of course, the next day Shihori is dead and Motoko’s mother-in-law has fallen ill. Motoko, in a fit of rage, begins kicking and screaming at her mother-in-law. At her mother-in-law’s funeral, Motoko talks to some village women who suggest that her father-in-law might have risen from the dead and come to take his family to the other side.
Later, Motoko’s son Shigeki approaches her with a bite mark on his leg. What happens next is interesting. Motoko takes her son, locks both of them in the bathroom together, and holds him close, telling him that “No matter what happens Mommy will protect you.” Thus she sets up a scene which we first saw in an earlier episode, of Motoko huddled in her bathtub with her son’s decomposing body (whether he died of vampire attacks or natural causes is never made clear), looking completely mad. She’s become a madwoman in a confined space, surrounded by death and decay, which calls to mind the archetype of the “madwoman in the attic” that was so prevalent in Victorian literature for women.
While all this is going on, we learn that Kanami’s mother has fallen ill, and at some length she dies. Kanami calls Motoko, but Motoko, having long since lost her sanity, barely responds.
Sometime later, Kanami’s mother returns. Kanami, who is overjoyed to see her mother, takes her inside, but daybreak soon approaches, and poor Tae starts developing telltale burns. Kanami hides her in the dark for the day, and when she comes out at night Kanami offers her oatmeal, which Tae finds that she can no longer eat. She begins to slowly starve, until one day, Kanami cuts her hand on a knife in the sink, and Tae collects some drops of blood on her hands and stares at them hungrily. She’s too ashamed to consume them, though, and rather than drink them she bursts into tears. Kanami then says that she’ll give her mother blood meals as often as she can, though she can’t promise that they’ll be enough, prompting her mother to cry some more.
Things get worse, considerably worse, when Motoko, having discovered that her son is well and truly dead and decomposed, emerges from her confinement and goes to visit Kanami. Kanami invites Motoko inside, and offers to get Motoko clean clothes (since she now smells like dead people)-and it’s at that point that Motoko notices Kanami’s mother sleeping in a back room. Kanami explains the situation, telling Motoko that her mother promised never to attack anyone else. Motoko puts the pieces together and tells Kanami that she’s happy her mother returned-but of course she’s secretly distraught that none of her own family members came back to her.
At that point, Motoko goes for a walk into the main village, now completely consumed by desire for vengeance against her father-in-law-as she walks, she repeats the mantra “damn you old man” over and over again. Obviously she’s referring to her father-in-law, but it could be symbolic of her damning the patriarchy as well, as it promised her a life as a happy housewife that’s now completely gone. We see her walking among the carnage of scenes from earlier episodes, and she accepts a rice ball from Chizuko and her friends, all while continuously muttering “damn you old man…damn you old man…” in an ominous tone. At one point, she even sells out Kanami’s mother to the villagers who are hunting vampires. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, as it’s left ambiguous whether Motoko is doing this intentionally to spite Kanami, or if she’s just so completely insane that she no longer knows what she’s doing. Given what we already know about the series, it could go either way.
In time, Motoko comes to acquire a can of lighter fluid and a lighter, and she makes her way back to her old homestead, amidst the bodies of many staked vampires, and pulls off her dress before dousing it with lighter fluid and setting fire first to her own fist, and then to her dress, reaffirming her status as a madwoman unleashed, since that archetype was so often associated with fire. And as she and everything around her burns, she starts to laugh, and utters a triumphant “I beat you, old man.”
Kanami, for the record, is one of only a small handful of survivors we see at the series’s very end.
Episode 22
The final episode!
This final episode is mostly just a continuation of things that were happening before. Sunako is placed in her suitcase, and Seishin leaves Kanemasa so the two of them can escape to safety.
This is also the episode in which Megumi gets killed, which is meaningful because she’s both the first vampire to rise up in the village AND the last one to die. She first tries to make a run for it and escape to a city, but eventually she’s cornered by a bunch of people with tractors. First she tries to reason with them, and invoke their sympathy by reminding them of who she is-but they disregard her pleas and instead knock her down and run her head over with a tractor, as she cries and screams about how she’s always hated the village and everyone in it because of how “backwards” they are. Maybe she just felt oppressed and suffocated by the patriarchy and wished to escape to a more egalitarian setting where she could be who she wanted to be?
The villagers, meanwhile, debate whether or not she’s a vampire, eventually coming to the conclusion that if she were a regular human she should be dead from HAVING HER HEAD RUN OVER BY A TRACTOR! So they stake her to death. For the record, she’s gotten off relatively easy here compared to the manga, where she was staked no fewer than FIVE TIMES! Given all the times I’ve associated stakings with rape by now…well…you can imagine.
Back to Seishin and Sunako, there’s a bit in which the angry villagers murder Seishin’s mother, as well as Mitsuo and one other woman who helps at the temple, accusing them of conspiring with Seishin to help the vampires. At some length, Seishin and Sunako get separated, and Sunako departs from her suitcase in the night to make her way to the abandoned church, which has caught fire, as the village is burning. Sunako then spends quite a lot of time calling on God to forgive her for killing all those people, and asking God why she was forced to become a monster instead of receiving any sort of protection. Quite possibly, this is an exceedingly subtle criticism of the use of religion to oppress women, as so many religious scriptures contain some sort of sexist or patriarchal instructions (or at least things that can be interpreted as sexist or patriarchal).
As Sunako weeps and begs for salvation, Tomio Ookawa comes on the scene, calling Sunako “demon girl” and telling her that she should have never been allowed to exist. Sunako cries and screams, and at one point tries to bite Tomio, but he’s stronger than her and there’s nothing she can do to extricate herself. In the end, she’s saved by the timely arrival of Seishin, who by this point has transformed into a werewolf. He attacks Tomio Ookawa with a cleaver he got from his house, killing him; and then turns to Sunako. Sunako, by this point, has accepted her fate, and tells Seishin that she’s going to die in the burning church; but Seishin has other plans, telling Sunako that there is no way Sunako could possibly have sinned, since God did nothing to prevent her from engaging in the allegedly sinful behavior in the first place. And with that, he takes Sunako away.
But now the entirety of Sotoba is burning to the ground, meaning that Toshio Ozaki’s plans to save it have come to nothing. To recap, this traditionalist rural village was invaded by vampires, headed by a female, who wanted to take it over for themselves, upending its old ways in the process. To defend their homeland, the traditional villagers resorted to destroying the vampires in ways divided along gender lines, only to find their hard work coming to nothing as one madwoman sets the village on fire, burning it to the ground.
In the end, we see Seishin driving in his car with the suitcase, which presumably carries Sunako, in the back. Other bloggers have commented on the significance of this scene, and one such blogger actually wrote quite a long article expounding upon how she does not think that this is the arrangement that Sunako really wants, but that Sunako would have been perfectly content to have died right then and there, or even actively preferred that, and Seishin forced her to leave against her will. She did not, then, go on to explain the significance of this, but if you view Sunako as trying to oppose the patriarchy, this is very significant indeed. Let’s review what Seishin’s done again: he’s become a werewolf after giving Tatsumi his blood. I’ve spoken earlier about how werewolves are manlier monsters than traditional vampires, and so we see with Seishin: he’s become manlier as a result of his transformation, since before he wouldn’t raise a hand even to protect himself, and now he’s gone and killed Tomio Ookawa to protect Sunako. Unfortunately for Sunako, this also means he’s become more likely to order her around, as opposed to simply doing what she says and sacrificing for her. And at the end of the day, he’s chosen whether or not she lives or dies for her, and stuffed her into a tiny suitcase to take her where he sees fit (with no qualification that she has any say in the matter whatsoever). Potentially, poor Sunako is now trapped in a situation where she’ll be playing second fiddle to Seishin indefinitely, reinforcing the patriarchal stereotypes she sought to overturn.
Of course, there is one small victory for Sunako in all this: she’s the vampire who masterminded the taking of Sotoba, and is also the only survivor of the incident, meaning that she could start again at any time. It’s a neat little affirmation that the monstrous women men in patriarchal society so fear will never be truly gone.
And if you stick around after the final credits roll, you get a scene of Kanami, Kaori and Akira (whom Natsuno rescued) and Natsuno’s dad, as well as Yasuyo and one or two others, boarding a bus which, in all likelihood, will take them out of Sotoba forever. That tiny handful of survivors is apparently all that remains of the town (I think some of the others got away too, including Toshio Ozaki, but it’s ambiguous how many he managed to rescue).