I “Get” Shiki Now.
What I needed to understand about this show was the contrast it creates: living dead more alive, emotionally, than the living, and through their existence, living who are more dead, emotionally, than any walking corpse.
I’ll leave the rest under spoiler tag. I have just finished watching ep. 14.
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This was expected from the episode preview but, as Dr. Ozaki (Toshio)’s world falls apart around him, he is dead to the world, at his absolute mental and physical limits from the stress of secretly maintaining the body of his wife, who has become a victim of the Shiki.
By the end of the episode, she is regenerating, and he films her entire progression to one of the active, conscious, and frightened living dead.
Frightened for good reason.
Toshio, his eyes deader than any corpse, experiments on his deceased but aware and terrified wife’s body, attempting all manner of means to knock her out cold (all failing), how to injure her (but scalpel cuts even to the femoral artery quickly heal), her visceral, hard-wired fear of religious objects (so that part actually proves true huh…), and finally…
…her vulnerability to a stake in the chest.
When Seishin the priest arrives at his friend’s house and is told to come to the proper room, he arrives to find the room itself filled with blood spatter, including on Toshio’s face. He turns to Seishin, completely devoid of emotion, and tells Seishin he has come at a good time; Seishin can help him clean up.
The staking scene is done through the eyes of the camera recording the event, in black and white, with Toshio’s body blocking the view of the chest area itself… limiting the gore, but well, it lets you focus on the girl’s face as she writhes in absolute agony, trying to yell out through the tape Toshio put over her mouth to muffle her pleas.
This is cold, cold stuff. It is disturbing. As horror goes, it’s pretty awesome.
The point being, Dr. Ozaki (Toshio) has been turned by events, step by step, into a stone cold man whose only emotion is fakery intended to ease the minds of his nurses and keep buying him time. Even this nearly broke him in the end; he was at the “one more night and then I give up,” but of course, drama demands it play out.
I’d seen various ways for the village to be saved from destruction brought up, and written out, so I really don’t know if the humans have any “chance” here, but Toshio’s descent into a very black darkness is quite a statement on humanity – and how these living dead, their dark sides unleashed, are considerably more “alive” in an emotional sense.
Irony all around, both from the God of this work of fiction, and from the author, I think.
About J Sensei
Blogger, writer, linguist, former Japanese> English translator, rusty in French, experienced in Japanese, fluent English native. Writing for Technorati.com and various blogs. Skype: jeremiah.bourque (messages always welcome). E-mail:
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