Review: Parasyte

Review: Parasyte

Introduction

Summer is here and in the meantime I’ve done little except get a cold. Out of boredom I started looking up the conservation statuses of animals. I’ve got some woodpeckers in my backyard that are at a “Near Threatened” status, but you wouldn’t know it from how often I see them around.

And on the topic of animal conservation, I want to start off this review by saying that I’m a bit of an animal lover at heart. When I was little animals fascinated me, especially ones I read about in books but had never seen. (This included farm animals). I learned lots of rudimentary facts, but never any useful information that makes me qualified to be an “animal expert” in any way.

In the process I was reminded of a certain anime (for the unfamiliar, that’s the standard term for any animated show produced in Japan) that had a bit of a connection with animal conservation and the main factor that drives animals to extinction today—humans.

I was recommended Parasyte by a friend who’s into anime. He said it would be something I would enjoy since it addressed some fears I had shared with him about the nature of humanity and what constitutes consciousness. While Parasyte did little to soothe those fears, it did prompt me to ask myself some interesting questions about the topic.

A warning to those interested: Japanese anime is almost never intended for children. The notion that animation is only for children tends to exist only in the US, and even then…well, just look at Looney Tunes and see how many times Bugs Bunny dresses in drag. :p Parasyte in particular is very violent and shows a gratuitous amount of blood and gore, and the nature of the eponymous “Parasites” is quite disturbing. There is also a small amount of sexual content, but it’s fairly “tame” compared to what you could see in an anime. But that’s another topic in and of itself. For various reasons, I don’t usually watch huge amounts of anime, but lately I’ve been trying to see if there are any good ones about worth watching.

Parasyte: The Maxim is the full title of the show. The y being used in “parasite” is just a clever spelling and “the Maxim” doesn’t really mean anything at all; sometimes the titles of anime are “lost in translation”.



Synopsis

Our protagonist is typical Japanese high-schooler Shinichi Izumi. One night, a tiny creature that resembles a silverfish finds him asleep and attempts to enter his body (if you haven’t already guessed, this is one of the parasites). When the parasite attempts to enter Shinichi’s brain by going through his right hand (his ears are blocked with headphones, his mouth and eyes are shut and his nose is too full of mucus), Shinichi wakes up and realizes what’s going on. He ties the cords of his headphones around his arm to prevent the parasite from traveling any further through his bloodstream, confining the parasite to his right hand and forearm.

What’s with that incredulous look? You say this wouldn’t work even if this could happen? True, but please through all logic out the window for a moment. Please? :)

Shinichi wakes up to find that the parasite has moved to the next stage in its life cycle: an autonomous, talking hand! It essentially looks as if Shinichi’s hand has an eyeball where the tip of his index finger should be and lips in the palm. But the parasite, which names itself “Migi” after the Japanese word for “right”, actually has control over Shinichi’s entire right arm and can contort it into any shape he* wishes. Migi learns to speak through reading books and searching the Internet for scientific information (thank you, Wikipedia!) and explains to Shinichi that he and many others of his kind needed to obtain a host. Normally, Migi explains casually, his species is supposed to reach its host’s brain, consume it and gain full control of the person, their body being just a hollow shell now possessed by a different being altogether. But since Shinichi blocked Migi from doing this in his tiny larva-like state, Migi remains an “immature” parasite. The implication is that all (or almost all) of the parasites who landed around the same time elsewhere in Japan have already found their hosts, killed them and taken over their bodies. Migi tells Shinichi that he was not selected for any particular reason; he just needed a host.

Now to pause the story for a moment to analyze Migi: it’s clear right away that Migi is behaving like a sentient animal. He isn’t mad at Shinichi for not letting him mature and take his brain, nor is he particularly malicious about doing so. It’s just what his species biologically needs to do. Migi is emotionless and does have any care or sympathy for Shinichi or humanity; as a parasitic organism that has to feed off of one for survival, that’s understandable. He does, however, ensure Shinichi’s survival since Shinichi’s death would mean his own death as well. Unlike some other parasites in real life, Migi’s species (which is never given a name in the series) needs to live in its host body and can only detach itself for a few minutes, at best. But how does Migi know all of this information about himself despite being a “baby”? It’s simply animal instincts. It’s implied that the parasites came from space, so they’re technically aliens, but the viewers aren’t given some obvious clue like a giant UFO flying over the night sky and releasing them. They just sort of show up, with no knowledge of a creator or parent organism, and know instinctually what to do and what they need to survive. And that just so happens to involve taking a human as a host and eating any other human they come across that isn’t a parasite.

For reasons not entirely known to Shinichi and Migi, other mature, fully-non-human parasites in human bodies come after the pair. Shinichi’s quick thinking and Migi’s natural fighting skills (which included shapeshifting his tendrils into far-reaching, rapidly-moving blades) allow them to fend off parasites, all while Shinichi must try to behave as human as possible. (The parasites can all hide beneath human looks, and then “unwrap” themselves and reveal their monstrous true forms when needed. But even in disguise, parasites can recognize their own kind, although it’s never said how).

Due to this unusual symbiotic relationship, Shinichi and Migi develop a friendship of sorts build on mutual survival. Shinichi, however, begins to change while Migi shares his body. He becomes more emotionless and distant, and others around him, such as his parents and his girlfriend, Satomi Murano quickly take notice of this and question his behavior. Shinichi is clearly somewhat distraught, since there’s no way his parents or Satomi would believe him if he told them what was going on. And, Migi reminds him somewhat threateningly, if word got out that he was sharing his body with a parasite, the authorities would want to study him and figure out why he wasn’t killing people recklessly like the other monsters have been (the police quickly start to catch on to all of the random, grisly murders the parasites commit while disguised as humans). He’d likely be living in a laboratory for the rest of his life, Migi warns him. While Migi’s threats come across as a bit like blackmail, Shinichi is convinced that it’s a possibility. Migi, of course, doesn’t care about Shinichi’s interpersonal relationships either way and simply wants the two of them to survive.

Again, to step back for a moment, normally such a situation with a human character would probably lead viewers to not like a character essentially holding another character’s life at hostage. But Migi is not portrayed as a villain: he’s more like a potentially dangerous partner that Shinichi must work with to ensure not only his survival, but also that of all of the innocent, ordinary humans around them—after all, the parasites could easily kill people (And some of them easily do so, even to heavily armed police officers).

Throughout the course of the series, Shinichi’s involvement with Migi leads to tragedy. His mother is killed by a parasite searching for a new host since his* old one died. When the parasite returns home from a vacation in his mother’s body, Shinichi is forced to kill a being that looks exactly like his own mother after “she” stabs him in the heart with one of her blades. Migi is forced to use some of his own tissue to repair this wound, leaving a huge scar on Shinichi’s chest and causing Shinichi to become even more emotionless, likely due to more of Migi’s body becoming infused with his own.

A girl named Kana, who somehow has the ability to sense parasites, senses Shinichi and believes that she instead has the ability to sense the location of her “one true love”. Shinichi tries to ensure her safety while juggling his relationship with Satomi, but she is killed by a parasite whom she mistakes for Shinichi.

Even a sympathetic parasite character meets a tragic end. Tamura Reiko is a woman who worked as a teacher. When she was taken over by a parasite, the parasite became curious about the purpose of its species and decided to live out the identity of its host. When Tamura Reiko--who later changes her name to Tamiya Ryoko to protect her identity as the police investigate the murders perpetrated by hostile parasites—meets Shinichi, she assures him that she doesn’t want to kill and instead finds the fact that a parasite and host managed to co-exist quite fascinating. She even has sex with another parasite that overtook a human host and gives birth to a child—and somewhat surprisingly, the child appears to be a normal human baby boy. (Evidently parasites can’t reproduce, because doing so just results in the offspring that would have been created by their hosts. The parasite usually doesn’t destroy the reproductive organs of its host, after all, just the brain.) In an attempt to find out more about Shinichi, she hires a private investigator who later turns against her after some of her fellow parasites kill his family in an attempt to elude the police. Due to the private investigator’s outrage at his family being killed and hatred of all the parasites, he exposes Tamura as one and she is shot to death by the police. Her baby, not being a parasite, is thankfully unharmed…although now he will grow up an orphan since his father was just another killing machine Shinichi had to kill in self-defense.

The incident with Tamura causes the police to discover that Shinichi has a connection to the parasites, although they don’t know about Migi himself—only that Shinichi can detect the parasites. Along with a serial killer named Uragami, who while not a parasite is as every bit as inhuman and coldhearted as they are, Shinichi is tasked with “screening” the inhabitants of an apartment complex to see if any are parasites.

The police get rather brutal, accidentally killing some humans in the process due to mistaking them for parasites, but some of the parasites are gunned down in cold blood before they even have a chance to escape or plea for mercy. Understandably, Migi is not comfortable with the idea and neither is Shinichi—even though these beings have been trying to kill him, brutally killing them in response to the potential threat they could become is a bit too much for him.

Among the human casualties is a politician named Hirokawa, a radical environmentalist who successfully runs for mayor and uses his authority to set up safehouses where the parasites can kill and eat their victims discreetly. The surprise is that he himself is not actually a parasite at all, despite espousing rhetoric about humans being “monsters” and “parasites” of Earth. I’ll get to the annoying environmental preaching in a minute, but for now the show must go on.

Only one parasite manages to escape the apartment building alive: Gotou, a particularly powerful being that is the result of four parasites merging together to create a powerful superhuman. Like all of the other parasites, his goal is to kill Shinichi, and unlike other parasites he makes no pretense of being human in any way. His pursuit of Shinichi after the incident at the apartment buildings forces our protagonist into the woods (no relation to the musical), and in the skirmishes they have, Migi ends up being absorbed into Gotou’s body.

Shinichi, now missing his whole right arm after the loss of Migi, lives quietly in the country with a kind old woman. Eventually, however, rumors of a monster eating people circulate, and Shinichi knows that it’s Gotou, so he goes to fight him, knowing that he isn’t likely to survive.

Despite all of his power and strength, Shinichi is able to kill Gotou and even bring Migi back to his side by attacking Gotou with a meat cleaver. Unbeknownst to Shinichi, that meat cleaver came from a toxic landfill containing hydrogen cyanide. The poison causes the various other parasites that Gotou controls all at once, including Migi, to “rebel”, and this forces him to explode due to no longer being able to sustain the form Gotou is (he doesn’t look very human by this point).

Despite all of the trouble that these parasites have put him through, Shinichi is reluctant to finally kill Gotou, whose “parts” struggle to crawl back together and regenerate after the explosion. Migi doesn’t want to kill one of his own kind—this is possibly because he has gained some of Shinichi’s own human sympathy from living inside of him for so long—just as how Shinichi was always reluctant to kill other human beings, even if they were now controlled by parasites. Shinichi states that it isn’t for him to decide whether or not to kill Gotou, and he instead offers to leave it up to the “powers that be”. However, he quickly changes his mind when he realizes that Gotou would still want to kill him if the regeneration is successful. And so, the last hostile parasite dies at the hands of humanity.

In the final episode, an “epilogue” of sorts occurs. After killing Gotou Migi, having learned so much while under Gotou’s control, wants to go to sleep, as he has done several other times before, which essentially causes him to disappear and Shinichi’s hand to function like normal again for a while. But this time, he intends to do so for good, more or less “dying”, much to Shinichi’s dismay.

While Migi is “dead”, his emotions begin to come back to him. He does a better job of loving Satomi and his father, and maintains a friendlier attitude around people. All of the parasites still alive no longer harm him and are content with eating regular meat like beef in order to meet their nutritional needs. Because they can’t reproduce, it’s likely that the parasites left will blend in as normal humans and then die out after the events of the series.

But just before the show ends, Uragami, the crazed serial killer from before, appears and holds Shinichi and Satomi hostage on the rooftop of a building. When Uragami tosses Satomi over the roof solely for his own amusement, Shinichi tries to grab her with his hand but can’t reach her in time. Only Migi’s timely and surprising intervention with Shinichi’s right arm saves them both. “We were all born here, on Earth,” Shinichi muses after Satomi is rescued and Uragami is killed. “We keep trying to understand each other along these tiny points until they accumulate. We try to get closer to someone else until our lives end.” These are some interesting words I’ll discuss later.

After the credits roll, Migi and Shinichi meet in a dream, and this time Migi looks much different, in his “true” form—likely the form he would have if he could live on his own without a host. Migi reminds him of all of the people that died during their time together, and it causes Shinichi to think of his mother and others who died. Migi is surprised at what they look like—while he was a parasite in Shinichi’s body, they looked different to him even though he clearly has eyes to see them with. Migi realizes that he and Shinichi literally see things differently, as two different species. Migi remarks that even though humans and parasites share the same body structure, they would still be fascinated by what they could learn from each other if they exchanged information—or, souls, rather. Migi then leaves and tells Shinichi to forget about him. Whether he dies or not is unclear, but evidently Migi wants Shinichi to live the life of a normal human. And so, despite Shinichi being sad about losing Migi, whom he has come to see as a friend, his hand returns to its ordinary state once more.

“We protect other species because humans are lonely creatures,” Shinichi thinks to himself. “We protect the environment because humans themselves don’t want to go extinct. What drives us is really self-gratification. But I think that’s fine, and that’s all there really is to it. There’s no point in despising humans by human standards. So in the end, it’s hypocritical for us to love the Earth without loving ourselves.”

As he goes about his ordinary life with Satomi, he concludes that he could never see things from Migi’s perspective—that all of the fighting they did was not to save humanity, just for the two of them to survive. Two different species can’t understand each other, but they at least ought to be able to live together in peace and mutual respect. In another dream the next night, Migi finally says his last goodbye, wishing to contemplate for a long time. And I think I’m going to do that as well!

Extra thoughts and conclusion​

While I enjoyed Parasyte’s action and soundtrack (despite being dubstep, which I normally don’t like), and also the fact that it was short enough to watch in a few sittings, at just 24 episodes, the message of the series seems a bit muddled. It took a whole episode at the very end to hash out and even then it seems a bit preachy. I, for one, don’t like environmentalists inserting themselves in a show about dangerous alien monsters that are killing humans. These parasites are clearly, with some exceptions, killing machines. Shinichi didn’t need to feel remorse or reluctance to kill Gotou; he was a threat to humanity and Shinichi’s own personal safety, as were all of the other parasites. The fact that Shinichi does show some sympathy for these non-humans, however, is likely deliberate. A human can and should, the show argues, care for lesser creatures. At the same time, the Parasyte tries to be critical of the environmentalists who blame humanity for the state the Earth is supposedly in right now (and pollution and global warming aside, I’m not sure what sort of state the world is in right now). The show argues that they are ultimately a bit selfish and wanting to preserve themselves. I think that’s a reasonable point to make, although I doubt most environmentalists would like to think of themselves as “selfish”.

From a Christian standpoint, I’m immediately drawn back to the Garden of Eden: there, animals of all sorts lived peacefully, and humanity was allowed to rule over the Earth and instructed to care for it. Parasyte seems to uphold the Biblical view that there is nothing “wrong” with humanity being the dominant species in that regard, and no one, not even an oil tycoon (contrary to popular depictions) wants to destroy the Earth in order to make money. This anime can be seen as a more effective version of the film “The Day After Tomorrow” and a darker, less kid-friendly version of the Lorax—the original Dr. Seuss book, not the movie. It depicts a strange, unknown force more or less meant to “punish” humanity for its damage to the Earth. And despite my dislike of liberals, I don’t think humanity getting punished for damaging the environment is entirely unfair, although I’d like to think that I myself haven’t done much damage to nature other than perhaps letting my cat drink from the toilet too many times (I’m trying to get her to stop now).

Parasyte also seems to go against the notion popularized by Temple Grandin and pet owners, who insist that humans—I suppose autistic humans, in particular—have a closer connection to animals than we realize and that we ought to think of them as somewhat like us. Instead, Parasyte argues, we can’t hope to know what it’s like to be them. All we can do is figure out what they need and respect their space. I can agree with that.

A year or so ago I was in a depression over having Asperger’s Syndrome. I didn’t like the idea of Temple Grandin’s, that somehow “we” had a better connection to animals. As much as I love animals and have had various incidents with animals being nice to me, I’m still not an animal. I’m not an animal trapped in a human’s body, (other than meeting the biological definition of “animal”) as I once thought back then. I didn’t like thinking that, by the way. I guess my point with all of this is to say that humans, for better or worse, are the dominant species, and to try to bring other animals up to our level just won’t work. We can make life easier for them, we can make our Earth better, and we can even subscribe to possibly fraudulent scientific ideas—assuming that they are correct—to alter our society in favor of the environment. But we can’t make an animal a human being. And I think if we did, the animals would want to go back to being themselves. I know I would!

I disagree, of course, with Shinichi’s hesitation to kill Gotou, but I respect it, as I said above. If something threatens humanity, we have the authority to kill it. The catch is that we ought not to misuse our powers of reason and innovation, lest we forget the God who gave us these gifts. And while Shinichi concludes with a somewhat sad message in that species cannot understand each other and that we must all die anyway, I’d like to offer something a bit better: remember that the state of the world now—where humans and nature tend to go against each other—isn’t the way things always were, and it’s not the way things will always be. God will call us home one day to a new, better world where children can play with snakes and the lamb can lie down with the lion.

There are a few more negative (but minor) elements I'd like to address for a second: The parasites, as I said before, are implied to have arrived on Earth as a punishment for humanity's attempt at damaging the environment. There are a few problems with this: One is that the show never addresses whether or not there are parasites in other countries--I'd say we Americans drill for oil quite a bit, and China is notorious for its polluted cities. Shouldn't they get the most parasites? Why land in a country that cares enough about the environment to produce this show in the first place? Another problem is that aside from the landfill, we see very little pollution in the scenery. Characters never even remark about how "I'm getting sick more often now" or "The air is warmer than it used to be". Nothing like that. It's just sort of taken as a given that that humans are doing something. Perhaps that serves to counter the idea among most environmentalist works that humans are the cause of all of the bad things, but it's still an issue to hardly show any environmental damage at all.

Another thing is the random sex scene. Shinichi has sex with Satomi right before he goes off to find Gotou, most likely just so that he won't die a virgin. While it's spoiled due to an episode title having "sex" in the name, there's no real point to it. It just seems off since it's never brought up again. Again, though, it's minor, but it's just a warning if you don't like things like that (but you're ok with blood and gore).


It’s important to note that one major aspect of Japanese society is the idea of social cohesion. Japanese people don’t like seeing people in conflict; they want everything in harmony. This isn’t a stereotype so much as it is a cultural value, and the Japanese people reflect the orderliness with which God made all of His creation when they emphasize this. I used to think that a desire for harmony and order was naïve; maybe it was my own cynicism and disorder in my own life that made me dislike that idea. But now that I’m more mature I’m beginning to understand that order is definitely something even a Westerner like myself can appreciate. It’s just that for now, on Earth, it takes a conscious effort to maintain. We, like even Adam and Eve of long ago, are tasked with working to keep our world safe for all life until the day in which we can rest arrives. And evidently, for Migi, that rest came sooner than later! ;)

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