Winter 2022 First Impressions – Sabikui Bisco

Streaming: Funimation and Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Episode Summary: After a disaster destroys Tokyo and turns it into an inhospitable desert, people begin to die from a mysterious illness known as the “Rust.” It slowly overtakes their bodies until it reaches their hearts. There are theories regarding how the illness is spread, some of which involve the assumption that strange plagues of mushrooms (and the mushroom keepers who create them) are somehow responsible. The most notorious of these mushroom keepers is Bisco Akaboshi, who spreads terror using his bow and arrows to produce giant mushrooms.

Doctor Milo Nekoyanagi maintains a residence in the slums where he tends to the impoverished locals while also using connections to obtain contraband mushroom material in order to search for a cure for the Rust. His motivations seem rooted in kindness, but they have a selfish angle as well – his sister Pawoo is suffering from the disease. One evening, none other than Bisco makes his way into the city to wreak havoc, causing the pavement to burst forth with mushrooms with every strike of his arrows. But he seems focused on one mission in particular – to seek out Doctor Nekoyanagi.

Impressions: It’s always difficult for me to know where to start when each new anime season begins. It’s a task that becomes even more difficult when you’re offline for the first few days and suddenly nearly twenty new series have premiered in your absence. My most successful policy often amounts to “jump head-first into something I know nothing about,” which nearly always ensures that I’m not trying to navigate some large amount of personal baggage while taking in the first breaths of a story. In this case, it appears to have worked out pretty well.

Japanese anime and post-apocalyptic stories are fast friends, and this story continues in that tradition. Its social situation is muddy, where “good guys” are forced to operate outside legal channels in order to seek after some ultimate greater good. The government propaganda machine is running at full-tilt and therein are provided many scapegoats for the public to blame for their substandard living situation. Those individuals scraping out a position at the fringes, lingering within the ire of the authorities and serving as convenient pariahs are at the same time the most interesting focal point for the story.

Bisco the “man-eating mushroom” gets very little actual screen time during this episode, which is of course by design; it allows us as the audience to get a good taste of what the internal authoritarian storytellers want us to believe about him before learning the truth of what the writer wants to actually portray. And while Bisco’s entrance is violent and dramatic, there’s already a good sense of the fact that the mushrooms, which are so tightly controlled as contraband and spreaders of disease, are more than likely integral to the survival of the human race. However, control over them (and the vilification of those who are able to generate them outside of that governmental control) is more about politics and economics than the general wellbeing of the population. It’s almost like the creator was looking at real-life when they wrote the story!

Jokes aside, there’s something that feels especially prescient about this anime, which is based on a story from a few years ago. It’s almost as if living through a poorly-controlled pandemic during which people of lesser financial means have suffered greater mortality while also being lied-to by the authorities, and watching as those with means have access to the latest treatment, is something we might want to discuss right now for some reason. Intentional or not, the premise of this series definitely forms an interesting intersection with real-life; whether that’s something that most viewers are interested in dealing with, or if they’d rather just focus on the surface-level aesthetics and action (not a choice I would criticize at all at this point), remains to be seen.

Pros: The visual design of this series is very appealing. There are elements of the setting that draw some obvious comparisons to series like Dorohedoro; while the slums in this series aren’t nearly as deteriorated as something like Hole, it’s difficult not to see parallels in terms of the specifically mushroom-focused elements. There are also several fantasy elements, including giant lizard mounts and gargantuan crustaceans, that feel both grounded in some form of reality while also making it clear that this is a transformed, corrupted world replete with mutations and mayhem.

One of my favorite story elements is ambiguous morality, at least when portrayed in a way that doesn’t make it an excuse for glorifying bad behavior. I firmly believe that there are no monsters in this world, only humans who, because of circumstances, sometimes make choices that result in harm to themselves and others. The world portrayed in Sabikui Bisco seems ripe for that kind of examination, even if only in its background characters and the various bits and pieces of culture that we’re able to glean from them.

Cons: On the other hand, there are some elements of this episode that are completely unsubtle and it’s at those points that I think the narrative stumbles a bit. Portraying an already obviously slimy politician using the iconic (and usually very unsettling) voice of Kenjiro Tsuda ensures that there’s absolutely no mistaking the sort of character he’s meant to be. While I enjoy the overall effect, it leaves little room for interpretation.

Content Warnings: Body horror (the rust disease manifests as a rash on the body). Violence. Mild nudity/fanservice.

Would I Watch More? – This first episode was intriguing to me. While the series wasn’t really on my radar before the season started, it seems like it might be a fairly interesting science fiction story and that’s something I’m definitely here for.