MUSHI-SHI

Mushi are not animals or plants but a third kind of life, closer to the underlying mechanism of being alive than to anything that fits a taxonomy. Most humans cannot see them. Ginko — a soft-spoken, white-haired traveler who attracts mushi the way a magnet attracts iron filings — can. The series follows him through the mountains of an unspecified post-Edo Japan, sleeping in the inns of villages where a mushi has taken root and trying to settle the encounter between mushi and humans in a way that lets both keep existing. Each episode is a self-contained story. The mood is the show.