Miranda: O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
Prospero: ’Tis new to thee.
—Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1
One of the creepier epiphanies I had in science class was when I learned about the bacteria that live in our digestive tracts. The idea that there was something else alive inside me was eerie enough, but then I read about the organisms that flourish in the volcanic vents on the ocean floor. Compared to that, the inside of my gut was relatively easy territory. Life flourishes wherever it finds a toe-hold, and it’s easy to forget that human beings are only one leaf of a much larger biological tree.
Mushi-shi is one of the few manga I have read that that does justice to that sense of wonder. It is not about a plot or a problem or even really a character, although its individual episodes may contain all of those things. What it is most about is an ecology, a cycle of life and death and rebirth, and how the world of men is only a tiny dot on the face of things. The only other comic I can think of that comes even close to the same territory is Larry Marder’s amazing (and criminally underappreciated) Beanworld, but while Beanworld was about whimsy and wit, Mushi-shi is about overwhelming awe.
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