Garden of Sinners 4: “The Hollow Shrine”

It's time for the last Kara no Kyoukai/Garden of Sinners movie currently in queue. I don't have many expectations, either positive or negative, at this point. "Overlooking View" was fun. "A Study In Murder I" was so-so. "Remaining Sense of Pain" was awful. So, this could really be anywhere in terms of quality, and most of these films seem to be episodic enough to stand on their own.


The date is given as March, 1996, and Shiki is being rushed to a hospital. Since the accident during her attempted euthanasia of Mikiya was sometime around then, we can assume that this is the immediate aftermath of that incident.

Also, behold: slightly less terrible video quality!

This film has the best introductory theme of any of the KnK movies so far. It's so moody, tense, and dramatic, with a religious undertone to the chanting vocals. It's loudness relative to the doctors' voices gives it an oppressive quality despite its sensuality, and it makes the world around Shiki seem more distant, as if she's drifting away from it as she dies.

Mikiya follows her to the hospital, because of course he does. And gets in the way of the staff, because of course he does. After a while, another concerned party comes to see Shiki; I can't remember if that's her father or her butler, but it's one of the two.

He and Mikiya exchange a polite, if solemn, bow as they wait for the doctors to update them.

As dawn breaches, Shiki's vitals stabilize. Mikiya remains seated in the lobby. He might have forgotten how to do anything at night besides stand around outside of wherever Shiki is by now, so this is normal for him. Time wears on. Shiki is taken out of her ICU and placed in a normal hospital bed. Then, darkness solidifies around her and she floats up into a blazing indigo light.

Probably not literal, but this is R-Type so who knows.

Shiki's voiceover says "there was no end." Cryptic, but that's par for the course for Garden of Sinners. Then we cut to some time later, with Shiki still in a coma, but stable. Mikiya brings her flowers and sets them beside her bed week after week. From the room across the hall, Kirie "Ringu" Fujou watches, developing a crush that would be dispelled in an instant if he ever opened his mouth during these visits. Shiki's visions continue, with her dividing into two copies of herself (representing Chara and Frisk, presumably) with the indigo star overhead blazing down except when a black eclipse covers it. Life and death, perhaps, or else dim awareness of her surroundings as the shadow of the Nice Guy blocks the overhead light. We jump to a brief glimpse of Mikiya's high school graduation, and then Mikiya arriving for his first job interview.

Touko disguises her voice over the phone, apparently. I'm not sure, but from the dialogue it seems like she might actually pretend to be male when talking with people she doesn't know. The voice that the VA puts on while demonstrating her alternate voice sounds lower than usual, but not really masculine, so I don't know. It could be that I'm misinterpreting the intent, or it could be that Touko's voice actress just can't really do a man voice. If that IS the intent, then it's another nod to the Daoist duality thing that the show seems to be building toward something.

They exchange greetings, and then there's an ominous closeup of one of the mannequins in Touko's workshop that looks and is dressed almost exactly like Shiki. Is this a synthetic body that she's preparing for her? If so, then we already know she'll only end up using parts of it, since Shiki was still partly organic by the time of the later adventures.

Maybe this is just part of the process of creating magical synth limbs. You need to attune them to the recipient by making them as part of a simulacrum, or something.

Meanwhile, in Shiki's dreamscape, Chara and Frisk struggle across the liquid darkness to reach each other, but can't. I'm not sure what this represents, exactly, but it might have something to do with Shiki's state of mind at the moment of the accident. Frisk and Chara seemed to be fighting for control as she hesitated before killing Mikiya, so being knocked into a coma right at that second might have done something screwy. Finally, after an unspecified period of time, Shiki wakes up in her hospital bed.

The first thing she sees upon awakening is a get well note from Mikiya. Her Frisk cringes, but her inner Chara dances for joy. She then looks at the bouquet sitting beside it, and weird blotches of color appear across the flowers. She blinks, seemingly unused to this, and we see that her eyes have gone into mother of pearl murdervision mode.

This is new to her, apparently. So she didn't have murdervision until the coma activated her latent powers.

...

If, as I suspect, her split personality was deliberately induced by her family, then this might have been what they were trying to accomplish. Accessing her innate magic might have required a different persona, or a divided persona, but for some reason it didn't work properly until now.

...

Shiki reaches for the flowers as best she's able. The colors keep flashing across the bouquet. She moves her hands after them. When a nurse comes in a little while later, she finds this:

I'm not sure what the murdervision guided Shiki to do, exactly, but it caused instant wilting. And also accidentally pulled an IV out of her arm while she did it, causing her to lose consciousness again.

When the doctors revive her again, Shiki sees the glowing lines appear all over them. Indicating places to cut. Not just vital points, but presumably murdersense accounts for details like how to cripple someone to stop them from fighting back. She tries to blink and then block it out, but nothing helps; the mother of pearl deathmode continues (also, the mother-of-pearl thing seems to be purely for the audience's benefit, since nobody in the room seems to notice her eyes changing color). She pushes her palms harder against her eyes, and then there's this weird squishing sound effect and we cut to a nurse running through the hallway in a panic.

I guess the implication is that she did something to her eyes, but I'm not sure what she could have done to them with her palms.

The next time Mikiya arrives at reception, they tell him that against all odds Shiki has regained consciousness after the...how long has it been? At least a year...that she's been in a coma. However, she's in very delicate condition, and only family members can see her.

Cue Mikiya slipping inside and standing outside of her door with his stupid bouquet. God, I fucking love Mikiya. Not since Eric Cartman have I seen a cartoon character nail such simultaneously relentless and banal human scumminess with such style and tact. We don't see if he manages to get in or not, so I choose to believe that he just snuck around in there waiting for Shiki's room to be unwatched until the nurses chased him out with a spray bottle.

Some days later (I think? At least one day, but it's not clear how many), a new physical therapist comes in to work with Shiki. It's Touko. With Touko's magical specialty, she actually may well be a physical therapist as her cover story, but it's also possible that this is just one of her undercover operations. As she enters, she overhears a couple of nurses talking about how their miraculously reawakened patient has a new specialist coming in, that her eyes are injured but her vision will recover (I guess Shiki got palm-eyegouging powers along with her murdersense...), and that "Mister Puppy" will be ecstatic when she's able to have other visitors.

Then they talk about how sweet Mister Puppy is, how attractive they find him, and how much they envy Shiki for his devotion to her.

What.

The.

Fuck.

...

Okay. It's not completely unbelievable to me that someone could set out to write a sweet, lovable, and empathetic male lead and accidentally write Mikiya instead. It would mean that the author was basically the Japanese version of Earnest Cline at least with regards to gender and relationships, but creators like that unfortunately aren't hard to find. Likewise, I can believe that the forever alone otaku fuckwits who Light Novels of this era were generally marketed toward would see Mikiya as someone they can root for and relate to, and that this series was therefore able to build an audience. We live in a broken world created by a blind idiot god, after all.

But I'm looking back at "A Study in Murder (part 1)" and trying to make sense of it with the assumption that we're supposed to like Mikiya. And I can't.

In her first and most extended conversation with Mikiya, Chara tells us that she was created out of Shiki's lack of trust and faith in the people around her, that she can happily deal with these grim realities, and that she loves killing and destroying. She also tells us that pursuing a relationship with Mikiya is an interest that falls under her part of Shiki's psyche. The translation and wording in that conversation were pretty janky, but if that's NOT what was being said than I have no idea what was. The monster-among-her-own-kind who revels in things being terrible is drawn to Mikiya, while the calm, sane side of Shiki isn't. How is this reconcilable with Mikiya NOT being intended as a loathsome character?

Is it just supposed to be his pheromone powers that make all women unfortunate enough to come near him want to sit on his useless, simpering face that are effecting Shiki? If so, why is it ONLY the evil half of Shiki that's being effected? Is it just because she handles all personal relationships period, or something, in addition to fighty stuff? What does Frisk even do, in that case? Does she only exist for getting fucking schoolwork done?

I don't know how to parse any of this anymore. And knowing that the story thinks that Mikiya is actually desirable makes me lose all inclination to give it the benefit of the doubt about almost anything going forward.

...

Touko comes into Shiki's room, and tells her that she looks healthier than she expected. Shiki, her eyes still bandaged up in the wake of her palm-gouge, is sitting upright in bed, but she doesn't respond. Touko then says that she's a speech therapist by specialty, and that she's here to help with Shiki's aphasia. Ah, that explains why she's not answerin...oh wait nevermind she opens her mouth and says she doesn't have aphasia, seeming confused by Touko's statement.

Touko gently chides her, telling her that if she refuses to speak to anyone after waking up from a head trauma induced coma, it's pretty understandable for the doctors to have misdiagnosed her. Well said, Touko. Shiki is surprised that Touko isn't surprised to hear her talk, in that case, and growing suspicious she tries to mess with her own IV's again. Touko stops her. Shiki finally says aloud that she knows Touko isn't an actual doctor, and Touko admits that no, she's an undercover sorceress. When Shiki tells her that she has no interest in politicking with wizards right now, Touko says that she knows that, but that Shiki is going to need someone else to "fill the hole in her heart." The audience insert mary sue fuckboy shaped hole in her heart, yes yes, we get it.

Speaking of Shiki having no need for wizards at the moment, I wonder what's going on with her family? Have they just written her off as a failed experiment at this point? Possible.

Anyway, when Shiki is understandably distressed by the pronouncement that only the dumbass incel-lite author's hideously stunted idea of what a worthy male should look like can fix her, Touko muses that she might have said too much too fast, and tells Shiki that she'll be back tomorrow.

Outside in the rain, Touko meets up with Mikiya again. He asks her if Shiki is alright, and she tells him that she is, but only for now. She leads him back to her office so she can explain the situation in proper detail; she says it's going to be a long story, and she'd rather get out of the rain to tell it. Meanwhile, back in her hospital room, Touko's words about Shiki's aloneness are haunting her, and we see Shiki start to break down and hyperventilate. Something Touko said is actually getting to some part of her.

Cut back to Touko and Bitchboy, who have returned to the former's office. Touko then proceeds to explain absolutely nothing, except that Shiki's not about to die or the like. Then the camera lingers on them for a while as elevator music plays. That night, Shiki dreams about being surrounded by an army of demons. The next morning, there are these two little birds that land on Shiki's windowsill after the nurse opens the window, and Shiki does an internal monologue of some pseudophilosophy about loneliness.

A montage ensues, with Shiki's voiceover narrating it. Touko came back every day, and Shiki began looking forward to their conversations. We never get to hear these conversations, and the only Touko visit that we DID get onscreen had Shiki sitting there silently and then telling Touko to leave. How did Touko break down her defenses? What kind of rapport did they strike up? I have no idea, and the story apparently considers it unimportant. We just flash ahead to Touko making some contradictory gibberish assessments about Shiki's dual personalities (my favorite example: "He didn't have control of the body, but he also didn't use it?" Chara prefers male pronouns, apparently, but more importantly WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT SENTENCE EVEN MEAN? I'll just assume that it's a translation error and that one of those "didn'ts" was supposed to be a "did"). Then, Touko is talking to Mikiya and telling him that Shiki is missing something from her old identity, that it's connected to him (I think?), and that he should just "interact with her like (he) used to" to help fill the void in her identity.

Interact with her like he used to, eh?

Sure! I, for one, am 100% in favor of this!

Touko mutters some more contradictory nonsense about Chara being in hiding or something, and then Shiki asks for scissors. Touko tells her she still can't have anything sharp; if she can turn her palms into gouging instruments, who even knows what she could do with a metal point! When asked what she even wants scissors for, Shiki says that it's to cut her hair. She's always done this herself, and wouldn't trust anyone else to.

Touko is empathetic about this one harmless, humanizing little quirk of Shiki's.

Shiki's about as dumbfounded at that as you'd expect. Touko leaves, telling the pitiful Shiki as she does so that she might have a new visitor starting tomorrow.

The camera shows some random outdoors stuff and interior hospital scenery for about sixty seconds. Then, finally, we go back to Shiki's hospital room, where she's getting a visit from her parents. I guess they haven't just given up on her after all. They dispassionately congratulate her on coming out of this, and tell her the doctors are ready to discharge her tomorrow; preparations to complete her recovery at home are being made.

Shiki's thoughts suggest that she's dreading this. Her murdervision goes crazy, showing her how to kill everyone in the room even from behind her bandages. Then she's alone, shouting to herself, and it's the middle of the night. Did she just dream her family was here, or was there a timeskip? I don't know, and at this point I don't even care. This show is deliberately making itself hard to follow, what with the arbitrary timeskips and out-of-order episodes that don't seem to be doing anything with their out-of-orderness, so I'll oblige it and just not pay attention anymore. Shiki starts going for her own eyes again, this time with her actual fingertips. Presumably, she's either afraid of the murdervision making her kill people she doesn't want to kill, or she doesn't want her family to get to weaponize her in the end after all. There's still no confirmation on her family having deliberately turned her into...this...but with what I already know of the franchise and what's been hinted at thus far that seems pretty damned likely. Anyway, Touko appears out of nowhere just in time to stop her from permanently blinding herself.

Touko tells her that she's "too decisive, and she acts too quick." I think they meant "impulsive" rather than "decisive," but if I stopped to muse about every questionable word choice and sentence structure in the Garden of Sinners sub this thread would be tens of pages longer.

Also, she tells Shiki that it would be a shame to ruin magical murder eyes like hers. And also that doing so wouldn't prevent her from "seeing what needs to be seen." Either she's being even more obtuse than usual and referring to a completely unrelated thing that needs seeing other than the murder instructions, or this makes absolutely zero sense Kelvin.

Touko explains how her murdersense works (I guess she figured out that that's what Shiki has. Somehow. I'd think her family might have told her, given my theory that this is what they were trying to get her to develop with the split personalities and so forth, but in that case you'd think THEY would have filled Shiki in on this themselves so idk). It's pretty much the same explanation we've already heard from Shiki herself in the last movie, with some added technobabble. She also says that the reason Shiki got this power now is because she came close enough to death to be able to see it, and also channel it through her hands. That's how she wilted those flowers, and I guuuuuess it's also how she managed to fuck up her eyes using only her palms maybe. I guess Shiki has a necrotizing touch power that we haven't seen her use until now.

They trade some non-sequitur about Shiki's will to live, Chara being dead or AWOL or asleep or something, Shiki having belonged under Touko's wing all along (???), and a bunch of other disjointed sentences. Finally, Shiki gets mad at Touko being herself, and the murdervision flash she gets makes her freak out and put her face in her hands. Touko says that with Shiki as emotionally fragile and hollow-souled as she is currently, she's going to make a tempting host for the "drifting thoughts" that inhabit the hospital.

O...kay? I guess hospitals tend to spontaneously generate possessing demons made of the suffering and death of the patients or something. That's a cool worldbuilding detail, but it's also something that should have been established much earlier. They've been in hospitals plenty, and you'd think this is something that would have come up at least once. Still, props given where earned; this is a really neat concept with tons of story potential.

I'm guessing that's what was up with that dream Shiki had earlier, with the demon phantom army trying to pour themselves into her body.

Shiki says she doesn't care if she gets possessed or killed by hospital demons, and Touko calls her pathetic again and says that due to her apathy the wards she set up to protect her from said demons won't be as effective. And, before walking out, she asks her if Chara died in vain.

Um. Haven't they just been blabbering about how Chara is just biding his time or asleep or something? Damnit, I'm starting to care again. I know I'll only regret it, so I should really cut that out.

Later that night, Shiki dreams she's being attacked by another hospital demon. It starts choking her, and telling her that it WILL enter her body. Somewhere, Mikiya starts singing "Singin' In the Rain" again, this time reciting the lyrics out loud. His English is way better than I was expecting, and the VA delivers pretty well. There's a flashback to the humming scene from the second movie. And then, Shiki decides that she does care about her own life, and fights back harder against the dream demon.

Okay, so, I guess Chara was a (very corrupted) embodiment of Shiki's zest for life and vitality, and the car accident made him...die...or something. So now she needs to find something else to replace him, and the closest she ever came to feeling liveliness without being in Chara mode was head-shaking to Mikiya's whistling. Okay, sure, whatever, only the kiss of Prince Friendzone can break the spell, right.

This is a pretty cool scene, though. Mikiya's calm, acapella singing forming a dissonant soundtrack for the frantic dream battle between Shiki and the corpse-like apparition. Then, Shiki launches herself through the window with a shattering of glass, and suddenly Mikiya's singing give way to the overwhelming theme music from the OP, and man, it's legitimately awesome to watch and listen to.

Then Touko shows up and tells Shiki that it seems like the hospital demons have taken over the corpse of a patient who just died and are using it as a vessel to attack Shiki physically, which also helped them get through her wards.

...

What.

Hold up.

That...that ISN'T just another dream or vision? Shiki's awake? There's actually a real, physical zombie attacking her, and she actually just jumped out the hospital window and met Touko?

Random fucking zombie just shambled into the story out of nowhere? Is...is this just a thing that happens, in the setting? One in every X number of patients who dies in the hospital rise as murderous undead and goes rampaging through the wards looking for potential demon-hosts?

...

The zombie that they're apparently fighting now barges out the back door after them. Touko casts some kind of fire spell on it (using her cigarette as a wand, amusingly), but that just burns its hospital gown and bandages away, leaving the undead creature itself with only superficial damage at best. Touko says that they're going to need to find a way of completely incinerating it with hotter flames than she can conjure, or else get someone with holy magic. That last bit wasn't me making a D&D joke by the way, Touko actually says that. She also says that...um...

Okay. Sure. But:

This thing seems to rely on brute strength to attack people. If you cut or blow off his legs, he won't be able to walk. If you destroy his arms, he'll have nothing to grab you with. If its limbs can be destroyed - and I don't know why she'd be raising the subject if she thought they can't be - wouldn't destroying its limbs be exactly the right thing to do in this situation? You can find a permanent solution once the damned thing is immobilized, no?

Touko admits that she's powerless against this monster. Even Shiki with her new murdersense can't kill what's already dead. They need to run.

HAHAHAHAHA SHE JUST CAME WITHIN INCHES OF ACTUALLY SAYING THE THING!!!!

However, Shiki tells Touko to cut it out with all the nerd shit, she's going to kill this thing whether Touko says it's possible or not. She tears off the bandages covering her eyes, revealing them to be surprisingly healthy looking and intact, albeit in mother-of-pearl deathmode. She charges it, her usual fight theme plays, and the fisticuffs begin!

Shiki outmaneuvers and overpowers the monster, knocking it back and dazing it. Touko uses this as an opportunity to toss Shiki a +3 dagger of ghost stabbing, which she promptly uses to cut her hair.

Shiki then proceeds to prove, materially and beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Touko is full of shit by doing the thing that she just assured her was impossible and killing the zombie.

But wait, it gets even better!

After she cuts the corpse apart, the blob of spirit-demon-stuff that had been inhabiting it emerges and starts forcing itself into Shiki's body. Shiki declares that she'd rather die than let this thing possess her, and...okay, so remember in the last movie when Touko had that whole thesis about how you can't be stabbed in the midsection and then just recover instantly?

This movie is set before that one. And Shiki stabs herself in the midsection to kill the demon, and then removes the blade from her flesh without any sign of injury. Right in front of Touko's goldfish-memory nincompoop eyes.

Yes, it's a magic dagger, sure. But if magic daggers are a thing that exists, then they're a thing that fucking exists!

...

If this whole zombie encounter was engineered by Touko to prod Shiki into life and put her abilities to the test, that would solve some (though not all) of these problems. That would be my working hypothesis, if I had any faith left in Garden of Sinners. But I don't.

...

Touko says that Shiki needs to work for her now if she wants more training in the use of her new powers, and Shiki agrees even though Touko just demonstrated that she doesn't know jack and shit about them and Shiki has proven able to use them just fine on her own. Shiki says she agrees, as long as she gets to kill people, because that's a thing she still wants to do apparently, despite everything that's supposedly changed about her. Shiki then sinks to the ground in exhaustion, and Touko says a bunch more stuff, but it's Touko so I ignored it and am confident I missed nothing of substance. Last scene is Shiki being lonely and mourning the loss(???) of Chara, and then Mikiya coming to see her. End episode


So, that was the first four out of nine total Garden of Sinners movies.

"Overlooking View" was a perfectly good episode of Law & Order: Urban Fantasy Division. That's what I was expecting the rest of the series to be like as well. Sure, "Remaining Sense of Pain" was a really, really BAD episode of Law & Order: Urban Fantasy Division, but if the average quality was closer to "Overlooking View" then it could still get away with having a terrible episode here and there. That show would have been fun.

Unfortunately, that's not what this series overall actually is. I'm not sure what it really is, or what it was trying to do, but I'm not curious enough about it to pursue those questions. The subject matter that isn't incoherent is as likely as not to be just plain bad, and usually not even bad in an entertaining way. Mikiya alone would have been enough to ruin an otherwise decent show, and this one would be pretty weak even without his sorry ass getting in the way all the time.

But man. Let's talk about that guy some more, because...just wow.

I wasn't being facetious in my review of "A Study In Murder (pt 1)." Throughout that entire hour long movie, it honestly never so much as occurred to me that the author might be expecting me to like Mikiya. I didn't have so much as a suspicion that this wasn't a moody supernatural detective version of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" where the unpleasantness of the characters and the schadenfreude of seeing them inflicting themselves on each other is the whole joke. Since seeing it (and before seeing "Remaining Sense of Pain"), I had one online friend tell me that this wasn't the author's intent, but I also talked to multiple other friends who only saw the first couple of movies and had the exact same interpretation that I did. It's really just mind blowing.

In terms of how this reflects on the author, well...this was an early work, written by a pretty young Nasu. The inexperience definitely shows, and so too does the emotional immaturity. I had my Nice Guy phase in my late teens and early to mid twenties. Even at my worst, if you'd showed me "A Study in Murder" I'd have still seen Mikiya as the solipsistic, condescending, narcissistic little stalker that he is, but I was bad enough to at least be able to understand why someone might write a character like that and think them heroic. And why someone might tack them onto a story that otherwise seems to be about a much more interesting female protagonist and twist all the other characters into pretzels to suck his mary sue cock. I got better. I know people who were worse than me who got better (and yes, some of them got better while remaining guys). So, when I described the author as an incel-lite trog, that might not describe him later in his career. But I'm pretty damned sure it's an accurate description of who he was when he wrote this shit.

If this show was nothing but Shiki fighting demons across moody nighttime environments while awesome music played and Touko stumbled around in the background with her mouth duct taped shut (holy fuck is Touko another whole topic. She's obviously meant to be the inscrutable wise woman. How the hell do you manage to have your wise wizard character constantly be wrong about almost everything?), then I'd enjoy it. But that's not what it is. So, while I hope to continue enjoying other Type Moon adaptations in the future, I doubt there's much point in giving Garden of Sinners any more chances than I already gave it.