The tale of traveling Mushi Master Ginko continues in volume four of Mushi-Shi.  This quiet and gentle show is oddly engaging thought there isn't any giant robots or extraterrestrial monsters trying to invade.  It's the story of a man who tries to live in a union with his surroundings, while studying the invisible creatures that permeate his world.  While these stand alone stories don't always end happily, they are well told and enjoyable to experience.

Series background:

Mushi are the most pure creatures that exist.  Not base and vulgar like humans or animals, Mushi are beings that are in touch with the essence of life.  Invisible to normal people, these creatures are all around us, though humans rarely interact with them.  One person who is able to see these creatures is Ginko, a Mushi-Shi or Mushi Master.  He travels the countryside carrying only a mysterious wooden box on his back and collects Mushi artifacts (items that are created in our world through interactions with Mushi) and helps people who have been infected with malicious or unwanted Mushi.  Though his travels he encounters many odd and bizarre situations things that only a Mushi-Shi would be able to understand.

This volume:

This disc has another four sedate and enjoyable episodes.  It starts out with an interesting story about winter.  When Ginko gets caught in a snow storm, he finds refuge in the house of a family with a young boy who can see Mushi.  In past winters he's run off and found fresh herbs that only grow in the spring, and after a while he's always fallen into a slumber and won't awake until the first thaw.  When Ginko tries to find out what's affecting the boy, he follows him into the mountains and falls asleep too, not to wake until spring.

A bittersweet episode follows, where Ginko encounters a woman who is forgetting things.  It started with small items, but soon she's forgetting what crabs are or that she has sisters.  Oddly enough she still remembers how to cook, and her son and husband, but other things keep slipping away.  Ginko finds that its due to a malicious Mushi, but will that knowledge help him cure the lady?

More of Ginko's world is explained in the next episode.  The way Mushi masters communicate and the dangers of that entails, are examined when Ginko receives a misdirected message and goes off in search of the sender.  A different type of story where Ginko is a minor character, it never the less features an interesting tale and unique Mushi.

The volume wraps up with another story that has Ginko playing only a minor part.  When a young boy travels to the city in order to be an apprentice to a master painter, his sister gives him a coat woven from fibers culled from the area around their village and dyed from local pigments.  The man uses the inside of the coat as his first canvas, and eventually has to sell it in order to buy paint.  When Ginko comes across the painted coat, he realizes that it has the scent of Mushi, but he's not sure how they are involved with the coat.
As I mentioned in my reviews of the earlier volumes, this show is very different from most of the anime out there.  If I had to pick one word to describe it, that word would be serene.  It is a quite and gentle show.  It's like a walk in the forest on a cool day; enjoyable, refreshing, and oddly tranquil.  That's not to say that there's no action or that the series plods along, because that's not the case.  Every episode has a mystery that Ginko has to unravel, but the mysteries themselves are often just as fascinating as the solutions.

One of the aspects that make this show such a breath of fresh air is that it isn't about Ginko hunting Mushi.  He doesn't try to kill or destroy the Mushi since, even when they are hurting a person or village, they aren't malicious.  The Mushi are just following their nature, like a cat that chases a mouse.  Ginko is just trying to arrange things so that two sets of beings (Mushi and Humans) can live together in a non-confrontational or hurtful manner.  This is quiet different from most anime where non-human entities are routinely killed on sight.

This disc comes in a clear keepcase with a reversible cover and a nicely illustrated slip cover.

Audio:

Viewers have the choice of watching the show with either the original Japanese soundtrack or an English dub, both in stereo.  As I often do, I alternated tracks and found them both to be very satisfactory.  Neither track shows any trace of distortion or background noise.  The English actors do a very good job of matching both the lip movements and the feeling of the scenes in the dub track too.  A nice sounding set of episodes.

Video:

The 1.78:1 anamorphically enhanced video looks pretty good with only minor problems.  The show takes place mainly outdoors and there are a lot of greens and blues in the color palate that they use.  These colors are reproduced wonderfully.  They are vibrant and strong and really make the show a joy to watch.  The blacks are solid and the lines are tight.  On the digital side there is a touch of aliasing here and there, but it is a small amount especially when compared to most anime.  There are a couple of scenes where banding is a slight problem, but again this isn't major.  The only other defect that's worth noting is some mosquito noise in a few of the dark scenes.  Overall this disc looks really nice.

Extras:

Like the first volume, this disc has some solid bonus items.  The highlights are two more interviews with the director Hiroshi Nagahama, in one he discusses the music in the series and in the other the opening sequence.  There's also a clean opening and closing animation, and a series of trailers.

Included with the disc itself are two beautifully illustrated postcards and a nice 6page booklet that has character sketches as well as quotes from the people in the show.  It's a very nice booklet and I'm glad they included it.

Final Thoughts:

This show, while being low keyed and sedate, is actually one of the more interesting shows to be released of late.  It paints an interesting world that is very much like ours, but with an added sense of mystery and wonder.  It's a story driven show, but the tight story telling and unique plots make it a joy to watch.  Highly Recommended.