Review of Shiki

For me, all 'straight' vampire stories are thinly veiled metaphors for the rise of capitalism. And by 'straight' I mean when the genre is definitively vampire and not romance with some vampire window-dressing. Shiki is a classic vampire tale, which is very much about the clash of one mode of life being violently threatened and subsumed by another. In this case, the location is not Transylvania or Louisiana but an isolated, small, backwater town in Japan. What makes Shiki so interesting to me is that it does it's very best to play things out over a long period time in as 'realistic' a way aspossible.

This is the story of an entire community and the scope is ambitious.

There are lots of well written characters and we see so many different ways in which the village's traditional modes of operation (be that religion or medicine, etc) are waylaid by 'corpse-demons'. And this is amplified by the fact that personalities remain intact even as those who die and rise up succumb to their new hunger. You end up sympathizing with several of those turned, as they struggle to deal with being enmeshed in a new existence that is violent by design but one which the only escape from is (another, more final) death.

With vampirism the ends justify the means. You need to eat, and the only way to do that is to kill. In the process, one makes more vampires. There is no 'outside', you are either a predator or prey. It is almost childishly simplistic. In this regard I love the character of Sunako, who embodies Capitalism's childish needs and simplicity to a 'T'.

A series well worth watching even if the hair styles (imo) are annoying.