There’s almost nothing as satisfying to me as revisiting something I enjoyed in the past and realizing just how correct I was about it. Case in point: Shiki. I watched the series as a simulcast in one of the earlier incarnations of Funimation’s video streaming service. I had a backlog of episodes and spent an afternoon catching up to the current simulcast episode so I could watch it week-to-week from there (I believe episode 11 or 12; it was somewhere about halfway through the series). I’d been lukewarm about the series at first until that point; then I was hooked. But there are a lot of series I watched around that time period that I probably wouldn’t enjoy nearly as much more than a decade later. But I had the opportunity to watch Shiki again within the past couple of years and I think I may like it even better now.
Shiki is modern vampire storytelling done correctly. It takes place in an isolated, rural Japanese town which follows an older tradition of burying their dead (rather than cremating the bodies). One day the mysterious Kirishiki family moves into a huge European-style mansion up on the hill, which attracts the attention of Megumi, a fashionable girl who feels like a big fish in a small pond. Following her meeting with the Kirishiki family, people in the town begin falling ill with a mysterious type of anemia. Megumi passes away from it, and soon the number of deaths begins to increase.
Ozaki, the town doctor, finds himself struggling to assess the ever-increasing number of patients and then becomes overwhelmed by the number of deaths. It isn’t until he discovers the supernatural nature of the situation (partly by experimenting on someone close to him) that he takes the lead in fighting back against what have been dubbed “Shiki” or “corpse demons.” Now the humans and the Shiki are at odds with what they need in order to survive.
It’s easy to be put off by the early episodes of this series. The character designs are truly something else – strikingly unique, and some might say even ugly. And it takes a while for the townsfolk to figure out what’s going on. I’ve spoken to several people in the past who spend the first half of the series frustrated that the characters don’t see what’s happening and immediately realize that they have a vampire (or vampire-adjacent) issue. It’s that aspect of the story, however, that impresses me the most, because I think it’s extremely realistic. Who in their right mind would believe that vampires, a fictional supernatural species, could be responsible for a few deaths?
It’s episode 13, though, that I think will be one of the anime episodes that stay burned in my mind for the rest of my life. In it, Dr. Ozaki captures a particular Shiki and performs experiments on her that amount to horrifying torture. As my spouse likes to say, that’s the point in the series where you realize that this is the guy who’s been made out to be the savior of the town. It’s this guy who we’re supposed to be rooting for. And at that point you realize that there’s no closure to this story that achieves a resolution where anyone can “win.” You’re left simply to question which form of sentient life deserves to survive, and there’s no way to answer that question cleanly. This, to me, is the genius of the show.
Shiki is unfortunately now unlicensed, and the out-of-print disc versions are going for a pretty penny on the secondhand market. But if you can manage to get your hands on a copy *somehow* it’s well worth the trouble.