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

Shiki returns to the building through a torrent of rain. As she walks, there's a brief flashback to her getting a voice message from Mikiya telling her about the bizarre string of suicides that boss lady wants them to help investigate. That call happened on August 7th, which I assume was some days before the present (if "the present" is even a thing in this story. I'm guessing that was the last time he spoke to Shiki before going vegetable). She reaches Spoop Tower, and cuts her way in once again. This time, nothing tries to mess with her until she reaches the roof; I guess that Ringu wannabe has decided to rethink her tactics, after last time. In fact, the elevator seems to come for her all on its own, despite this being a condemned building whose power is most likely cut, which...well, if I were Ringu, I might well send it down here to bring Shiki up top where I have the advantage.

Anyway, when Shiki ascends to the rooftop to spot the whole team of dancing ghost girls all hovering more or less within reach, she doesn't wait for them to strike first.

One of the floating spirits - the long haired Ringu looking one - is notably larger than the rest, and seems to be of a slightly different composition. "You're certainly demonic," Shiki says, "meaning I've got to kill you!" Ah, maybe that's why she told Touko that there were eight suicide victim ghosts despite seeing nine figures. She could tell that the leader was something else entirely. Possibly something nonhuman.

Speaking of nonhuman, Shiki's eyes have turned mother-of-pearl as she enters fighting mode. While her synthetic arm and the rest of her body don't seem to be made of the same stuff, I'm more convinced than ever that little - if any - of her is natural.

Cue simultaneously slow, artsy, and yet extremely brutal fight scene. Shiki's new arm shrugs off another possession attempt with just a little bit of a warping/rippling effect, and then we see exactly why Shiki was unafraid of entering a haunted tower alone. Her fighting isn't uncanny like the Servants in UBW, or showy like the bits and pieces of magical combat I've seen so far in Zero (though she's no less superhuman than those other characters). It's just vicious. She does not care about style. She does not care about elegance. She barely even cares about minimizing personal risk. Everything she does, down to the slightest motion, is done for the sole purpose of making everything around her as absolutely dead as possible. And that dagger absolutely is magical, because it tears and shears its way through ghosts as if they were just mildly elastic fabric, spilling clouds of iridescent blood that float away into the air and dissipate just ahead of the wraiths' bodies themselves.

She also, at least after the first minute or so, seems to be having fun fighting this way. She seemed reserved and sort of unemotional during most of her private and talking scenes. During her previous attempt at exploring the tower, she showed anxiety and anger. But here, while fighting and killing, she looks and sounds like this is what she lives for. And, well...it might literally be what she was created to do. This is made more disturbing by the fact that the wraiths look like teenagers, and their own lifeless, vacant expressions change to pained ones during their final seconds.

Once all eight of her slaves are gone, Ringu tries to escape by floating to a different rooftop. She never had a damned chance. Shiki leaps a dozen meters onto the adjacent rooftop after her. I guess Ringu either can't or won't escape higher into the atmosphere; something seems to be keeping her near rooftop level. Shiki takes full advantage. Ringu tries to take control of her hand again. No dice. Ringu tries to do...something...else, and Shiki staggers for a moment, but she recovers quickly. With a predatory grin, she tells Ringu that those "hypnotic effects" aren't going to work on her, because unlike Ringu's usual victims Shiki doesn't have the sort of emotions that Ringu uses to confuse people into suicide.

Ah, she was trying to do the mind control thing she uses to make the girls jump. I guess Touko was wrong about it just being the sight of the city from above mixed with local atemporal effects that caused that. That said, Shiki seems to be somewhat in denial (or just lying) here. She did momentarily seem to be effected by the mind control. It seemed less like she lacks any emotional weak points, and more like she just has a really high will save.

Ringu's own doll-like placidity comes to an end at this point. Her features grow less abstract and ethereal, and more human. And, she looks scared. Even moreso when Shiki uses her own trick back at her, and raises her new arm to perform a long-ranged telekinetic grasp at the specter's throat. This newfound emotionality and deliberateness spurs Shiki to ask - as she had once before earlier in the fight - if Ringu is floating, or flying. I'll take that to mean "lashing out blindly and incoherently" or "acting deliberately, with intentional malice." The way that Ringu seemed to just wake up when Shiki cornered her suggests the former, though it could be an act.

...

There's got to be some intentional parallels with Shiki herself, and the way she seems to "switch on" in combat. To use her own language, Shiki is flying right now, but most of the time she's floating.

...

As Ringu stammers and struggles against Shiki's Vader-choke, Shiki tells her that she found Mikiya first, and Ringu doesn't get to steal him. You're that attached to Strawberry Nice Guy, Shiki? Really? His one conscious appearance didn't exactly endear me to him, or make it seem like you particularly enjoyed his company either, but okay I guess. Shiki raises her +3 dagger of ghost stabbing and pulls Ringu into it, impaling her through the solar plexus.

Before she dies, Ringu speaks again, just screaming the word "fall" over and over again until she dissipates in a cloud of ghostly lily petals.

A moment later, Ringu wakes up in her hospital bed, clutching her solar plexus in agony after having just dreamed about being stabbed in it by a magic terminator.

Oh. Okay, I see now.

I was curious about whether Ringu actually was "demonic" in the traditional sense, since up until now all magical entities we've seen in the world of Moonfate were of human origin. And, it seems that trend isn't letting up any time soon. Not an otherworldly demoness; just a necromancer with astral projection abilities. Judging by her surroundings, astral projection is this lady's only method of interacting with the world outside of her hospital ward. Too bad she's using it to for serial killing.

Well, Shiki may or may not have put her out of commission at least for a little while when she destroyed her astral form. Maybe she'll be back as strong as ever tomorrow night, maybe it'll take her months or years to regenerate that avatar. This is an ability we haven't run into yet in the setting, so I have no idea what sort of limitations it might have.

...turns out this might be a moot point though, because just then the door opens and Touko walks in. This is the point where we either find out that Touko and Ringu have been working together in secret and this was all some kind of stress test, or where it turns out that Shiki has a way of tracking souls back to their bodies and Touco just decided to finish the job in person.

Ringu and Touko don't recognize each other by name or face, so I guess it's the latter. Still, Touko at least gives the girl a chance to talk first. Ringu talks about the view of the city from her window; how it's the only thing she has to enjoy much of the time, since her hospitalization. Especially when the cherry blossoms are shedding their petals; it makes it look like flowers are blooming in the sky itself. That's...a pretty close parallel to what her suicide collection looked like in motion.

She quickly figures out what Touko is here to do. But, both women seem willing to be civilized about it, and Touko at least gives her a chance to explain herself first.

Touko also introduces herself as a friend of both "the person who attacked you, and the person who you attacked." Person singular who she attacked, presumably referring to the still-comatose Mikiya, rather than "one of the people who you attacked." As if the suicide girls don't count. Oh you zany Fate wizards with your moral myopia.~

Anyway, Ringu has been in the hospital for many years. Not clear why, but since her body looks intact I'm guessing some sort of heart condition or the like rather than an accident. She stared into the sky and over the buildings for day after day after day after day. Then, somehow, her mind was in the sky. She lost use of her physical eyes at this time, but barely noticed, because she no longer needed them. However, this isn't a simple case of astral projection; according to Touko, if it was, Shiki's +3 dagger of ghost stabbing would have rendered Ringu brain dead the instant it destroyed her avatar. Instead it's like she had...multiple personalities? Or something? The aspect of her that was haunting Spoop Tower was just a copy or something, despite her having obviously just been experiencing the world through it? There's also mention of some sort of outside entity (referred to in the masculine, but seemingly NOT Mikiya) who facilitated this? I think?

The explanation here is long, and it doesn't make a lot of sense. I've rewatched it a few times now, and it still just sounds like fantasy technobabble. There may be a localization issue at fault here, I don't know.

Anyway, when the conversation finally gets coherent again, Touko asks about Mikiya, and it turns out that Ringu knows him in meatspace. He used to visit her every week in the hospital for the first couple of years she was in here (it's not clear if this continued up until his recent soul-snatching, or if he stopped coming some time earlier). In whatever altered or fractured state of consciousness her Spoop Tower avatar was in, she was trying to be close with people. She missed Mikiya, and had always dreamed of him taking her out of the hospital with him after one of his visits, so as soon as he came within range of the building she was haunting she tried to do that...but ended up just getting his soul stuck half in and half out of his body, so she could only vaguely interact with his dream-self while leaving his body a ragdoll. The suicide girls were similar enough to her in age and personality that her attempts to communicate with them caused their identities to merge, somewhat, and unfortunately human bodies can't fly. Or something? It gets confusing and awkwardly worded again here.

Ringu doesn't seem to have realized what she was doing to people all this time, or even that this was all anything besides a series of dreams. He's shocked to hear about the eighth suicide being covered on the morning news, and asks how the heck long he's been asleep for. Touko fills him in, while omitting the detail of the culprit (now deceased, as the eighth and final/first suicide) being someone he knows. It's late August now, so this whole case went on for a couple of weeks. He comments on her summary with a...oh for god's sake.

:/

I hate it when authors do this. The story has nothing to apologize for. Demeaning it like this doesn't make it seem smarter or more self-analytical, it just makes the author seem insincere.

Well, anyway, Mikiya and Shiki share a train ride home from Touco's lair, and have a philosophical argument about the ethics of suicide that sort of went over my head. It doesn't help that I'm not sure at all if Ringu's suicide caused the others, or stopped them, so the applicability of any of their ethical arguments to this case is sort of opaque. Mikiya is surprised when Shiki invites him over instead of just sort of being okay with it when he says he wants to. He's even more surprised when she offers him one of the ice cream tubs he left in her freezer, and downright shocked to see that she's already eaten the other one. Then, she insists that he sleeps in her apartment tonight. It's not clear if she means "sleep with me" or "sleep with me," but in either case he agrees. I fear there may be collateral damage to his body if she meant the latter.

It is your fate to stay the night.

Scene ends with him standing in front of the fridge and making a dumb sexist comment, and her telling him to shut the fuck up before rolling irritably over on her mattress to face away from him. Heh, maybe no collateral damage tonight after all. I still am not sure why not one but TWO women were somehow invested in this guy, but as I'm neither a Japanese ghost girl nor a magic terminator perhaps I just can't relate.

End credits song is nice, which is no surprise given that said credits include Kalafina. Post credits, Touco and some new character named Azaka are watching the cleanup beside the soon-to-be-demolished building. A news voiceover names Ringu as Kirie Fujou, whose father built and owned the old apartment tower. That explains why her ghost/projection/whatever was drawn there, specifically. The penthouse suite was likely her childhood home.

She'd been in the hospital for ten years, and was 27 at the time of her death. I guess her magnetism for teenage girls rather than victims her own age was because she never really got a chance to mature past that age herself, depending on how conscious and stimulated she was for most of her hospitalization.

I'm still not sure why there were nine ghost girls including Kirie, if she was indeed the eighth. Even the cover art for this movie clearly shows nine of them. Was one of those figures supposed to have been Mikiya? They all looked female. And Shiki sure wasn't taking pains to avoid killing any of them during her rampage. It's consistent enough between scenes that it pretty much has to be intentional, rather than an artist slip-up or the like. Maybe this is foreshadowing some bigger mystery in the later Garden of Sin movies?

Anyway, Azaka tells Touco what she's been hearing about this latest suicide on the news, and Touco plays dumb. I'm guessing Azaka is a muggle relative of hers or something, as she doesn't seem to be even remotely in the know.

It ends with Azaka asking Touco why people kill themselves. Touco says that she could never really understand that herself, but says of Kirie in particular that:

Maybe Kirie was wrong about Touco having intended for her to kill herself after their conversation. Touco at least seems earnest here, even as she avoids actually telling Azaka the story, so maybe she was hoping that Kirie actually would be motivated to reign herself in and practice better control of her powers. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding that look, and Kirie was right. That's Garden of Sinners: Overlooking View.

I enjoyed this story, but it's definitely less polished than the other Nasu stuff I've been watching. The extremely slow pace overshot what I think was it's intended mark of building a haunting atmosphere, and strayed into timewasting. The film is fifty minutes long, and I don't think anything would have been lost if they'd condensed it into thirty.

Shiki is a fun, if slightly disturbing, protagonist. Her personal struggle with apathy and isolation, though mostly implied, makes her sympathetic enough to get me invested, and is needed to balance out her "barely human killing machine" aspect. I have a real weakness for the Tarzan archetype; the dehumanized hero, endowed with great power by the very same thing that alienates them from others, slowly discovering a human identity and connections. I don't know if Shiki is a straight example of this, since her origins aren't yet clear, but she's at least close enough for my liking. Touco (who also serves as the most obvious connection to the other Nasu media I've seen; she's very recognizably a Fate-style wizard) as a maybe-benevolent-and-maybe-not enigmatic authority figure works to support this kind of arc, too. 

The other characters I could take or leave. Kirie was a decent enough monster of the week, but I feel like we should have gotten more time to know her as a human. As it is, she's pretty bare bones (no pun intended), which makes the intended tragedy around her fall somewhat flat. If you traded in a few minutes' worth of Shiki walking very, very slowly while haunting music plays for an early scene or two of Kirie awake in the hospital and perhaps interacting with Mikiya, it would improve the work significantly.

Never actually showing how and when those two knew each other and what sort of relationship they had at all was actually a really weird omission. The story all but hinged on that, so...yeah, bad call for not including something like that.

Granted, that topic brings me to Mikiya himself, who...I guess Shiki's personal risks provided all the stakes this story needed, but it would be nice if I could at least see why the other CHARACTERS like Mikiya so much. What little personality he showed ranged from just kinda socially inept (which can be sympathetic) to outright obnoxious and condescending (which can't). I guess Shiki and Kirie were both starved enough for company in their own ways that they might latch onto literally anyone available, but both of them doing so to him just...come on, you gals can do better.

I feel like there's a lot of philosophical subtext that just went over my head. I don't know if this is my fault, the author's fault, or the localization's fault (though I have a strong suspicion that the localization is at least partly to blame, considering that characters sometimes appeared to contradict themselves within the same sentence). Whatever the case, I had to rewatch some of the drawn-out dialogue scenes repeatedly in order to come close to understanding what they were talking about, and gleaning anything deeper from it with the level of understanding that I have is just impossible. There's obviously SOMETHING that's meant to connect the "suicide ethics" discussion, Shiki's decision to open up more to Mikiya, and Kirie's "float or fly" decision, but aside from Shiki and Kirie both being lonely and not knowing what to do about it I don't get it.

Structurally, Garden of Sinners turned out to be quite a surprise. The paranormal investigator angle plus the (overblown, but mostly successful despite that) enchanted and haunting atmosphere makes me think more of Mushi-shi than anything else. It...also has a bit of a "Ghost in the Shell" vibe too, come to think of it, what with our rooftop-leaping cyborg heroine investigating weird things for her inscrutable mentor. Different tone, obviously, but plenty of common elements.

So, could have done with a lot more editing and revision, but successful nonetheless. I have a few more Garden of Sinners titles in queue, and I'm not dreading them.