#48: Mononoke (2007)

Director: Kenji Nakamura

Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka; Ikuko Takahashi; Manabu Ishikawa; Michiko Yokote

Voice Cast: Takahiro Sakurai as the Medicine Seller, and various others

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Synopsis: A series of different stories, mostly set in Edo period Japan ], following a mysterious, nameless Medicine Seller. Found wherever there is a mononoke - when a supernatural spirit (a ayakashi) is corrupted by the worst of humanity and starts to interact with the human world in violent ways - he can only be able to exorcise them with his magical sword when he finds out their shape (form), truth (truth) and reasoning (reason in the English subtitles).

A series I had always wanted to see, Mononoke was actually a spin-off from a 2006 horror anthology series Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales. Both came from the Noitamina bloc, a syndicated time space on Fuji Television which has started to broadcast more mainstream anime, or to be more technically honest anime that will appeal to stereotypical otaku more, but has always been a place syinominous with experimental animated programming and shows which strayed away from the stereotypes of modern anime. It is where Eden of the East (2009) came from or, for the perfect example, Masaaki Yuasa's The Tatami Galaxy (2010) which shows how these shows, original tales or adaptations, are idiosyncratic both in look and the storytelling they have. Ayakashi was a series of three stories told over multiple episodes. Two were adaptations, of folklore and a play, whilst the third was an original story by Mononoke director Kenji Nakamura with a co-writer for the spin-off series Michiko Yokote, the original tale introducing the world that first introduced the world to the Medicine Seller, a figure in his own series the exact definition of what Wikipedia calls an "Occult Detective" story, a sub genre where figures exist to investigate supernatural and paranormal mysteries.  

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The Occult Detective genre is more common than I once thought - John Constantine of DC Comics one of the most well known characters from the sub-genre, but it's a trope that especially thrives in anime and manga if you step back and see how much it's been used. Just in anime, there are works that I've seen (The Garden of Sinners (2007-2013)), to those I've yet to see (Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective (1998)). Even anime with different genre tropes brush up with this subgenre - like Chrono Crusade (2003-4) and the original 2001-2 version of Hellsing - because their set ups follow organisations that deal with strange cases even if they're more likely to use firearms than detective skills to deal the mysterious involved. All of them usually have enigmatic figures, male or female, in the centre for which everything paranormal circles around them, be they on their own and with a team behind them. It's a great trope to use as, if the character has a drama, it can be built upon from episodic tales beforehand until they fully take centre stage. If they are like in Mononoke, with the Medicine Seller an aloof and even sarcastic figure between the mortal and supernatural world, then the characters and tales that they encounter if done well are engaging by themselves but with a constant onlooker between them that can drive the narratives to their ends.

The series, from the first (two episode) tale Zashiki-warashi, immediately stands out as a beautiful production. The tale's pretty obvious in which a pregnant young woman on the run stays in a brothel with a sinister past, but the way Mononoke presents it is entirely unique. It's an exceptional looking show which appears to have been made with cut outs or even with paper used as animation cels, making the fact (as behind the scenes footage on its US DVD shows) that it's a computer animated production which layered this two dimensional look on top of computer drawn sketch lines a perfect marriage between the two styles. It argues, if used as a lecture tool, the balance between the old hand drawn era and the new digitised era perfectly, having aged without fault from 2007, and that some of the best anime of the 2000s onward made a conscious decision to marry the two sides or embrace the expressionistic. The use of colour as well is also significant in how bright and vivid a show with such morbid subject matter is, something that was lost in Western appropriation of Japanese "J-Horror" a decade back. Even with stories which had intentionally dank, dark  looks, the visual and colour palette significant with a lot of these stories in terms of aesthetic detail when with the absence of colour, used to signify details carefully.

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The stories tread on well worn tropes but the unconventional look through the stories, alongside the time given to them over two to three episodes, gives them new personality here. The tone for Mononoke as a result, even with realistic character designs that are rarely distorted, is openly symbolic and surreal both for style and to tackle exceptionally grim subject matter, where the titular beings known as Zashiki-warashi in the first story are connected to unborn children, symbolic imagery blatant in meaning like red ribbon but allowing material that would be gristly to actually depict to be show in a heightened, meaningful manner. Sometimes it's useful for the limitations of a TV anime production whilst presenting an utterly artistic flair, such as the final arc of the series replacing moving crowds of bystanders with mannequins in costume.

A story like Umibōzu, in which there are a group of people on a boat in the midst of a haunted area of the sea, shows how all the stories are effectively chamber pieces, supernatural detective stories where the Medicine Seller is the judge of mortal sins as he has to figure out the cause of the mononoke to cleanse them away, the auditor who usually extracts the truth from all the characters with him in each particular story. Rather than laborious plot twists, its closure to peeling away the layers of an onion and using the stories to depict human fallacies, Umibōzu particularly poignant for this as its about guilt, the masks people in any stature wear and how cleansing it actually transforms a person for the better. This could also alienate the viewers in place expecting actual monsters, the next story Noppera-bō about a woman who might've murdered her husband and his family becoming an existential drama all within her own head, but constantly in these tales they are using conventional plot structure to tackle human drama through these folk creatures. That most folklore is naturally based on human behaviour and the acts we commit, than it feels more sincere to depict them as such than the (usual) Western model of such creatures being mere monsters outside our species.

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Also as a result of this, openly existential and psychological tales using the wild and wonderful yōkai of Japanese folklore, the series openly embraces the strange even if it's by means of rewriting said creatures of Japanese culture for new meanings for the stories too. One thing that can never be denied is that the penchant for the strange in Japanese storytelling is embraced and is not just a "cute" thing for non-Japanese outsiders to be patronising about, but idiosyncratic creativity where the combination of the country's rich folk heritage and idiosyncratic creativity gives carte blanche for undead fish musicians and faceless mask wearing entities to wandering in story arch without needing to explain their existences to the viewers. One of my favourite stories, Nue, is openly weirder than the others, a literal chamber piece involving two dead bodies, four people including the Medicine Seller and a mystery to solve...only that its surrounded by an incense smelling competition between three of the individuals where, for one game, the answers have to be named after chapters of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji (1021). Alongside writing the arc Umibōzu, naturally the oddest arc of the series, which includes visual clues that on future watches will immediately show the story showing its hand early, comes from one of my favourite anime screenwriters Chiaki J. Konaka who has made a career of this type of distinct writing. Both loved and notorious for his existential and abstract plotting, his goes from fan favourite Serial Experiments Lain (1998) to frustrating viewers of the second season of The Big 0 (1999-2003), a legitimate candidate for an auteur screenwriter in anime who just happens to be in a production like Mononoke where the scripts by all the screenwriters involved are all strong too.

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The only issue with Mononoke is that it could've been longer. A risky proposition as the future stories might've dropped in quality, but like the best of anime series, unless they have full conclusions with finite endings, they always leave you wanting more. Mononoke offers a tantalising conclusion by jumping forward abruptly in time to the 1920s, the story Bakeneko about a group of people trapped on an underground train who may have all been responsible for a death of a young female journalist. I actually find it to be the best of all the story arcs in the series for how far more bold in style it is even against the others, with moments of legitimately gruesome horror by way of expressionistic imagery and the nihilistic tone it has for three quarters of its length. It's a great way to have ended the series but with the obvious connotations, with the Medicine Seller ageless on the train, it does leave one gasping for more episodes that will never be about the character existing in modern day Japan, standing out in his appearance but still have a cool, humorous air to him dealing with mononoke still.

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