Garden of Sinners E1: “Overlooking View” (part one)

Garden of Sinners, or Kara no Kyoukai in Japanese, was the first light novel series by author Nasu Fate Moon that paved the way for the rest of the Typeverse. Rather than getting a TV anime series adaptation like Stay/Night or Zero, these got turned into a series of hour length movies. All I know about them is that they were written previously to the other Fate stuff I've seen so far, and I believe they're set earlier as well though I'm not sure about that.

Our story starts with a woman named Shiki getting a knock at her apartment door, and not being happy to see the guy behind it. On one hand, he brought her something to put in the fridge. On the other, he comes across as sort of a paternalistic busybody, chiding her for not keeping her door locked and a bunch of other little things. Also, the ice cream he brought melted because of how long he took to bring it over in hot weather without asking for ice to carry it with. And she doesn't even like ice cream. Okay, yeah, I'm fully on Shiki's side of this little spat now.

She puts the ice cream in the freezer next to the last one she still hasn't eaten. He waxes bad-poetic about how he feels like he should buy her strawberry ice cream even though she has no interest in it because strawberries are related to roses and...okay, I'm having trouble following his point, but I think the gist of it is that he's trying to complement her via overcomplicated botany metaphors and she's just suffering through it. I'm not sure what these two's relationship is supposed to be. He's coming across as having an awkward unrequited crush on her, but she's clearly willing to let him into her apartment on short-to-no notice, so I dunno what they are.

Anyway, we cut from the Nice Guy plant taxonomy to a ghostly female figure poised at the edge of a rooftop in a decaying metropolis.

Actual screenshot from Serial Experiments Lai-wait, hold on a second...​

A glowing butterfly takes off over the girl's head, and the intro credits roll. Mournful, New Agey song with harp music, think "Japanese Enya in a particularly sorrowful mood" and you'll be pretty close to the mark. The titles are intercut with surreal imagery of plasma butterflies flying over monochrome voids and close-ups of compound insect eyes made of rippling molten glass. Then we see the girl's broken body smashed out all over the road and bisected by a train that just ran over it during the title drop. Lovely!

It's now the next morning, and Shiki is waking up and putting herself together in front of an oppressively bright bedroom window. The aesthetics continue to be like a less psychedelic and tech-themed Serial Experiments Lain. Shiki's morning routine is long, silent, and foreboding, in a very similar way to Rin's in the UBW pilot. Something of a motif in Moonsu's work, I guess? Anyway, she grabs a bottle of water from her refrigerator (which seems to contain nothing besides water bottles, aside from the unopened ice cream boxes in the freezer...) and heads outside. As she walks, a voiceover from the local news reports on that teenager who jumped off a rooftop last night. She was apparently the fourth suicide to use that particular rooftop within the last couple of weeks.

Shiki stops in place on the sidewalk, and stares at the building in question. As if either contemplating becoming the fifth to jump off it, or deciding that there's a demon living in it and she should go kick its ass. Or something.

Also, is she wearing a bathrobe out on a busy sidewalk? I thought it was a kimono at first, but looking again I'm not sure.

Well, no one seems to be staring at her, so I guess it's just a kimono that errs a little on the bathrobe side.

She arrives at...either a library, or the house of a friend who has a lot of books. Mister Strawberry is here, along with a redheaded woman who's musing about the rash of suicides in a sort of knowing manner that suggests these people all know or at least suspect what's really going on here.

All four of the victims so far were teenaged girls. All from different schools and neighborhoods with little to no overlap in their social groups. None of them are known to have been abused, mentally ill, or otherwise at risk. One particularly bizarre detail, which Redhead claims that Mister Strawberry - who she names as Mikiya Kokutou - pointed out to her earlier, is that jumping is a very attention-getting and disruptive suicide method. People who choose it tend to have a sense of grandiosity, or have a message that they want to get out...and yet, not one of the girls left a suicide note, or otherwise told anyone why they were going to do it. That's a very unusual combination. Four times in a row, all in the same place, with victims who didn't know each other?

This is starting to look more like the work of a particularly cunning serial killer than anything else.

Redhead also says that "our boy" still hasn't come back to them. It's not clear if she's talking about Mikiya, who's sitting right there but may not be all there upstairs, or someone else.

Spooky cut-forward, with a close up of Shiki's coffee cup turning into a sickly yellow full moon as it leers over the dingy skyscrapers. Distorted opera music plays as another lone girl crosses the midnight city and makes her way to that tower. Is the victim Shiki, this time? Hard to say. It kind of looks like her, but it's dark.

Okay, it IS Shiki, but I don't think she's tonight's victim after all. It appears that there's already been one. And a dog has been heedlessly tracking what's left of her all over the sidewalk.

So, when are the police going to start posting watchmen on that rooftop? Maybe they already are and it's just not making a difference, because magic. Shiki soon finds the body and directs another wary, combative stare upward. Both at the rooftop itself, and at the coven of ghost girls who are levitating above it amid the return of the spooky opera music.

Are these the victims, the culprits, or perhaps both? Whatever the case, I get the strong impression that most people can't see these specters like Shiki can.

The next day, while news of the fifth suicide spreads on the radio, Shiki reports to Redhead that there will be three more suicides. She saw eight ghost girls hovering over the building, and managed to recognize at least a couple of them as previous victims, so presumably three of them are suicides-to-be. And, Redhead reveals herself knowledgeable enough in occult matters to propose a partial explanation (after chiding Shiki for doing something as dangerous as going to the site alone at night). At that condemned-but-not-yet-demolished building complex, she happens to know, time is slightly distorted, with the events of the material world and their spiritual repercussions happening out of order, and sometimes with the potential for reversed causality. So, the ghosts of suicide victims who haven't jumped yet could very well already be there, waiting for themselves to happen. As for why the girls are killing themselves at all, she suspects that as the building's temporal spirit-space decays further and further, the view from the rooftop might be causing a sort of basilisk-hack effect. The view of the city they live in from such a great distance, triggering a rush of memories from past and future alike with no sense of time or cause and effect, might lead to an impulse of "walk toward the thing you recognize." Which in this case brings them off the edge.

Seems like a pretty big inference based on pretty minimal evidence, I have to say. Unless Redhead has heard of other cases extremely similar to this one, I suppose, but if that was so she probably would have proposed this explanation to begin with, before Shiki told her about the ghost girls. Anyway, even assuming that Redhead is right, there are some questions that need answering. Why are all the victims teenaged girls? And, what is causing them to wander up onto that rooftop alone at night in the first place?

Also, wait a minute...there were NINE of those specters, looking back at the screenshot. Not eight. Shiki is keeping something from Redhead. I suspect that one of the ghosts is either Redhead's, or Shiki's herself.

Then Redhead asks if Shiki thinks that this "might be related," but doesn't say to WHAT. Even when Shiki asks her what the heck she's talking about. A sixth suicide is announced on the news (what? In the middle of the day? Are they still not posting any sort of guards on that rooftop?) Then there's a very confusing montage of images. Flashback? Flash forward? Not sure which, maybe that's the point. We see Shiki back at home. Then we see her poking Mikiya (who was sitting silent and still in place during both her visits to Redhead's place), and him falling limply over as if dead or catatonic. We saw him saying and doing things in the intro, though, and Redhead said he was talking just within the last few days, so maybe this is a condition that just comes and goes with him? Shiki spilling water on her phone. Shiki wandering the city.

Yeah, I'm not following.

Anyway, the next coherent scene has Shiki returning to the suicide tower again, this time in the late afternoon, and arriving just in time to see body number seven plummet to the ground. She looks fearful. Almost feral. Then, she draws a dagger from somewhere in her bathrobe kimono and marches into the front door of the crumbling old high rise, slashing the "keep out: condemned" ribbons out of her way.

The heck is even going on?

She advances through the abandoned hallways, grimacing like a soldier in a trench with her dagger held out in front of her, as creepy music box type music gets louder and louder and we hear laughing ghost girls. Finally, Shiki meets one face to face.

Unfortunately, the spirit proves hostile. She instructs Shiki to "come with me" and then latches onto her hand and starts dragging her violently through the moldering corridor, toward an open window. Shiki tries to use her dagger, however effective that could even be against a ghost, but it's quickly knocked out of her hand. Bits of broken walling throw themselves at her as she tries to resist the pull. In desperation, she manages to pick up her dagger again and impales herself through the hand that the spirit is pulling at.

Oh...heh. I hadn't even noticed until I paused to take this screenshot, but now that I see the still image that hand is clearly prosthetic. Okay, I think I get how this works. The ghost is telekinetic (as evidenced by the bits of drywall it's been throwing), but it can only use that on nonliving objects. Maybe it would have normally tried to grab the intruder by the clothing, but in Shiki's case the arm was a much better target. And now Shiki is using her dagger to pin that arm to the wall, so that the ghost can't drag her by it.

Of course, if I'm right about the logic of this sequence, then the ghost should be able to just grab the dagger and use that to kill Shiki. Or, if she's only interested in advancing her death-by-falling fetish specifically, just discard the dagger and grab Shiki's arm again.

Unless the dagger is enchanted with an anti-ghost effect, of course. This is the Fateverse, so that's not terribly unlikely.

Turns out that dagger is ghostproof in some manner, because rather than grabbing it the attacker just yanks on the prosthetic arm hard enough to pull it free, and nearly ripping it out of Shiki's body in the process. As the ghosts' distorted opera theme picks up again, the spirit babbles something about how "you can fly like us" and "we wish he would take us with him, he's always so straight" and other Twin Peaks style riddles. Shiki seems to get an idea from what just happened, though. She picks up the dagger a final time, sends a flash of golden fire through the blade (either the dagger actually is magical as I suspected, or it's just a really dramatic visual embellishment even by anime standards) and pries the hand from her wrist entirely in a spray of blood.

Shiki is panting, but seemingly in less pain than the blood loss would have made me think. Defeated, the specter withdraws through a nearby wall and vanishes.

Later that evening, Shiki is back at Redhead's house. Her name is Touko, apparently. Turns out that Touko is the Winry to Shiki's Edward, and has a workshop full of dolls, mannequins, and synthetic limbs like Shiki's. Also, it appears that it wasn't just Shiki's hand that's artificial; it's her entire arm. And somehow, it still bled when she pried off the hand at the wrist. When we see a closeup of Touko's work, it's clear that she's no mundane prostheticist.

The way she talks to Shiki as she works, going on about how it's the power of the soul that allows her constructs to work and that Shiki used to be a soulless void herself once strongly suggests that she's the one in charge here. In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that Shiki is some sort of artificial life form that Touko created herself. The rest of Shiki's body looks much more human than that arm, but appearances can be deceiving. Also, it would explain why she has nothing but bottled water in her refrigerator, if she's some sort of magical construct that only needs water to survive.

I wonder why the ghost gave up once she just severed her hand, in either case? Even if the rest of Shiki's body is living, shouldn't it still have been able to pull her by the remaining part of the arm? Maybe whatever Shiki did with her dagger there actually injured or weakened the spirit in some way, idk.

Whatever the case, Touko seems to be the actual wizardess here. Shiki, whether she's a golem or just a human with some magitech prosthetics, is sort of a minion.

As Touko works, the topic of soulless bodies brings her around to talking about Mikiya, who it seems actually is catatonic and has been for some time. I guess the ice cream visit in the intro was supposed to be a while ago, then? Or in the future? It's hard to rule the latter out when the story has already talked about future memories and stuff. Apparently, Mikiya started apprenticing under Touko after being enchanted with some of her mannequins that he saw at an exhibition somewhere. And, according to Touko, the same soulless void that drew him to her lifeless puppets is also what draws him to Shiki.

Um. How sweet of you to say?

Shiki goes back to her own apartment and takes one of the untouched ice cream tubs out of her otherwise barren freezer. Why does she own a freezer if she has nothing to use it for, I wonder? Maybe the fridge system just came with the apartment. She's still missing an arm, but she sits down and awkwardly opens and tastes the ice cream one-handed. This is a very slow, atmospheric process. Then it's the next day, and she's just gotten her new arm installed.

Touko is annoyed as having to replace this limb twice in as many months, so she decided to invest some extra time, effort, and mana points into this one and make something that'll last. In addition to looking perfectly human (which lends more credence to the rest of Shiki's body potentially being synthetic as well), this one has considerably more strength, accelerated reflexes, and resistance to mechanical trauma, as well as warding against magical effects. Shiki won't be able to just cut this one off if it gets possessed, but it's also not going to get possessed in the first place. She does a few knife tricks with her new hand, and seems impressed with its new speed and agility.

She confers a little more with Touko about Mikiya's condition. Touko says that she warned him, repeatedly, not to go near that weird old building that the suicides had started happening at, but he wouldn't listen. I'm starting to suspect that he might be the actual (accidental?) villain of this story. If his soul somehow got attached to that building, leaving his body catatonic behind it, and the ghost girls all seem to be worshiping or trying to earn the favor of a "him," then...yeah, it's certainly possible.

Well, time for round two with the ghosts of Spoop Tower!

However, I'm going to have to split this here. It may not be obvious from the review, but this is kind of a difficult watch due to the slow pace and somewhat rambly word choices in much of the dialogue, on top of being fairly long in objective terms (at least compared to my usual subjects). So, the second half of it will be up tomorrow.