Review of Shiki

The opening scene, in which a search party of villagers find in the woods the body of one of their own, a young girl, sets the tone for the 22-episode funeral that is Shiki. In terms of narrative, it breaks no new ground; a remote village is infested by vampires (not romanticized here as has been the trend in recent years, but portrayed once more as malevolent predators with whom the living cannot coexist) who kill the villagers one by one and replace them with their own kind. It works through its cold-blooded commitment to its moribund atmosphere, existing in a perpetual state of grief forthose already lost and those about to go. The cast is not the most nuanced or memorable, but it is good enough for the repeated tragedies to evoke more than apathy. They are normal people; few with any heroic strain, most unaware of why their parents, children, friends, neighbors and lovers are dying, their love for one another the only vigil against the night where the dead supplant the living and death supplants life.

The series is utterly enveloping in its sadness; from only a few episodes in I could not stop watching except to eat and sleep, and I ended up finishing the whole series within the span of 24 hours. My one major gripe with it is the fanservice. It is thankfully far from ubiquitous, but a few female characters are very unrealistically proportioned and when an especially dramatic scene (a few in the series' second half come to mind, but I can't go into details without spoiling things) has comically oversized breasts bouncing around it is about as distracting and inappropriate as a stripper at a funeral. I haven't read the novel series that served as the basis for this adaptation, but I'm guessing it didn't have this problem.