🚬 蟲師 Mushishi Book Club Week 3 🕸

[DIO-Berry]

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Week 3

Start Date: June 14
Previous Part: Week 2
Next Part: Week 4

Week	Start Date	Chapter	End Page	Page Count
Week 3	June 14	Chapter 2 柔らかい角	100	40

Vocabulary

Mushishi Book Club Vocabulary Sheet

Discussion Guidelines

Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.

Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).

Hide Details results in the dropdown box like below:

Example

This is an example of the “Hide Details” option.

The “Blur Spoiler” option will simply blur the text it surrounds.

This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.

Posting Advice

• When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.

• Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!

Participation

Will you be reading along with us this week?

• I’m reading along
• I have finished this part
• I’m still reading the book but I haven’t reached this part yet
• I’m reading this book after the club has finished
• I’m no longer reading the book

If you’ve already read this book but are still going to join the discussion, please select “I have finished this part.”

[Belthazar]

A note on this chapter's featured mushi

So, the mushi in this chapter are named 呍うん and 阿あ. 呍 is an obsolete variant of 吽 (and let me tell you, actually producing the kanji 呍 was a real pain - my IME doesn’t suggest it, and it doesn’t come up with Jisho’s radical search or handwriting search, so I literally had to open a listing of the CJK unicode block, scroll down to the 口 section, and check them one by one).

Anyway, point is, taken together, these two kanji form the word 阿吽あうん, the Japanese rendition of the sacred sound om. Comprised of the first and last letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, it represents the beginning and ending of all things, in the same way as “alpha and omega” from the Greek alphabet. If you go to a shrine or temple in Japan and there’s a pair of komainu or nio bracketing the gates, one of them (usually the one on the right) always has its mouth open representing the あ sound, while the other one always has its mouth closed representing the うん sound. These mouth positions on statues are typically called 阿形 and 吽形 (even when they’re not paired up).

[Lisaveeta]

My favourite panel for this week

Thanks @Belthazar for the note on this week’s mushi. And thanks to whoever’s doing the vocab list (I’m reading a paper copy so it really helps with the look ups)

[Belthazar]

@Lisaveeta

And thanks to whoever’s doing the vocab list

That would also be me.

[Lisaveeta]

Thought it was you, but also thought I’d better not make any assumptions.

[Lisaveeta]

Risky Behaviour?

Am I right in thinking Ginko’s experimenting on himself to prove his hypothesis?

[simias]

多彩な音

I like this expression.

Also this is hard. I understand the gist of the story but a lot of the finer points are very whimsical so sometimes I can’t tell if I’m missing something or it’s just supposed to be bizarre.

[wiersm]

@Lisaveeta

Am I right in thinking Ginko’s experimenting on himself to prove his hypothesis?

That’s also how I interpreted it.

@simias

I like this expression.

Yes, I also like the language so far (including that phrase), and yes, the author does seem to expect us a bit more to read between the lines and interpret what is happening. I had to read this week’s chapter twice, and the second time it was definitely easier for me to understand what was going on.

Visually also, I like the hand-drawn nature of the art and the creativity, but with some of the panels it is a bit hard for me to understand what I’m looking at (like last week’s foot panel).

[Belthazar]

@wiersm

the author does seem to expect us a bit more to read between the lines and interpret what is happening.

Yeah, I’ve read this before in English too, and I still can’t work out what epiphany lead Ginko to figuring out the cure… or how the mother worked it out, and why she didn’t just tell someome about it instead of talking about lava.

[Lisaveeta]

@Belthazar

I still can’t work out what epiphany lead Ginko to figuring out the cure…

Isn’t it because of what he does hear in the quietness of the snow blanketed landscape?.

@wiersm

the author does seem to expect us a bit more to read between the lines and interpret what is happening

Definitely! As a reader, you’re expected to work pretty hard.

[Belthazar]

@Lisaveeta

Isn’t it because of what he does hear in the quietness of the snow blanketed landscape?.

Yeah, but I still feel like there’s a step missing. It’s like:

Step 1: Ah eats silence.
Step 2: Even when it seems silent, there’s still sound.
Step 3: ???
Conclusion: Human sound kills Ah.

It kinda seems like there’s a visual clue going on in these panels too, along the lines of there’s so much snow falling that it almost feels like he’s gone blind, but he hasn’t gone blind, what he can see is snow, and that sort of connects to his theory of what happened to the noise in the last hours of mother’s life, but it’s still unclear to me how that leads to the cure.

Also, both the kid and the mother spent periods of time with their hands over their ears, but that just resulted in them growing horns instead. Why does the cure work only when they know it’s a cure? I guess perhaps they weren’t pressing hard enough?

[simias]

I was also confused by that, glad to hear that my Japanese skill was not (entirely) to blame.

[DIO-Berry]

Possible meaning?

My interpretation was that the mushi were a metaphor for cutting out the outside world. The impression I got was that the mom missed the dad and didn’t really want to live without him. Letting the mushi kill her was an easier out I believe. However, she didn’t want the son to die which is why she somewhat communicated the way to stop the mushi to him. After she dies, he starts to lose his connections to other people except for the village elder and Ginko. With their support, he starts contemplating and trying to understand it is why he goes out in the snow right? Ginko saving him connects him to the outside world and incites the urge to cure himself.

Mushishi really only has the number of characters needed to tell the story. The village elder is there to show care/connection and the foil of the man with a family shows how this isn’t a problem that people with strong human connections face.

Thoughts? Is there anything that disproves this theory or other sensical conclusion?

[Belthazar]

Response

I, uh… I don’t really agree with any of that. Dad’s not really relevant to the story here - the only mention of him is that he was there the time mother saw the volcano; why he’s not around now is never explained. The Ah don’t cut them off from the rest of the world, they do the opposite - they let all of the sounds in. The problem is that the mushi, by sheer power of numbers, are the dominant sound in the world.

I also get the impression that Maho habitually goes for a stroll to stop himself going completely stir-crazy.

[DIO-Berry]

Reply

Why even have a dad if he has zero relevance?

@Belthazar

The Ah don’t cut them off from the rest of the world, they do the opposite - they let all of the sounds in.

Isolation via making noise unbearable is still cutting off the outside world no? Although maybe I didn’t specify enough that by outside world, I mean human connections/society

@Belthazar

I also get the impression that Maho habitually goes for a stroll to stop himself going completely stir-crazy.

Yeah that makes more sense

[wiersm]

Replies

@DIO-Berry

Isolation via making noise unbearable is still cutting off the outside world no?

Yeah, I agree with that. Some interesting theories and I am sure that there are metaphors going on here. I think there is something to be said that some people react to the loss of a loved one by going into isolation, perhaps because they can’t (or don’t want to) be confronted with all the impressions from the world around them. So yeah, there might be parallels there with what the Ah is doing to them.

@DIO-Berry

Letting the mushi kill her was an easier out I believe.

I’m not sure I agree with this, though. Ginko seemed pretty convinced that the mother simply realised too late how she could kill the mushi.

@Belthazar

I still feel like there’s a step missing.

I took Ginko’s explanation on page 97/98 as him explaining his thought process. From the fact that the Ah kills its host he deduced that it was a kill-or-be-killed kind of situation for the parasite, and he realised that the mother was trying to tell Maho something in her final moments, so he concluded that she was trying to tell him how to kill the Mushi.

That still doesn’t explain how the mother worked it out, but maybe she just had a similar epiphany…

@Belthazar

why she didn’t just tell someome about it instead of talking about lava

I think that is just because of some basic rule of magical realism : why say something plainly when you can talk in allegories? (in particular when you are on your deathbed)

@Belthazar

Also, both the kid and the mother spent periods of time with their hands over their ears, but that just resulted in them growing horns instead. Why does the cure work only when they know it’s a cure? I guess perhaps they weren’t pressing hard enough?

Yeah, I think it just must have been not hard enough or too short. I agree that the story doesn’t give any explicit explanation for the horns. I interpreted them as part of the Mushi’s dying process. Perhaps its solid parts get excreted by the human body as horns on the forehead as its liquid parts melt out of the ears. As the Mushi is slowly dying inside the host, the horns develop slowly and pressing hands to their ears is just speeding up the process.