Shiki
(24 + 2 episode series)
This series was both good and somewhat disappointing. It was good in that it had an interesting story and somewhat interesting characters which kept me watching, but disappointing in how the majority of those characters reacted to what went on around them, as well as in how the series ultimately ended.
This story is a little like
Higurashi in that it takes place in a small, geographically isolated village, and that a lot of bad things happen to good people. In this case, ironically enough (on purpose, no doubt), Sotoba is a quiet little village that is famous for having a certain type of tree that gets used a lot to make grave markers and coffins. Also like
Higurashi, rather than taking place in modern day, it takes place at some point in the past, in this case the 1990's. That's about where the similarities end, though, aside from having some little children which turn out to be evil because of what happens to them. There are no time-loops or take-backs, though, just a lot of dead people.
This series has something of an ensemble cast, but focuses mainly on three characters: Natsuno, a high school boy who's also a prick, Dr. Ozaki, dean of the small hospital in Sotoba, and his friend since childhood, Seishin, a local junior priest who also writes novels on the side. The story starts soon after an old traditional mansion on one of the local hills was torn down and replaced with a western-style castle. No, really, a castle.
Nothing forbidding about this at all.
It was built by a family of rich outsiders, who also move in during the middle of the night, rather rudely awakening some people so they can ask directions. Still, all most people complain about is how the castle doesn't really fit in with the rest of the village, and how the new people pretty much keep to themselves and otherwise act so strangely (kind of reminded me of home, actually).
Shortly before their arrival, there had been a number of strange deaths which left an isolated part of the village, which is spread out over a valley, completely vacant. Then, soon after they arrived, the local moe blob who thinks she's destined for greater things goes missing after approaching the castle and is found to be in a strange lethargic state. Soon afterwards, she dies. While I was hoping this would be a permanent death and the story would be done with her, this series is actually about vampires, as you might have guessed what with the castle and all that. It seems this "family" of vampires, the Kirishikis, has decided that Sotoba would make the perfect place make a safe haven for their kind, and soon set about feeding upon the locals. Unlike most vampire movies, it takes several feedings to kill a victim, who even then might not necessarily reawaken as a vampire. Pretty much all the other movie myths are shown to be right, though, and as an added bonus these vampires are not like the fangirl fap material that Anne Rice novels and the
Twilight movies have made them into more recently.
So initially, no one knows what is going on, except of course that an unusual number of people seem to be getting sick and dying. Dr. Ozaki initially thinks he has some kind of epidemic on his hands, and gets pretty stressed out trying to figure out what it is and how to combat it all while trying to keep it a secret so people don’t panic and possibly spread it further. To complicate matters, the people who are sick insist they are simply fighting off a summer cold and refuse to be treated. This is because while a single feeding isn't enough to turn someone into a vampire, just being bitten means they can be hypnotized by the vampires to do and say whatever they wish. This actually made for a pretty gripping story, even though the audience is fully aware of what's going on even as the characters struggle against what they think is an epidemic of some kind. It actually takes a while for the bites to be seen, and even then these are taken to be insect bites and therefore a possible vector for a disease.
In the meantime, Natsuno has been getting the feeling that the moe blob who liked to dress like a slut and had a creepy stalker crush on him, is still stalking him from the bushes outside of his window. He reacts by hanging out at basically his only friend's house, sleeping over there at night to avoid feeling like he's being watched, and having strange dreams. Unfortunately for him, his stalker follows him and takes her frustration out on his friend, who soon dies. I'd feel sorry for him and all, but he is an asshole and I never took a liking to him. I'm not sure if the audience was supposed to find him all "stoic" and therefore admirable, but I just thought he was a jerk. However, he is the first to figure out what's going on, since he basically witnesses his stalker come into the room and feed on his friend, though at first he thinks this is nothing but a dream. It also kind of comes back on him, too, because his family is from the city, so while Natsuno figures out what is happening and his best friend comes back to feed on him, his father undoes everything he does to try to protect himself.
While Natsuno is feeling watched, Seishin is likewise being stalked, but this time by a little girl who follows him out to his secret hideout in the woods, a small church. He at first thinks she's just a strange little girl, but she keeps dropping hints that she isn't quite normal and is actually much older than she says she is. She's also a fangirl for him, and has totally read all of his books.
Isn't she just the cutest little killer you ever saw?
While I think Seishin had an inkling (and who wouldn’t with eyes like that), he only really accepts it when Dr. Ozaki also starts to figure things out and asks his old friend to help him keep watch on a patient overnight, because he's convinced she's being fed upon. This is when both of them see a local woman who they both knew to be dead, hovering outside of the second story window of the patient's room, asking to be let in so she can feed. The two of them naturally resolve to save this woman, but the next night the vampires conduct an overt attack on the clinic, which unfortunately only Dr. Ozaki and Seishin are around to witness. They all attack the patient and kill her, but leave the doctor and the junior priest for now, basically telling them to back off or the same will happen to them. And this is where the two characters react differently. Seishin is a pacifist, so he elects to basically do nothing, and is disgusted at Ozaki for suggesting that they capture one of the vampires so he can conduct tests on them.
And really, this is where the show tries to get all moralistic and argue something that really doesn't make much sense to me. Basically, it tries to humanize the vampires by having them argue that they didn't exactly ask to be vampires, which is a valid point, but they then go on to argue that since they have to feed to stay alive, humans are no different than animals to them. This is not a valid argument, even though it's one that PETA tries to argue all the time. The difference is that humans are sentient beings, and animals are not. The vampires also refuse to seek any alternative solution which wouldn't require killing human beings for them to feed. This makes them a threat, and frankly I don't have much sympathy for them, despite the show's best attempts to play up the tragedy of the vampires. It's true that some of them met tragic ends, and this is especially the case for the vampires who refuse to feed on anyone. But where I lose sympathy is when they try to use this tragedy as an excuse to kill others, who either stay dead, or are reborn into the same living hell.
Since both Natsuno and Dr. Ozaki have determined that they will try to fight the vampires, the vampires have decided to kill or otherwise punish the two of them. Natsuno is the most proactive and is actually recruiting some of the other students who agree with him, so they take him out first. Just to drive this home, they send his friend to do it, and while he initially doesn't seem like he can go through with it, despite threats from the other vampires against his family, he does go through with it. Luckily for Natsuno, he doesn't either die or turn into a normal vampire. Instead, he turns into a werewolf, though here a werewolf is basically what Blade is in that franchise – he has none of the weaknesses of the other vampires, and all of their strengths, or at least he would if he fed on humans. The Kirishikis also have a couple of werewolves in their employ, who basically have been doing all of the dirty work for them, so that plays out somewhat interestingly.
When it came to Dr. Ozaki, however, they decided to punish him by feeding on his wife. This was a rather stupid move on their part, because as it turns out, Dr. Ozaki is despicably pragmatic, so his reaction is to let them kill his wife, so he can then watch to see if she rises, and then conducts a series of experiments on her in order to figure out how to kill the vampires. So basically he tortures his own wife to death. And while the cold, calculating part of myself kind of agrees with what he did, I also agree with his friend Seishin, who was just disgusted at what he had done, and how unapologetic he was about it. But while Ozaki now fully knows what he's up against, he then goes on to do nothing. While he had all of this evidence he could have sent to the outside world while that was still possible, he didn't, so when he was finally bitten by one of the Kirishikis, he ends up destroying most of this evidence under her hypnotic control.
Really, things only came together at a point when I was just about to give up on this series out of disgust. And while the bad guys winning doesn't necessarily turn me off to a show by itself, in this case I was getting fed up because no one who knew what was going on was really doing anything about it. It was getting to a point that I felt that the people of this village deserved what was happening to them since they refused to do anything about it. Hell, Seishin actually goes to live with the Kirishikis, which is supposed to be him "accepting" them for what they were.
Thankfully, things finally happened. As it turned out, Natsuno had planned on this happening along with Dr. Ozaki, who manages to self-treat himself with a blood transfusion so he can free himself from the hypnosis he's under. He then fools his attacker into thinking he's still under her control, and convinces her into checking out a festival the village is throwing that night at the local temple. As it turns out, the shrine actually weakens her, and Ozaki uses this to out her in front of what's left of the village, who then resolve to kill all of the vampires in order to defend themselves. The odd thing here is that the doctor insists that they do this secretly, without involving the outside world. And this is where a lot more tragedy plays out.
While the series really wants the audience to feel for the vampires, with most of them I really can't, as I explained earlier. So really the only tragedy I feel comes from those who were recently turned into vampires and refuse to feed, but are killed along with the others anyway. There are also a number of people who were killed who didn't have to be, because some of the villagers get too overzealous and either didn't pay attention to Dr. Ozaki's explanation that people who were bitten don't turn into vampires unless they die and therefore kill anyone who is bitten by vampires as they attack them, or argue that the bitten are collaborators since they are acting under the direction of the vampires and therefore should be killed anyway, even though they are nothing more than victims. As the series is winding down, all the temple people end up being murdered as collaborators as well, because Seishin, who was a collaborator, hid in another part of the temple grounds and they knew nothing about it. So really, tragic all around, unlike all the vampires who convinced themselves that their friends and family along with every other living human being were all cattle and it was totally cool for them to kill them as such, only to have some of these "cattle" visit it back upon them now.
For me, the disappointing part comes from how the series ends, so if you don't want to be spoiled any more than what this review has already given away, just skip the next paragraph.
Basically, the entire village is burnt to the ground, making the entire ordeal the villagers have gone through in order to wipe out the vampires to protect their village is all for nothing. While the outside world naturally gets brought into the area to put the fire out, the fire did succeed at destroying all evidence of the slaughter the villagers were carrying out, it also destroyed all the evidence Dr. Ozaki collected and any evidence they might have which the outside world might actually find useful, considering that vampires exist and all. Then there's the way the pre-teen vampire fangirl and the recently converted Seishin manage to escape during all the confusion with the fire. And that’s how the series ends. Hell of a note, isn't it?
When it comes to the characters, it's really a mixed bag. As I said, it's an ensemble, so there are a lot of characters the series follows. I find that this actually works somewhat against the series as it becomes difficult to keep all of them straight, let alone to remember all of their names. There are also some characters who only seem to exist so we can hate them and actually want them to die horrible deaths, which they do, twice. For me, though, the most interesting dynamic is in the character of Dr. Ozaki, because while he's more or less a good guy, he does some pretty horrible things, and to his own wife to boot. And while both Ozaki and Seishin have an interesting background which explains why each is the way they are as far as how others have expectations of them which lock them into lives neither of them wants, Seishin is a coward and frankly I found myself wishing bad things would happen to him.
Overall, I'd say that I did like this series, though. It was refreshing to see something with vampires that actually depicted them as monsters instead of as love interests for once. So while there were still aspects of the show I didn't like, I'd still recommend this one to others, even though it isn't exactly among my favorites. 7/10.
