Past the End of the Catbus Line: Mushishi ’s Apparitional Actants

The mushi that therefore I am

While we could certainly pinpoint these traits in a variety of animated texts, the anime series Mushishi, Japanese for ‘Bug Master’ offers a powerful demonstration of the political gravity with which animation might intercede in our engagement with the climate (and with notions of subjectivity that have often justified our parasitic relationship with it) beyond the magical–pastoral tradition. Mushishi envisions a fairly realistic turn-of-the-20th-century Japan in which beings called ‘mushi’, simple organisms that are neither plant nor animal nor fantastic spirit, exist alongside small agrarian communities.

On the topic of Spirited Away, which Jason Yadao (2009) fairly describes as ‘Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning animated feature about a girl working in the bathhouse of the gods’, Yadao claims that ‘it’s that sort of charm that manga artist Yuki Urushibara tapped into in “Mushishi”’. Yadao calls the anime adaptation ‘at its core the manga brought to life, without any gimmicks or deviations in the story’. Yadao’s tendency to connect it to Miyazaki’s work makes sense, but it also flattens out the theoretical and political gravitas of Mushishi’s abrasions on Miyazaki’s corpus. Mushi are not the pastoral sprites of Miyazaki’s cheerier work, they are not quite the kami of Shinto mythology, and they share nothing with the chillingly servile Pokémon, whose very existence is soldered to human entertainment and violent instrumentality. They are – by design, it would seem – difficult to pin down. Paul Jackson (2010) likens tales of mushi to Miyazaki’s work in their borrowing from Japanese mythology, but that comparison also doesn’t hold long. As Steven R Anderson (2014: 78) notes, ‘one of the central paradoxies of Mushishi is that human interaction with the mushi – creatures described as deriving from “life itself” – often results in suffering and loss.’ Jackson cites the Japanese folktale of the Woodcutter’s Daughter, in which a bamboo cutter raises a celestial daughter he cut from a stalk. Unlike that tale, in which the Princess eventually ascends to be with her otherworldly biological family, Mushishi’s ‘princess’ Setsu chops down the stalk-mushi (which overwrites the magical bamboo chute’s place in this retelling of the story) and, as Jackson himself summarizes, ‘having rejected the bamboo that birthed and nourished her, Setsu eventually dies as a consequence’ (p. 343). It is not a vindictive, loving, or even a pointedly neutral act – the situation’s outcome is simply the procedural consequence of the interconnections and interactions of its various agents. This disconnect with earlier anime engaging the natural world fantastically may be one reason why Anderson concludes that ‘the difficulty of finding a representational analogue for the mushi reveals the divergent symbolic relationships between body and nature, human and creature in Mushishi’ (p. 80)

Mio Bryce and Amy Plumb (2012) offer perhaps the most useful way of thinking through mushi. Their description of mushi as ‘generally parasitical, attaching themselves to both the living and the dead’ (pp. 111, 113) isn’t exactly fair or exhaustive (humans are also frequently aggressive to mushi and their habitats). But it does home in on the mushi’s syntagmatic relationship with everything they encounter – their inability to function as isolates that perhaps comes the closest to defining them. One grounded way, then, to go about reading the mushi is to read them as beings which dramatize Bruno Latour’s (1999: 180) conception of actancy, a way of theorizing the world as an amorphous series of interconnected collectives of things which ‘force us to abandon the subject–object dichotomy’ and ‘redistribute actions to many more agents than are acceptable in either the materialist or the sociological account’. As actancy given visual shape, mushi can inhabit, affect, commingle with, and feed off plants, nonhuman animals, dreams, fungi, sunlight, water, sound, paper, humans and their bodies (including, but not limited to, ear cavities, eyelids, and skin), clothing, shadows, pictographic characters, memories, mountains, forests, paintings, rust, wind, saké, thoughts, and even other mushi. In some shots, the mushi’s glowing, amorphous forms adorn the screen like fireflies or dust molecules, drifting along as neither landscape nor character; in others, they take simple forms like snail shells or insects or pocket-sized microorganisms. Often, they are invisible to both the anime’s characters and viewers alike. Most episodes are driven by a friction between humans and mushi created by inadvertently competing actions. In one instance, a mushi develops a parasitic relationship with a child and draws potentially lethal lightning to the child’s body for its own sustenance. In another, a town unearths a species of invasive mushi while clearing wild fields for farming, and the villagers must choose whether to burn their crops or risk the spread of the mushi. Typically, the somewhat protagonistic Mushishi (‘mushi master’) called Ginko is tasked with finding some kind of amiable solution between all human and nonhuman parties. Sometimes he invents a solution, sometimes his suggestions fall on deaf ears, sometimes there is no solution to be found, and sometimes he barely shows up. Frankly, not a whole lot happens – and it’s great.

Animation, as an art of imitations itself, an allusory–illusion, an imitation that ‘fails’ by nature in its aversion to photorealism, and a series of signs that trace by effacing, can dramatize, stage, and envision alternatives, (like mushi) to the jealousy which the subject status of humanity has for the idealized version of itself. In Eugene Thacker’s reading of Aristotle’s De Anima (2010), he examines Aristotle’s need for some kind of sign that can bring the amorphousness of life into legibility, writing ‘it is as if, in proposing a concept of the principle-of-life (psukhē), Aristotle is forced to think “life” in terms other-than-life (time and temporality, form and causality, spirit and transcendence)’ (p. 21). For Thacker’s reading of Aristotle, ‘there is a sense in the De Anima that what remains of “life” is this strange animate nothingness, a kind of vitalist void in which the principle-of-life can assert itself only via that which displaces it’ (p. 21). This ‘strange animate nothingness’ which makes life legible by vitalizing it through ‘terms other than life’ is staged and dramatized by animation – and in particular by mushi. According to Jacques Derrida (2008), ‘animal’ is the name ‘which men have given themselves as at the origin of humanity, and which they have given themselves in order to be identified’; they have corralled ‘a large number of living beings within a single concept, “The Animal”’, the yield of which is the legibility of their own subjectivity, which will always bear the trace of the animal (p. 32). To animate inert materials as animated mushi, humans, animals, landscapes, and natural objects allows us to stage the untangling of the residents of this single concept and – when we bring Latour’s perspective into Derrida’s thoughts – of another loaded ‘single concept’ in addition to the animal: that of the object. Not at all coincidentally, the first episode of Mushishi begins with Ginko investigating the case of a young shut-in with the unorthodox power to bring mushi into an animate being simply by drawing them with his right hand. The mushi that the young artist articulates into being are also the mushi that Mushishi’s studio artist team bring to life with their pens, ink, hands, software, and production teams. The mushi immediately liken themselves to the figure of the animated character – articulated into being by a complex combination of language, technology, and something like magic, and hovering somewhere around the border between life and its opposite that is not quite death. Their animated state is an amplified version of what Alan Choldenko (2014: 104) theorizes as ‘lifedeath’, that state in which the animated figure is ‘both alive and dead, neither alive nor dead, at the same time’ and which means that ‘one can never know life or death, motion or nonmotion, as such’. Mushishi is an exploratory performance of actancy, of the strange life of things and collectives of things, and of the not-quite-object status of the natural world – but tangled up in that pursuit is the chance for animation to interrogate itself: a moment to meditate on the innate absurdity of the bestowing of life onto images.

Ginko is careful to explain that his (initial) explanation of mushi is not a definition, but a forfeiture of the possibility to use language to correspond to a referent. ‘I suppose there’s really no simple way to explain what they are’, Ginko says, ‘but let me give you an analogy.’ He speaks as if he understood both Latour’s (2014) notion of proposition (Latour’s term for ‘occasions given to different entities to enter into contact’ which ‘allow the entities to modify their definitions over the course of an event’, p. 141) and Cholodenko’s (2014) ‘animatic apparatus’ (that which ‘suspends distinctive oppositions, including that of the animate versus the inaminate’, p. 104), and Ginko sees a natural connection between these disparate terms. The crossroads of the animatic apparatus and proposition ‘articulates entirely different relations’ (p. 143) for mushi, just as Latour says that Louis Pasteur does of the very much similar yeast microbes. In doing so, he makes mushi articulable through difference rather than some kind of innate correspondence with the natural world.

Say these four fingers represent animal life and your thumb represents plant life. Human beings would be here – at the tip of your middle finger, the farthest point from your heart. Moving toward the palm of your hand, you find the lower forms of animal life. When you get to your wrist, though, that’s where your blood vessels combine into one, right?

This is where you would find fungi and microorganisms. From here, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between plant and animal life. Even so, there is still life beyond this point. And if you keep going, all the way up your arm . . . past your shoulder . . . when you get to this point – at the place that’s closest to your heart, right here – these creatures are the ‘mushi.’ They are life in its purest form. Because of their nature, their shapes and physical appearances are ambiguous. (Mushishi, ‘The Green Seat’, 2005)

In positioning the mushi at the heart, the symbolic center of the human body, Ginko does not affirm the Aristotelian notion of the soul, rather, he articulates life in such a way that actancy that indiscriminately involves humans and nonhumans becomes its very center. It is as if, in the spirit of WJT Mitchell’s (1994) imperative to ‘picture theory’, Mushishi has animated what Cholodenko has theorized, giving a deliberately animated defining example to Cholodenko’s ‘lifedeath’ (Mitchell, 1994: 6). This laying out of the mushi is, outside of the logic of actancy, a contradiction – the very antithesis to the living thing cannot be that which is at the center of the living thing, nor can it be at the conceptual core of life itself. The contradiction is, according to Mel Y Chen’s (2012) thoughts, hardwired into this very hierarchy of being (Chen uses the term ‘animacy hierarchy’) that mushi attempt to resolve, a hierarchy in which ‘the animal position . . . is difficult or impossible to fix’ because ‘the animal figures . . . are themselves animate, mobile’ (p. 106). As Chen says, ‘the hierarchy slips’, and ‘its slippage subtends its very fixture, and it calls for us to detect the ways it does so (p. 106).’ Through animation’s ability to envision that which is not accessible in the real (as EG Lutz phrases it as early as 1920, ‘there is no need to consider physiological impossibilities of the human organism’ in animation, p. 230) the mushi provide a vehicle to animate and examine the very slippage of categories of animacy itself that Chen is concerned with. Before Louis Pasteur’s fermenting yeast can be called as such and before it has been articulated in the artifice of Pasteur’s lab, Latour (1999: 118) writes ‘It would be hard for something to have less existence than that!’ Just as the mushi’s ‘shapes and physical appearances are ambiguous’, Pasteur’s yeast ‘is not an object but a cloud of transient perceptions, not yet the predicates of a coherent substance’ (p. 118). And if our diegetic mushi are ‘clouds of transient perceptions’, then we can say the very same of our non-diegetic mushi in animated film – signs like Ginko, who is, after all, articulated himself by the complex and collective apparatus of massive teams of animators, software designers and operators, a voice actor, and even Yuki Urushibura’s manga source material. The amalgamate of light, sound, color, and motion comes into being through difference from other components of the show and, with these guiding discourses, we can begin to see an articulated Ginko.

And, as we will see consistently throughout Mushishi, the formal moves it makes are always matched by its narrative content. Even diegetically, Ginko is not quite an autonomous human, but an actant dramatized: as a child, the mushi called ‘Ginko’ ate his memories, leaving him with only its own name, and fundamentally altering him in a mysterious way. The mushi called Ginko causes mushi to be forever drawn to the young Mushishi, steals his left eye, and bestows him with silk-white hair, unnatural green eyes, and a pale complexion. These odd physical characteristics tease the common artistic license of the manga style (a Japanese man with white hair and green eyes wouldn’t raise a viewer’s eyebrow in other anime and manga), but contrast the grounded depictions of those Ginko meets. Most people Ginko encounters have skin tones and hair colors largely appropriate for 1890s Japan. Umberto Eco (1985) marks postmodern aesthetics with a ‘new aesthetics of seriality’ (p. 166), an aesthetic marked by repetition of serial narrative elements in which ‘the writer plays upon a continuous series of connotations . . . to such an extent that their reappearance in each story is an essential condition of its reading’ (p. 162). In most manga and anime, we would tend to think of the anachronistically colorful hair and eyes of predominantly Japanese characters as such to-be-expected serial elements that cling to our genre expectations. As Susan Napier (2001) frames it, this bodily iconography is part of anime’s imbrication within mukokoseki, a statelessness, which attempts to excuse itself from historically and geographically contingent circumstances, and which, she argues gives it ‘the potential to be context free, drawn wholly out of the animator’s or artist’s mind’ (p. 24). We wield our genre expectations; under Latour’s (1999) understanding of technique, we reach ‘the creation of a new goal that corresponds to neither agent’s [us/the visual tropes] program of action’, only to have the performance of this very process reflected back at us as we perform it (p. 178). We are reminded that it is the mushi, the nonhumans ‘folded’ into us which allow ‘the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies the original two [the contributing elements in the actant: human/genre-reading]’ (p. 179). Nor is the othering of anime tropes limited to Ginko. In ‘The Travelling Swamp’, Io, a young villager, is consumed by a swamp and folded into the mushi called Suiko that inhabit it, turning her hair green and rendering her body like liquid. And Ginko meets a host of beings along the way at various folds between human and mushi: a woman cohabiting her body with the amefarushi that causes excessive rain; a young man who can no longer feel the cold of his snowy village from the mushi in his blood, a human mother and her daughter both born into the lineage of the tree mushi Magari-dake. All of these animated beings, in their presence in Mushishi’s world and their visualization in ours, underscore the silliness of the subject’s notional superiority to a world of objects, giving cartoonish shape to the multifarious slippages of all participants in the animacy hierarchy.

The mushi in stasis

But, then again, what qualifies as an ‘animated being?’ The celebrated Canadian animator Norman McLaren (quoted in Furniss, 2008: 50) challenged conventional assumptions about animation when he defined it as ‘not the art of drawings that move’ but, instead, as ‘the art of movements that are drawn’. His revised definition emphasizes motion over design as the pivotal task of animation. And yet, it still assumes the sacrosanctity of motion in animating – the definition leans on the assumption that to animate is to incite locomotion. Animation scholar Maureen Furniss (2008) makes a similar claim that ‘absolute stillness can work against one of the central tenets of animation, the illusion that inanimate objects have been “endowed with life”; it could be said that, when an image within an animated production becomes still, its lifelessness is readily apparent’ (p. 79). On a similar note, Paul Wells (2013) asserts that ‘metamorphosis’ enjoys an important position within animated storytelling, claiming ‘some would argue that it is the constituent core of animation itself’ (a quote that Jackson, 2010: 77) reproduces to read Mushishi’s relationship with disability and the body). And Rebecca Coyle (2010: 3) claims ‘in its most inclusive definition, animation is a way of representing motion.’ As these scholars frame it, to be animated is to be frenetic; to never come to a rest or risk of abandoning the animated state.

We can also locate these assumptions about motion within animation’s corporate history. Disney Studios’ commissioned volume Walt Disney: The Art of Animation (Thomas, 1958) laments that ‘Donald Duck can’t be held in an extended closeup’ as ‘quickly the audience will yawn, realizing that he is merely a creature created by paint on celluloid’ (p. 22). But Thomas is only taking a cue from Disney himself – in his dramatic introduction of the multiplane camera, Disney claims: ‘You might be thinking that it [the stationary scene] looks as flat as the old-fashioned kind of cartoon background. In fact, it does while it holds still. The trick of the multiplane camera is movement.’ As if to defend this movement-obsessed thesis, the video then samples the camera’s navigation through Bambi’s forest, and the vivacity that it would seem only movement can inspire is heralded by a chorus of angelic voices, singing the praises of the multiplane camera in motion.

This association that these thinkers build between motion with life and stasis with death privileges those elements which are prone to exaggerated, obvious motion, that of human and nonhuman animal actors, and runs the risk of conceptualizing anthropocentric animated worlds where carefully designed humans wield their subjectivity to tromp through a world of innate and passive objects. Alan Cholodenko’s (2014) more chaotic laying out of the parameters of animation permits stasis to take on a more involved role within animation, as he claims ‘any theorizing of animation cannot limit itself to that endowing with life and motion but must consider the full cycles of each . . . their metamorphoses, their diminutions, and their terminations – death and nonmotion – as well as their inextricable commingling throughout their cycles’ (p. 101). This ‘inextricable commingling throughout their cycles’ of seemingly contradictory elements like nonmotion and metamorphoses seems to be wrapped up in Cholodenko’s larger point, that ‘animation is always already, never not expropriated, as is any fixed, final definition of it’. But, if this is the case, what are the payoffs of the welcoming of nonmotion, death, and termination into a less fixed notion of animation? Animation may be unfixed, after all, but its unfixity is not without politics or rhetoric. What does a breakdown of animation into active and passive objects assume about ecosystems, and how might these assumptions be complicated by stasis-in-animation?

Mushishi wonders what we could gain in our theorizing of the environment through animation by interrogating motion and the claims it often seems to make over life in animation. Animated stasis is not only an intrinsic element of animated film, but it also generates a useful visual ontology which moves toward articulating the (for humans) imperceptible experiences of nonhuman objects. In the play between stasis and locomotion of the inert materials of light, color, and sound that defines animation, both the substances of human and nonhuman objects are rendered on a level playing field. In contrast to many mainstream media depictions of environment, Starosielski (2011: 159) claims that in an environmental animation, ‘environments are drawn . . . rather than captured’, and ‘they transform, rather than staying still’. We could advance these critiques until they are not only critiques, but deconstructions: in drawing forth environments, animation dismantles the idea of capturing them because it is always a transformation and, as a perpetual transformation, even a stock-still shot of a static cel is in transformative motion in its stillness. Legendary children’s book illustrator Maurice Sendak, after all, argued for what he called a ‘quickening’ (Sendak, 1990: 3) that the still image can perform, a kind of motion-in-stasis embodied by the dynamism of the still image and activated by the wild rumpus that is the reader’s pell-mell navigation of that image. For Sendak, ‘the wish to animate is always there’ (p. 60) intrinsically nestled in the single and seemingly temporally unified image. On this field, living characters can be rendered with the static traits of objects, and nonhuman objects can become animated with the life associated with subjects, subsequently shattering the subject–object dichotomy.

Such is the case in ‘The Depths of Winter’, in which Ginko finds himself stranded on a mountain that unnaturally reverts to the heights of winter during the first days of spring. The disembodied voice of the narrator, the elderly Mushishi Nui, opens the episode to a short monologue played over glacial camera pans that glaze across foggy mountains. ‘When a quiet, deep sound like a whisper is heard in the mountains toward the end of winter’, Nui begins, the rhythmic, atonal pulse of the ghost of a sound accenting her speech and attracting a wayward Ginko’s attention from a mountain pass. She continues: ‘It means the spring mushi will all awaken soon. The quiet voices of the mountain lords are discussing when to have the awakening.’ A ‘mountain lord’ our narrator speaks of is a being, most often a nonhuman animal that the mushi inhabit. The mushi then splice the consciousness of the animal with that of the Mountain so that it might oversee, police, and maintain the Mountain’s ecosystem. A mountain lord is marked from birth with weeds that crown their pate and puncture up through the skin. Something of an actantial and animated manifestation of Aldo Leopold’s (1968: 137) dictum of ‘thinking like a mountain’, the mountain lord is in a radical state of the awareness of the interconnectedness of the individual components of the mountain, so much so that the elimination of one component will endanger the mountain itself. In ‘Cushion of Grass’, for instance, a young Ginko mirrors the violence of the young Leopold, who describes himself needlessly killing a wolf and severing the mountain’s plan for itself. Ginko carelessly causes that mountain lord’s death, the symbolic locus of the interconnectedness of its various components, dooming the mountain to an only perhaps salvageable state of decay. If the mountain lords – the symbolic interconnectedness of ecosystems – are to speak and animate, how can they do so in all of their abstractness? Annabelle Honess Roe (2013: 141) reminds us that ‘both moving and still images have a capacity in their ability to replay the past, to revive and reanimate the temporal instant and physical bodies that have long since been lost’ – perhaps we can stretch her assertion to bodies that never were, bodies that are in a certain sense moving and in another stationary, bodies without immediately discernible organs. Just as the sound that plays over ‘Depths of Winter’s’ opening stills indexes the ‘quiet voices’ of the mountain lords, so too does the quiet animation of the panned-over landscape scenery. They are animated as compound beings, but it is an animation that is not as immediately perceptible as traditional character animation – a literal quickening, to play a little with Sendak’s term, of the seemingly stock-still image through panning, sound accompaniment, and viewer participation. Will the viewer consent to animate these mountains from the quiet prompting of these visual and sonic cues – consent to the quickening, the awakening of inert materials on the screen and the nonhuman ecological participants in the mountain? As Paul Jackson (2010: 342) notes, director Hiroshi Nagahama requested that the show’s art director produce background images before production on an episode began, allowing the more human stories to rise up and shape themselves around the landscape, an element traditionally seen as more passive – if viewers, then, were to accept the animation of the stock-still, they would be following in the footsteps of the creators.

If viewers do not allow the mountain to animate in these opening shots, sooner or later, ‘Depth of Winter’ leaves the viewer with no choice (if they ever had one at all). Ginko encounters no other human presence throughout the episode, nor is there any mark of humanity’s presence outside of the human-made objects he brings with him. But he is far from alone while he is in the mountain lord’s domain. Baffled at the sudden regression to winter, Ginko seeks an exit from the mountain, weaving through a living forest of digitally multi-planed trees, snow falling at multiple levels of depth, and the snow-mushi Oroshibue barely indistinguishable from the flakes as they whirl together in dashes of white. The multi-dimensional backgrounds make no motion, but teem with life. Barely anything moves, and everything is animate. Though Ginko continues ever-downward in his trek down the mountain, Ginko repeatedly passes through the same multiplaned stretch of labyrinthine and living forest – ‘why am I always circling back, even though I am always going downhill?’ he wonders with frustration. In this animation of natural materials, the actants of the environment, the collective that the mountain lord stands in for, are now the party that enjoys mobility. And Ginko, like an object, is a passive recipient of that party’s motions. As a Mushishi, it is Ginko’s self-appointed duty to rectify the crisis of the mountain, and so he continues to seek out the mountain lord, an old turtle covered in the honorific weeds and in snow, and he stumbles across the turtle at a mountain pond. The mountain lord swallows him with a mountain lake, and it forces Ginko into hibernation so that it might steal his kouki (the ‘sake of life’ which mushi are drawn to). With this kouki, the mountain lord can feed the Oroshibue so that they might migrate elsewhere and take their winter with them. Ginko seeks to intervene in the mountain’s affairs externally, a move like animating the mountain – but the mountain was already intervening with him, animating itself even in the stillness of winter to swallow Ginko and assert his place as a non-privileged component of the ecosystem. Like a good Mushishi and a good climatologist, Ginko yields to his recognition of the needs of the larger collective and amusedly accepts his misfortune. ‘Oh well’, he mumbles to himself, ‘it’s spring.’

The mushi in silence

But it is not only through a visual register that Mushishi politicizes a more elastic understanding of animation, and the stillness of visual bodies is not the only sensory register by which stillness performs animation. In broadening the possibilities for what can and is allowed to animate, we find another path for the distribution of agency between humans and materials. As Rebecca Coyle (2010: 3) notes, ‘sound is constant movement’ and ‘cannot be freeze-framed in the same way that images can be presented on the page’. Even outside of the ‘quickening’ of the static image on the page (or screen), this ‘constant movement’ of sound permits kinesthetic animation without any body in motion. Sound offers a vehicle other than mobility to signify life, agency, and the status of being animated. It permits animated objects, especially seemingly inert materials, to do something like vocalize their presence, perspective, and actancy in an animated ontology. The otherworldly sound of the mushi’s murmur’s closest analogue to a sound in our real world is, though likely not a direct inspiration, the calm warbles of the Croatian Sea Organ at Zadar, a massive instrument designed by humans but played eternally by nature as the Adriatic sea’s tides push water into its pipes and produce music (Meanderbug, 2015: ‘Zadar’, ‘OST 1 – Mushi’). The goals of the mediating technologies in the depiction of mushi and in the sea organ are not to fit sound into preconceived notions of music, but to try and give a voice to that which has none, and perhaps even that which is so abstract it can be barely be denoted by the word ‘that’. Comparing the ‘A World is Born’ sequence in Fantasia to that film’s precursor, the Silly Symphonies, Phillip Brophy (1991) claims ‘in comparison to “man mastering nature” in the Silly Symphonies, we have nature performing “by itself” unleashing an untamed violence to which Stravinsky’s score alludes in its use of a pagan ritual to propel its atonality’ (p. 83). We might say that Mushishi and the sea organ take this violence to a further, more ideological, level – now, scored music itself is too enmeshed within the symbolic to signify the natural world, and completely atonal warbling is the closest we can come to animating the pre-symbolic, in this case, the mushi.

Experimental composer John Cage catalogues a tradition of ‘new music’ and ‘new listening’ (Cage, 1961) in which mushi sounds and the sea organ are firmly planted, a tradition in which ‘one may give up the desire to control sound’ and ‘can set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments’ (p. 10). The playful babble of the organ rings of words uttered underwater not for the sake of communication, but for the joy of the sound itself as it is filtered through and co-uttered by water – the eerily similar mushi sounds index the symbol-lessness of this nonspeech of the sea, this letting sound be what it is. This extra-linguistic relationship with sound manifests in Mushishi as both animating agent of inert materials and as meditative praxis. In ‘Tender Horns’, Ginko is summoned to an unusually quiet mountain village in the peak of winter. The citizens of this village are afflicted each winter with a mushi called Un, a sound-eating mushi that penetrates the ears, settles within the cochlea, and renders its hosts temporarily deaf. The mushi affliction brings the work animation’s form is already performing to the surface level of the narrative: movement of active visual elements and even camera movement often remain entirely absent from long-held shots in Mushishi, the only sign that one is watching animated film and not viewing a painting projected to an electronic screen (which, of course, they are also doing) is the presence of ambient sound. Cage notes that ‘hearing sounds which are just sounds’, sounds which are not composed as having an affixed symbolic meaning or situation, ‘immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing’, and, similarly, ‘the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature’ (p. 10). Later in the episode, Ginko embodies Cage’s claim: Amidst a cold night’s walk in the snow, Ginko’s musings are framed by a slow pan over a wildly ornate and stationary snowflake. The still image is animated by the sound of his voice, the churning air of the cold mountain air, and the residual crunch of snow under his feet as he wanders and ponders. In what appears to be an image laid out without any stacked cels, sound now takes on the ‘animatic interval’ that Thomas LaMarre (2009) writes of, that machinic element usually created by the juxtaposition of cels in three-dimensional space ‘with distinctive effects of depth, which animators might play with or attempt to mask’ (p. 23). The moment embodies LaMarre’s claims that ‘animation does not have to open a sense of movement between layers’, and ‘can equally strive to suppress animatism’ (p. 9), and yet, the aural animatism of the image opens a different kind of interval, one that reads depth and motion into a static image. ‘If you listen carefully’, Ginko muses as we are treated to a long engagement with the stationary snowflake, ‘even snow falling can make a sound.’ Ironically, we, as viewers, do not need to listen carefully – it is the sound of the snow that we can hear which envisions and animates the descent that we cannot immediately see. In both the narrative of ‘Tender Horns’ and Mushishi’s animation, sound animates inert objects by indexing their actions and their life on a sonic register. With an understanding of ‘the future of music’ at his command, what Cage calls ‘attention to the activity of sounds’, Ginko alleviates the infestation (p. 10).

Even silence, in its material weight as a seeming lack of sound, and a sign bearing the trace of sound, can and does animate in Mushishi – the marked juxtaposition of silent (and static) landscapes with more obviously animated ones draws attention to the difference and to differance, and we are invited to see the mushi that live in (and eat) silence. The sign that we call ‘silence’, as Ginko’s thoughts gesture toward, is always on the horizon of increasingly local sound: a level of sound unto itself. ‘They say there’s a spectrum of noises that even animals can’t hear. That’s the spectrum of the voices of mushi.’ Here, we are at the level of silence – sound that is under usual circumstances beyond human distinction. ‘Each mushi’s murmur is probably very minute. But there are countless numbers of mushi. What would happen if so many of them murmur a word?’, Ginko wonders. ‘They say that, like a loud echo, those murmurs act in concert, and that sound is reverberating throughout the world.’ The collective murmur of the mushi – the sound that fills Maho’s ears, the sound that time and again animates stationary scenes in Mushishi – is also the sound of a lack of sound, a sound of silence. Just as sound and its absence permit natural objects, mushi, and landscape to complicate the traditional barriers between humans and nonhumans, the animating function of silence also allows humans the chance to opt out of subjectivity in Mushishi’s ontology. ‘Bell Droplets’ features Kaya, a young (and initially human) woman chosen by the mountain to become a Mountain Lord. As a multivalent creature who is not quite an individual, a human, or a self, Kaya makes no sound as she feathers from branch to boulder to hill around a bewildered Ginko. Here, silence takes on a material function, emphasizing the now-much-heavier-seeming step of Ginko’s boot and lightening Kaya’s step, reminding us she is not a thing at all outside of being light and color in motion: an illusion of a subject.

In democratizing the visual cues that determine which things are rendered as subjects and which are rendered as objects, Mushishi also passes up the chance to pursue that only somewhat more helpful alternative to empirical anthropocentrism: romanticism. When Ginko meets a young boy who is obsessed with mushi in ‘Pretense of Spring’, he tells him ‘they’re certainly not our friends, just unusual neighbors’, and, with the ghost of a smile, Ginko throws in ‘but you’re free to like them’, as an afterthought. Ginko would undoubtedly make a poor guest host of a Captain Planet PSA – his messages about environmentalism are sorely lacking in can-do attitude! But his approach, I think, offers viewers much more to work with. The mushi’s ethical position is as amorphous and illegible as their morphing bodies and their ghostly babble, the elements which bring them into animated being. They are not the big-eyed Bambi or the gleefully tactile Pixaresque Lorax. Their subdued presence is often barely articulated. Like Totoro, they are our neighbors but, unlike that forest king of the kawaii, they do not answer our call. Mushi do not plant our crops, they are not concerned with our illnesses and accidents, and they certainly do not travel in cat-vehicles shaped after the public transportation mechanisms that industrial culture demands. And yet, while the immeasurable gap between our consciousness and theirs does not permit us to experience the symbolic relation of camaraderie with them, we are, as Ginko reminds us, nonetheless their neighbors. We are allowed to like them. Presumably, we are allowed to dislike them too. But we must respect them in all of their otherness – whether we aim for a more elastic definition of what entities on our planet are endowed with rights or if we are concerned with the self-preservation of the humans who deprive those entities of rights.