Mushi-Shi, Inside the Cage

The episode that stuck with me the most on Mushi-Shi volume 3 is episode 14, Inside the Cage. While traveling through a bamboo forest, Ginko meets a man who can’t seem to leave the forest no matter how far he walks and what direction he goes. The man longs to return to his village after being gone for several years. He has such fond memories of the place and wishes to return with his family, even though the villagers who could travel to his home where he lives with his wife and child no longer visit. Even the man’s sister does not come and it’s all because his wife and child are different. What happens when the thing you have been longing for doesn’t want you?

When watching Mushi-Shi, I sometimes feel I have to check my instinct at the door. The way in which the show through Ginko does not present the world in terms of good and evil tells me that maybe I should look at things differently to fully appreciate the story. What I’m getting at is I think it’s too easy to see Inside the Cage as a tale about the “fear of the unknown,” condemn the villagers for being short sighted, and proclaim intolerance as bad. While that is true, is it really the point of this story? I don’t think so. If it were, wouldn’t someone in the story have stood up to it? In typical western fiction someone would, which again gives me reason to not go with my first instinct as the author of these stories does not subscribe to the same conventions I’m used to.

The lack of confronting and overt condemnation of intolerance keeps the story focused on the man Ginko encountered in the forest. I believe the story is about the man’s shortcoming, rather than the flaws of everyone else as the root of the tragedy. All throughout his time in the forest, the man saw it as a cage, even though he lived with a wife and daughter he loved. His want and yearning to escape lead to the tragedy that befell his family.

I think his want was a subtle knife. It’s not like he didn’t love his family. The man did and they brought him joy. And it isn’t like his want was the man turning his back on them, which he clearly was not. This want and sadness that made him feel incomplete, however, was something the family could not give him and drew a line between them.

See, he was looking at it all wrong. The forest, his family, his home, was not the cage he always thought it was. The forest was the only place he could be happy in the world. It was a sanctuary. In the end when he realizes this, the forest heals.