Category: Everyday Life

Mushi-shi no shi

There was a break in the rain and it finally became sunny: it’s a good time for laundry today!?
During our laundry, I thought I had to clean our miserable yard because of the rain and bugs, and first of all, I bagged some of the trimmed branches I had left piled here and there.
Why do the branches grow so quickly even though the area around our house has a circumference (on average) of only one meter!

Baby grasshoppers, slugs, pill bugs. Please do not eat our plants!
Oh, I even found that some caterpillars were eating the leaves of the bamboo grass.
What were the white bugs? I was bitten by mosquitoes everywhere! Oh no!

By the way, we watched Mushi-shi last night. We usually say no thanks to comic-based movies with many computer graphics, but Odagiri Joe appeared in it. We didn’t know the details of its story and the reviews of the DVD were not so great, but we could enjoy it until three quarters of the way through. The ending was somehow not clear.
Ginko (Odagiri Joe) reminds us of Sakamoto Ryuichi. We were thinking that if Wentz Eiji as Gegege-no-Kitaro had the same hairstyle as Ginko, it would have been better looking for his role. Beautiful silver haired Nui (Esumi Makiko): her low voice was also good. For the first few minutes we didn’t notice it was her: the same person as the Mother role on the cooking show Uchi gohan, and so on… We liked this movie’s visual sense.
Many people might have a different opinion, but, to tell the truth, we like the movie visuals more than the original manga, which I tried to find.
The soundtrack has sounds like overtone singing (or throat music): it could be a comfortable sound!?

Later we found out that the original comic is still running. So even if the movie director (Otomo Katsuhiro) wanted to have a clear ending, he couldn’t do it. There is also an animation series and the comments about it are actually better than about this movie, but we are not sure if we should rent it or not.

– YS, 1 July 2008

1 July 2008