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The Space between Worlds: Mushishi and Japanese Folklore

Adapted from Urushibara Yuki's manga, Mushishi presents a world of wondrous strangeness and allure. Here, life in its purest form courses beneath the Earth's surface, seeping into the soil and hanging in the air. Spirits of the dead rub shoulders with the living as mysterious creatures hibernate in mountain hollows and dwell beneath the surfaces of stagnant swamps. Like most stories of the fantastic, however, this world isn't as distant as it first appears. Reimagining the forms and themes of traditional folktales, Mushishi weaves Shinto mythology and rich evocative artistry into a tapestry as quintessentially Japanese as the medium it inhabits. Exploring these influences doesn't diminish Mushishis charm but brings it tantalizingly closer, begging us to get lost within. Guiding us through this landscape is Ginko, a traveling Mushishi specializing in the strange life forms known as mushi, literally meaning "bug" or "insect" but here referring to much more elusive creatures: "They are kept at a distance, coarse and mysterious, they seem to be completely different from the flora and fauna that are familiar to us." Set in an unspecified period of Japan's past, each stand-alone episode explores the effects these mushi have on humans. In episode 1, for example, Ginko travels deep into a thriving mountain forest. Inside, Shinra, a young boy, lives in isolation; unbeknownst to him, the spirit of his deceased grandmother maintains a protective vigil. Ginko discovers that when Shinra's grandmother was a young girl she took part in a mushi banquet, a gathering of mushi in human form who invite their guests to drink from a sake cup. Upon doing so the recipient ceases to be human and becomes an inhabitant of the other world, a plane of existence beyond our own. Episode 1 also introduces the central tenets of Shinto, Japan's native religion. In her landmark study of shamanistic practices in Japan, Carmen Blacker explains that "our human world is no more than a narrow segment of the cosmos . . . beyond it lies a further realm, altogether other,' peopled by beings non-human,