I fear, and that is OK.
What They Say:
“The Hand that Caresses the Night”
A hunter roams the mountains at night without the tools of his trade. The being that toys with life, and then extinguishes it is a fragile “thing” caught between the realm of man and mushi.
The Review: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
We begin the episode with Ginko, which actually hasn’t happened yet for this second season. This season has told its stories by focusing on the other characters in them, with Ginko very much playing a supporting role. But here, we fear for Ginko because we see the fear in his eyes.
Ginko has good reason to fear. What he’s facing is the absence of life. The Kouki we saw in the first episode were the Sake of Light and what he faces now is the Fuki, the Sake of Decay. They are literally the antithesis of the Kouki. The Fuki is what happens when the Kouki decays. Unlike most other Mushi, it has no mind. It will infect someone with a particularly high tolerance from it and it will be passed down through its generations.
The Fuki will be dissipated by drinking a certain amount of Kouki and it’s in the month Ginko’s gone retrieving it that everything seemingly goes to hell for the two brothers in this episode.
In the second half, the episode comes together. This is about fear, but not just for your life. The brothers have a fear instilled in them from their father. He never hurt them physically, but they were afraid of him. He exuded an aura of menace that the boys, especially the younger Usuke, couldn’t get out of their heads. When the elder Tatsu inherited the power, the boy still held the fear inside of him.
It leads to Tatsu believing he is the King of the Mountain. He calls the animals to him and kills without thought. He gains a great power and doesn’t realize that it’s the very same power that his father had. Like some children who were abused, they play the same role as their abuser to gain some semblance of control over their life that was, up until a point, out of their control.
But a different kind of fear is instilled into Tatsu when he’s shot in the arm, mistaken for a bear. He fears for his life in the same way that Ginko did at the beginning of the episode. Dropping crows earlier in the episode, it’s the crows that are his downfall. They won’t attack anything that has eyes like them and these crows see the eye on Tatsu’s palm and stay back. It’s the crows that eat his arm, covered in blood that shrouds the eye. He lives and his life becomes something else. He’s no longer the man he once was, nor is he the man his father was.
In Summary:
The Mushi at play here are subtle, and in fact almost nonexistent. The episode instead plays with something that all people fear: the void. The Fuki are the decay of life, eventually leading to nothingness. Tatsu and Usuke’s father fell prey to the Fuki and they didn’t realize the danger they were in. They just feared it. Usuke for even longer, as his brother embraced it.
The eerie music that speaks to death and darkness at the end plays perfectly with the episode. I wish I knew more about music—or even paid more attention to music in episodes—to comment more on it. But damn, isn’t it fantastic?
Grade: A-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Equipment: Radeon 7850, 24” Dell UltraSharp U2410 set at 1920 x 1200, Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II
