I’ve been looking forward to another episode of Mushishi. It seems that it doesn’t know how to deliver a bad episode. Each of the stories presented works so incredibly well, dealing with a different problem every single time.
This time, we have a little girl, who’s blind. She encounters a mushi, Ganpuku. This mushi gives her sight. At first she’s incredibly happy, but then the mushi starts showing her things that she shouldn’t be able to see. She’d be able to see right through walls, she could see things which happened miles away from her, nothing was a secret for her anymore. But it didn’t end there. Ganpuku then gave her the ability of foresight. The girl grew up, and many people came to her, in order to get their futures told. Obviously, the girl didn’t have any friends at all. When her father died, she moved away from her village and started living as a shamisen-player (which C1 seems to have turned into a lute).
Of course, while it may seem like joy and goodness in the beginning, if you have to live with this for more than fifteen years, you begin to see the disadvantages. Every good thing has a bad thing, and every bad thing comes along with a good thing, and this is no different. The girl may have had the ability of foresight, she had this 24/7. She had no way to turn this off, and she lived her entire life, seeing things in the future. In the end, she became dizzy and unhappy because of it. Around the end of the episode, it seems that Ganpuku has completely taken over her eyes. They then detach from her body, and turn into their real form.
It’s indeed a dilemma for the woman. She has to choose to either see the future continuously or see nothing at all. It’s a choice between two extremes, with not middle way at all. In the end, the woman didn’t care for herself anymore, and was content with living with Ganpuku. But she didn’t want anyone else to suffer the same fate she did. Therefore, she asks Ginko to bury her eyes, somewhere in the forest.
