The only good thing about Mushishi going away is the wondrous feeling of seeing it come back. What to call this episode of Mushishi Zoku Shou?  Is it Episode 1 of the second season, or is it Episode 11- or Episode 13?  The official website seems to have settled on […] Read more

“Road of Thorns” I knew “Road of Thorns” was going to pack quite the emotional punch, but the anime adaptation certainly didn’t disappoint. It’s easy to see why Nagahama-sensei had originally planned to end the first season of “Zoku Shou” with this story, because there’s not much you could follow […] Read more

I don’t know what the future holds for Mushishi, but I know this – if you love great anime, you should be damn grateful that it exists. Thinking back on this episode, the only word that seems to fit is “sublime”.  It was every bit as perfect as last week’s […] Read more

I don’t know what I can add to an episode like that, really.   That’s what anime perfection looks like. I would strongly advise aspiring anime directors to avoid watching this week’s Mushishi.  I think the instinctive reaction would be, “What’s the point after someone has already done that?”  In an […] Read more

There’s an even more elemental quality than usual to Mushishi lately. If you’ve been an anime fan long enough to remember the first go-around for Mushishi, no one could blame you for feeling a little bit uneasy about the current state of affairs with the series.  The final six episodes […] Read more

If there was such a thing as an archetypal Mushishi episode, that might just have been it. A week away from Mushishi seems like forever, even after having waited eight years for its return.  Its return this week is a classic episode in every sense of the word, one that […] Read more

I’ll never o-hanami the same way again. One of the dirty little secrets about Mushishi is that most of the time, it’s not really about Mushi but about people.  Each story is like a self-contained parable about the vagaries of human nature – our hopes and dreams, our capacity for […] Read more

The symbolism is thick with this one. Mushishi is fully back in the swing of things, and that means opening up the series to the darker side of existence now that the viewers have been gently reeled back in with three stories that run more towards the wistful and contemplative.  […] Read more

If there’s such a thing as a quintessential Mushishi episode, that might have been it. Mushishi is a series that has many sides to it, and they reveal themselves only if you’re patient and watch it for an extended period.  It’s not the sort of show that flashes its entire […] Read more