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

The next time Shiki approaches Mikiya at school, Frisk is in control, and she's not happy at being approached by him. Downright angry, in fact, that he's kept meeting up with Chara even after she herself warned him that Frisk wouldn't like it.

I feel like something got skipped over in the adaptation here. Last that we knew, Frisk willingly gave Chara control for her date(s) with Mikiya. Now she's acting like she told him to stay away from her, and he didn't. There was a mention of Frisk and Chara coming "out of alignment" due to the latter's attachment to him, but that's a lot vaguer than what's being acted on now.

Granted, Chara could have just been lying about how okay Frisk was with their meetings. That's entirely possible.

She tells him that she's a psycho, and he really doesn't want to keep getting close to her, much less destabilizing her. He plays this off as a "nobody's perfect" kind of thing. Finally, Frisk realizes that he didn't realize how literal she was being when she talked about willingness to kill, and shows him a freshly bandaged injury on her arm. She informs him that she got it at the time of the most recent murder, and that if he keeps trying to get in Chara's pants he too will become a victim.

It's not clear who exactly she's warning him about right now. Chara killing him for funsies, or Frisk killing him to keep Chara weakened?

She gets up and leaves, leaving him to stare after her in shock. Slowly, shakily, he acknowledges that Chad was right. He's been totally, willfully blind, and seeing what he wanted to see. He's not sure if he believes her totally just yet, but even if she isn't the killer, her willingness to pretend to be is not indicative of anything good.

When he gets home, he asks his uncle what's been going on. He confirms that there's been another murder in the last few days, though nobody outside of the department knows about it. There's a media blackout, because...um...

THAT IS NOT HOW HIGH PROFILE MURDER CASES WORK.

This part feels like a story written by some dumbass teenager trying to show off how edgy and cynical they are without actually understanding much about the world. It's not quite as cringey as E.L. James pretending to know how cell phones work, but it's in the same ballpark.

Well. Anyway.

Mikiya asks more questions about the latest crime scene. Looks like his uncle is a detective or assistant thereof, not a coroner as I thought at first. The focus on the state of the bodies above all else during the previous conversations kinda threw me off before, but in retrospect that was more down to Mikiya's line of questioning than his uncle's actual focus. He confirms that the sixth victim was killed at the time Shiki said, and that she fought back hard; they found some skin under her fingernails that the medical team thinks she gouged from her attacker's upper arm. Right where Shiki had a bandage. Now that they have a DNA sample from the killer, he's confident that they'll catch them soon.

He also asks Mikiya why he looks so pale all of a sudden. He lets this question be deflected easily, though. Which is understandable. There's no reason to take Mikiya's reaction all that seriously. It's not like they've found evidence linking the killer to his particular school or anything. If he's asking really specific questions about this most recent case and looking spooked at the answers, that's just kids being kids.

...

This is definitely the weakest Type Fate piece I've seen so far. It's not even close to the next weakest.

...

He runs over to the Ryougi mansion, but is told that she isn't home. As he makes his way back to the street through their ornamental bamboo grove, he muses about how he used to be afraid of bamboo forests as a kid. At the time, the forests' emptiness disturbed him he thought that the shadows looked like ghosts or monsters. Now, he realizes, the REAL reason we fear the shadows is not because they're empty, but because they might have another human being in them. Part of growing up is learning that monsters aren't real, but another part of growing up is learning they are.

That's a nice tie-in with Shiki's explanation about how her own childhood development got screwed up. I'm interested to learn how that happened. I'm guessing something more mystical than just early childhood trauma, given how weird its end results came out.

On the way out, he runs into Shiki coming the other way. She's covered with blood, and smiling in the way that only Chara does. Beside her is the body of her latest victim.

Wait...she killed someone right here on her family's own property? Who? How?

Whoever the body is supposed to have belonged to, Mikiya collapses to the walkway floor, dry heaving.

Cut to dawn, with Mikiya riding in a police car. His uncle is one of the officers present, and is asking him if he saw any sign of the culprit. Mikiya denies it, because he's literally the worst. Also, the Ryougis are claiming that that part of the bamboo park isn't technically on their property, that they had no idea who would be walking there and why, and that they don't consider it any of their business. Not much of a surprise.

The following evening, the butler knocks on Shiki's door to inform her that there's someone camped out in the bamboo in front of the house. No, the cops aren't back. Yes, the reason he's telling her instead of going straight to her dad is because it's one of her classmates. She tells him to just ignore the idiot, and quickly tucks herself into bed.

The lights go out in the windows. The carp swim in the little brook under the walkway. The house sits in the moonlight. This all continues for some time, because this is Garden of Sinners and for some reason the studio decided they needed to stretch each of these into an hour-long movie. Finally, Shiki gets back out of bed and looks outside. Mikiya is still there, drinking hot tea out of a thermos he brought. Unwilling to abandon his serial killer waifu. Clearly still in Frisk mode, she lets out a disgusted sigh and closes the door again.

Tomorrow midday, an exhausted looking Mikiya leaves home. I don't even know what time he's supposed to have given up and come home to go to sleep, but he's saying that he can still make it to school in time for his afternoon classes if he leaves now.

Also, this time he says goodbye to his mom, not his aunt. I guess he was just visiting his nearby aunt and uncle, rather than living with them. Noted.

He gets to school, and he and Shiki pass each other in the hallway without looking at each other.

Evidently, the brief moment of self-awareness that he had when she showed him her injury is completely forgotten now. Last night wasn't just the flailing of a confused boy who's too shocked to know what to do. Because he comes back the following evening. And the one after that. And the one after that. Months pass. Weather patterns change. She continues ignoring him. He continues camping (I'd normally call it "stalking," but I think the Spencer Principle applies here. Just like punching a nazi isn't assault, obsessively perving on a serial killer isn't stalking) in front of her door. Her family keeps either tolerating or just not noticing him. This sensitive, romantic music plays through it all, and oh my god this movie is brilliant why was I complaining about it before.

The best part of this is the bit where we see Shiki watching him through her window again when the snow has started again. Frisk has that frustrated, huffy expression that you'd expect, but you can see juuuust a hint of Chara being all doey-eyed through it. He's just that awful. Try as she might, Frisk can't keep Chara and her morbid affinity for human terribleness completely suppressed when her very ideal is sitting right outside the window.

The musical score here is just the cherry on top. It's perfect.

Finally, he gets another audience with Chara after school. The fact that she still hasn't been caught suggests to me that either the murders have stopped, or her family has completely subverted the police.

Hmm.

It doesn't seem like she was killing anyone UNTIL this schoolyear started. Or at least, she was doing so discretely and infrequently enough that no one suspected a serial killer. And now it seems like things have quieted down again.

When she said that Chara and Frisk were out of alignment because of Mikiya, did she mean that interaction with him was what was causing her to go out and kill people?

Unless I'm misinterpreting the timeline, that seems much more likely than not.

Holy shit.

Anyway, she asks him why he's still obsessed with her after what he saw. He tells her that he didn't see anything. Confused, she asks why he lied to the police about what he saw. And he continues to insist that he doesn't believe that she's a murderer. When asked why, he says that looking at her, he just fundamentally does not believe it, and it won't matter what happens. She asks how he can think he knows even the first thing about her, and he says that he doesn't care; he just believes that he does, and will not abandon that belief.

He literally says that. And when he does, Chara makes this expression.

She can't deny it any more. This is love. True, unadulterated love.

She can kill a dozen more people in front of his eyes, and he still will refuse to believe that she is a murderer. Because he decided who and what she was the first time he laid eyes on her, and nothing about her actual self will ever make a difference to him; he decided what she was, to himself and FOR himself, all on his own with no input from her. He will continue to aid and abet in her murders, if put in a position to do so, not because of any murderous desires himself - that would at least be something you could vaguely, morbidly respect - but out of sheer, unbreakable solipsism. He is the absolutely most noxious, pathetic, contemptible piece of shit excuse for a human being that she will ever meet. She can't resist him.

Why has no one ever shown this to me before? This might just be the best black comedy I've ever seen.

She invites him to come to her house again, as he's been doing. This time though, when he parks himself in the bamboo, she silently comes out to sneak up behind him, wearing a blood red kimono and wielding a knife. She's lurching, and her expression is blank. I think she was also walking like that when we saw her at the car crash, if that was actually her.

Is there a third persona at work, here? A sleepwalking marauder, seperate from either Frisk or Chara? That seems to be against theme, given the heavyhanded focus on duality with the Taijutu symbols and everything, but...it kinda looks that way.

Her initial attack opens a deep slice in his hand. He avoids her following slashes, but it's getting harder and harder; she's an experienced fencer, and this is her element. Finally, he just has to turn tail and run as fast as he can. She fells bamboo stalk after bamboo stalk as she swings after him; she's definitely shooting to kill. He manages to outpace her and climb up onto one of the walkways, but while his legs might be longer he has nowhere near her stamina. He exhausts himself just at the entrance to the trail, slipping on the rain-slicked ground and falling over just as she catches up to him again. She straddles him and puts her knife to his throat. He stares wildly up into her blank, doll-like face, and slowly his desperation gives way to acceptance. His breathing slows, and deepens. Internalizing that he is going to die here, and that there's no use trying to fight past this point.

He finally learned. But this was what it took.

She remains straddling him in a manner that would look fairly sexual if they weren't fully clothed for some time, as the rain pours down all around them. Then, suddenly, she shouts his name, and her head hangs downward. A quiet hint of the distorted opera music plays.

She asks for him to please say something. After stammering for a bit, he manages to whisper the words "I don't want to die." She looks at him sadly, and says "I want to kill you."

Then there's the sound of a speeding car, and everything goes black.

Flash forward to June 1998. About two years later, and about two months before the events of "Overlooking View." We're in Touko's library, and Mikiya is there with Touko. He tells her he has to go do something, and then we see him bringing flowers to Shiki in the hospital. He says he's been doing this every week since that car slammed into her as she straddled him, miraculously passing him over between its tires.

Okay, so he wasn't bringing flowers to Kirie (the minor antagonist from the last movie) all those weeks that she saw him coming in. He was bringing them to Shiki, and Kirie just happened to strike up a possibly one-sided rapport with him. I hope it was totally one-sided, actually; that's would just be deliciously karmic. Anyway, Mikiya assures us that he knows she won't kill anyone ever again, even when she regains her mobility, because "now she knows the pain and sadness of murder." Sure, that makes sense. Of course, he knew that she wasn't a murderer before this too, even though he'd seen her murder someone, so that's how much his opinions are worth. End.


This was a much more mixed experience than any of the other Moonbeast stuff I've seen. The gallows humor inherent in the premise was out of this world, but the tone was schizophrenic in a way that didn't really make the most of it. The clumsy writing and plotting help with the grim farce in some aspects (the ludicrously incompetent police sort of support the theme of people having to deal with a fundamentally broken world), but they also got pretty distracting.

I'm also not sure what tone this series as a whole is trying to go for. "Overlooking View" was unironic urban fantasy adventure/horror, and did a pretty decent job of it. This one...well, it started out as (very biting) edgy dark comedy, but the tone of the ending seemed like it was trying to be unironically hopeful and optimistic. Somehow. I have a feeling that it'll only make sense once I've seen more of the series. We know that Shiki gets out of the hospital and starts living alone under Touko's employ in the next couple of months, but we don't yet know how the accident might have changed her, or what control mechanisms Touko employs.

I suppose that, considering that the monster of the week ended up committing suicide last episode, this might be building up a self-destructiveness-of-evil theme. Mikiya's love for Shiki might be incredibly perverse, and hers for him even moreso, but it's still love. Maybe, in seeking out the worst in each other, they'll eventually make each other better people?

That kinda doesn't hold up to scrutiny, considering the implications that it was interacting with him that made her kill other people. But I could have been misinterpreting those implications.

Anyway, it's a confused, clumsy work. But considering that it's an early chapter from an author still finding their footing, it's alright.