Garden of Sinners: A Study In Murder: The Light Novel: The Anime: The Review: Part 1: Part One

This is the second Garden of Sinners movie, and the first story to take place chronologically. Given the previous title's time travel-adjacent shenanigans, I can only assume that the story is being told out of order for related reasons. Other than that, and the title being a sort of lazy Sherlock Holmes allusion, I don't know what to expect.

It's snowing on the nighttime city, and dead silent. Mikiya trudges along a snow-covered overpass on the city's outskirts, bundled up and huddled under his umbrella. He comes across Shiki standing by the railing and looking out over the city lights. She's wearing a crisp white bathrobe this time, to match the snow.

Okay, fine, this one is actually a proper kimono, but I'm going to keep bullying Shiki anyway. 

Mikiya passes her by, but then does sort of a double take and turns to stare at her back. This is Garden of Sinners, so he stands there with the snow falling and her kimono billowing for a long time. He finally greets her, and she turns her head and stares at him. For a while. Then soft piano music starts, and the opening credits begin. During the credits, we see a bunch of flowers, then a boring high school orientation assembly, and finally Mikiya coming up to Shiki and saying he recognizes her, and her asking him who the hell he is.

It's not as strong a hook as the last movie's. To put it mildly.

Begin episode proper, with a provided date of August 30, 1995. The last movie took place in August 1998, so Shiki and Mikiya had known each other for three years by that point. Not sure how old either of them are, but if they're in early to mid high school now then I guess they'd be 17-19 or so in "Overlooking View." Assuming that Shiki wasn't built and programmed with her complete personality a month ago, of course. Speaking of whom, Shiki is getting out of bed in a palatial home very unlike her later apartment, and an sharply dressed older man is bowing to and saluting her like royalty. 

I'm inferring that Shiki is an heiress to one of the mage clans, regardless of whether she's a biological daughter or a constructed one.

He begs her not to be out too late. She doesn't acknowledge him in the slightest as she heads outside into the summer evening. She muses in typically teenaged fashion about how the cliched darkness of the night speaks to her soul, and whether she seeks to be alone or to reassure herself that she already is alone. Hmm. Looks like maybe I wasn't bullying her enough.

The nighttime city is desolate at us for a while. Then, Shiki lutches across the street as if in some kind of weird trance, and has an unexpected meeting with someone who I never expected to show up in this series. The notorious, the fearsome, the inescapable...TRUCK-KUN! 

There's a collision. Blood splatters everywhere. And in the wake of it, we see Shiki standing, seemingly unperturbed, despite being covered in it. Right, of course, she has that synth-blood that we saw her shed when she cut her arm in half that one time. It might not actually be vital for her at all.

Or...actually, looking back at the accident, I'm not sure if that actually is Shiki who got hit. Hair looks different. Maybe Shiki just happened to be there at the scene of a hit-and-run? Whichever it is, she dabs some of the blood on her lips and cheeks like makeup, and does her creepy slasher smile. 

Okay then. I knew she liked stabbing ghosts a little too much, but this is a bad sign even from that baseline. Though I guuuuess this at least makes her high school goth poetry slightly more genuine, idk.

School the next day. Mikiya comes up to Shiki during homeroom and starts commenting out of nowhere about her clothing choices. She explicitly barely knows the guy at this point, so any fig leaf of tolerability he might have had up until now is pretty much gone. She just kind of glares at him impatiently, but answers his stupid questions politely, if laconically. He asks if she gets cold wearing kimonos when it isn't warm out (the snowy scene with him spotting her on the overpass was the previous winter, I gather), and she lies and tells him she wears coats over them. He asks what kind of coat you can wear over a kimono; how does that even work? God this kid is a nosy little prick.

Cut to her buying a coat that I guess kinda sorta works with a kimono. Mikiya is having an effect on her, for some reason. 

That night (I assume) a panicked man is being chased through the otherwise empty streets. His pursuer catches up to him, and we just see a distinctly feminine hand holding a dagger descend on him.

Um. Shiki?

...

Maybe Touco isn't Shiki's creator or mentor so much as her future jailor? Shiki was a monster of the week that Touco managed to put a leash on for use against the subsequent ones?

It's kind of looking like that might be where this goes.

...

The next day, Miyika and Shiki are hanging out during lunchtime at school. It's not clear if she was an active participant in them being together out on the deck, or if Mikiya just followed her there and she was too polite to tell him to fuck off. From what I've seen of their interactions so far, I'm placing a solid bet on the latter. Mikiya is telling her about the gruesome murder that took place last night; he knows details about it that the press still doesn't, due to a close family member of his being the coroner assigned to the case.

I'm sure said family member would be thrilled to know about him spreading this around to seem all cool and edgy for girls he has crushes on. :/

Anyway, the victim was chopped up almost beyond recognition. All four limbs were removed, with the cause of death having been hemorrhagic shock. 

Shiki asks if they have any idea who did it. Definitely no carefully concealed ulterior motives for asking that question, no, definitely not. Mikiya says they have no leads, and then continues to go on about the gory details until Shiki tells him not to talk about this stuff during lunch.

It really says something that Mikiya makes me root for the literal serial killer whenever he's interacting with her. :/

Over the following nights, three more murders of the same kind happen. As well as losing their limbs, at least one of the victims have a taijitu symbol carved into them. Not sure what that's about yet, but it could mean that Shiki isn't just killing for its own sake but rather performing some kind of sacrificial ritual. That would fit, assuming that the weird aristocratic family she's part of is in fact one of the mage clans.

Because of the murders, the local schools suspend all afterschool activities and urge their students to go straight home after classes get out, before nightfall. No afterschool activities? Well shit, that means we have no story! You can't have an anime without extracurriculars! Shiki does her best to carry the story regardless by running into a long-haired boy who she doesn't know on her way to the lockers. He asks her if she's looking for Mikiya, and then tells her that four times and counting is a bit excessive. 

Shiki does not respond to this. Just kind of recoils away from him as he leaves after telling her this.

Well, I mean...he's not wrong?

She reaches the exit, and sees that it's raining outside. She stares at the rain as if hypnotized for thirty seconds or so until Mikiya finds her and offers to share his umbrella. She's startled when he snaps her out of her rain trance, and gasps.

Hmm. I wonder if she knows she's been committing the murders? This is starting to remind me a little of Stephen King's "Strawberry Spring," with environmental stimuli inducing a murdertrance. She looked pretty out of it when dabbing that blood on herself, so...maybe she's the victim of some kind of curse or possession?

She tells him she doesn't need his umbrella, she's waiting for someone to pick her up. He unilaterally declares that he'll wait with her then, oblivious to her obvious irritation. Then he just hums "Singing in the Rain" for nearly a full minute. About two thirds of the way through this, Shiki starts headbobbing to it juuust a little, and his humming gets an orchestral accompaniment. The power of Nice Guyism is getting through to her, I guess. Then she sees a murder montage flash, ending on some close ups of Mikiya's face, and she snaps alert again and shouts out his name like a warning.

Okay, I understand you perfectly now, Shiki. Mikiya makes me want to stab people too.

She changes the subject when he's alarmed by her outburst, and the conversation calms slowly back down to nothing after a few minutes. That night, Shiki claims her fifth victim.

A day or two later, Shiki is at home swordfighting with someone. It's an intense match, and they're both skilled fencers. 

Eventually, he manages to knock her down with a surprise kick (breaking a wall fixture in the process. These guys do not go soft), and she reluctantly lowers her sword.

Afterward, the butler we saw her ignoring before brings her a towel, and asks how the match with her father went. Ah, so that was her dad. Teaching her all sorts of useful life skills that she's already finding ways to put into practice in the real world, I see. She crossly tells the butler to stop kissing up to her, it's not like she's the actual heir or anything, a woman never could be the leader of Clan Ryougi. The butler counters that that might not actually be true; her brother hasn't inherited certain traits necessary for the job, while she has.

Brother is really bad at magic, I guess? Odd that we haven't seen Shiki actually use any, if she's supposed to be better at it. Her tricks in the previous movie all seemed to be using stuff that was given to her. I think I'm misinterpreting at least one and possibly multiple parts of the picture, here.

She goes up to her room and takes off her kimono, revealing that her body is half-covered in bandages. From being hit by the car, maybe? Or just injuries sustained from her lifestyle in general, both domestic and otherwise? Could be anything. 

Oh my god Shiki why do you care?

Cut to Mikiya hanging out with a jock friend of his. Chad is asking him if he and Shiki are a thing now, and Mikiya insists that they're just friends, which Chad correctly interprets as his crush being unrequited. He goes on to inform us that a lot of guys have crushes on the pretty, aloof, and mysterious Ryougi girl, but that Chad himself never got it. Frankly, she creeps him the hell out. 

Mikiya insists that there's a side of her that most people don't see, but that he does (what side is that, Mikiya? Can you describe it? Can you list these qualities? Do you actually know anything about her?). He explains her aloofness away as mere timidity, but she's really friendly and cute once you get past that (when did you get past that, Mikiya? What was a friendly and/or cute thing you've ever seen her do, aside from maaaaybe head-bobbing to your humming?). If she were an animal, he claims, she'd be a rabbit.

In the following class period, Mikiya finds a note from Shiki on his desk. He waits for her after school at the time and place of her specification. She's an hour late, but when she does arrive she's grinning broadly, wearing a modern outfit (including the jacket she bought at his prodding), and enthusiastically hurrying him along. He only half-facetiously asks if she's actually Shiki, and she replies.

Well that's not terrifying at all. If it were anyone besides Mikiya on a date with her, I'd be worried for them.

She drags him around to buy things, snack on things, play arcade games, etc, all while cutesy date music plays. Shiki what the actual hell. Then, finally, after he and the audience are both utterly baffled, she sits him down at a cafe and explains the situation to him. She is Shiki, but she's not the one he's used to. She has something along the lines of dissociative identity disorder. Both of her personas consider themselves "Shiki," and acknowledge the other to be equally legitimate representations of herself, but the aspects they express and the desires they prioritize are opposite. And one of them - the seldom seen, vivacious part of her that may or may not also be the one doing the serial killing - wanted to go out with Mikiya. For some reason. And the other, more often dominant, persona let her take control for a while to do it. For some reason.

Mikiya just kinda sits there gormlessly through this explanation. Even when she talks about her love of killing. Even when, right after telling him how much she likes spending time with him, she suddenly gets up and tells him she'll see him again soon before marching out of the cafe, leaving him alone. 

So, she's the multi-personality serial killer, but he's the one who's behavior is making me go "what the hell is wrong with you, kid?" It's an odd experience.

Next scene is Mikiya at home with what I thought were his parents at first, but then he refers to them as his aunt and uncle. He's an orphan, perhaps? He's sitting at the living room coffee table, peeling oranges in an OCD way that apparently runs in the family. His uncle, the aforementioned coroner, tells him some more about the serial killings he's helping investigate. Each body they've found so far chopped up in a different way. Limbs missing. Body cut neatly in half. Some of them are sewn back together, but with each limb attached to a different stump. Some, but not all, have the Taijitu symbol carved into them. The murders have been getting persistently more frequent since they started at the end of the summer, and with foot traffic outside now decreasing as a result he fears the killer will soon start breaking into houses.

He also says that he found some paraphernalia from Mikiya's high school at the scene of the latest crime, which looks like the killer may have dropped it. This part is "completely classified," but that he's telling him anyway because he fears for him.

-_-

Um.

...

Police found evidence that the killer was at a school, and they aren't going to warn everyone?

What the fuck?

Why?

This isn't what a sane, competent police force would do. This isn't what an incompetent, apathetic police force would do. This isn't even what a corrupt, malevolent police force would do, unless the killer was personally paying them off. I don't even know what the hell to make of this.

I'm going to hang in there and HOPE there's an explanation, because otherwise...

...

Mikiya's uncle also brought a photo of the school pin found at the crime scene home, and asks Mikiya is he wants to keep the photo as a souvenir. Because that's a normal thing to do. I guess Mikiya's lack of social niceties is more justifiable, if this type of thing has been his frame of reference for however many years.

Fastforward to January (I think it was November before? Not sure). Mikiya is monologueing about how Shiki has become even more aloof and isolated since the schoolyear's start. His meetings with nega!Shiki have been infrequent, at best, but he's having some alone time with her now, and she's telling him more about her dual nature.

This part is very badly subbed, so I may not be getting it exactly right (and I mean objectively, verifiably bad subbing; I'm seeing grammatical errors and such), but what I think she's saying is that something happened very early in Shiki's development that ruined her infantile expectation of love and safety from the people around her. She dealt with this by splitting into a mild mannered, mostly asocial persona who functions without needing other people, and a gregarious, lively persona who can look at the worst of humanity and like it. The former persona enjoys studying, traditional clothing, and long solitary walks. The latter enjoys games, sensuality, and wholesale slaughter and destruction. Occasions like a major outing with Mikiya, because that's a desire that falls under Chara's purview.

...

Oh my god.

Chara is specifically adapted to enjoy and thrive in a world of terrible people.

And she wanted to go on a date with Mikiya.

I am laughing. I'm laughing so. Fucking. Hard. I take back all my complaints about Mikiya up to this point, I now love everything about the story's use of him.

...

The last thing she tells him, though, is that Frisk is very desperate to keep the status quo. She doesn't want Chara getting any stronger than she currently is. 

In fact, she might even be willing to kill for it.

Splitting it here.