In his bid to create something alienating and perverse, director Ueno Souta used the experience of directing Days with My Stepsister to iron out some of his cinematic language for whatever awaited him next. Having earned his early notice through arranging both the teenage characters and the setting in such a way that things appear seen through a glass darkly, SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table is the most sensible continuation of what he sought to find. He understands the inherent draw of the material intimately: despite all the maid outfits, bunny suits, and wrapped towels in the giant bath that might on the surface appear titillating, he makes no pretense about this being a “fun” series in the sense of having “likeable” (in the way we typically understand the term) characters or situations. The titular games are an endlessly encroaching monolith casting massive shadows against the floor until everything is swallowed wholesale. I do not simply mean the characters, including those fortunate enough to survive whatever macabre scenario the organizers have cooked up for them. The swallowing manifests in its visual-acoustic sensibility, obliquely disarming and carrying an abject horror felt in the stomach and in the eyes.
At the center of this horror lies Sorimachi Yuki. Necometal’s and Osada Eri’s design itself is ghostly, with long white hair, pale skin, and empty eyes. Given a quiet and wisped voice by seiyuu Miura Chiyuki, it’s apparent that her very existence in the world is itself rather ghostly. Long sequences of quietly being in her room barely moving, or moving through streets with little direction or purpose, evoke a listlessness that screams in its silence. Memories flash in her mind like a television screen, disassociating herself from herself as a mental and physical presence. She has effectively lost any ability to function within the so-called real world, a figure best thought of as a vague déjà vu and passing by in the gentlest breezes…or at least, that’s what it would initially seem.
She has a refuge in the myriad death games, and it makes ghostly or phantasmal presences of everyone and everything. Its girl participants are both willing and debatably-willing (if what they are claiming is true). Engineered to be as macabre as possible without crossing into whatever the organizers determined is improper taste, Ueno likewise directs them with the same scalpel-sharp incisions or perfectly detailed architectural blueprints. Blood replaced with polyfill fluff in-universe makes death come not through bleeding out, but through destruction of body or mind. It takes effort to die, though many such moments are shown away from the camera itself. There are indeed times that the games are loud either with dying or panicked screams, yet most of the time, they are quiet. Long, agonizing silences or the echo of shoes touching the floor seem to embody the specter of death hanging over everyone. Details on characters are often blanked, as though they can no longer be distinguished by defined traits or qualities, and the music’s ambience provides little concrete body as well. Animations move slowly, if at all, giving weight even to incidental motions. The result is a strange floating, like treading water, with the sense that the leg strength could give out at any moment. It carries a deliciously alluring hypnosis that bends the mind in unusual directions, almost akin to David Cronenberg’s Crash – violence without the stereotypical or pleasurable fanservice or catharsis associated with it.
But there is indeed a real, more tangible world outside of the ghostly nature of the death games. SHIBOYUGI makes it clear that the real world is just as much a factor in things. It is, after all, the circumstances of the real world that dictate why the girls are in the death games in the first place. This influence also impacts how they are perceived: an “audience” is occasionally mentioned by the players, and while it could be said that “the audience” is a meta commentary on us as anime fans (simply by watching the show, we are a part of the audience watching these girls and their suffering), the question of audience also relates to who is diegetically watching these games. It’s an ambiguity that proposes two possibilities, which the anime makes no claim to answer: the first is the larger societal public has wholly accepted the existence of these games and delights in the prolongated slaughter of its own youths. The second is that the games are run primarily by ultra-capitalist smegma who keep it secret from the public and have stopgaps in place to prevent the truth from ever coming out.
The lack of answer ties both into Ueno’s presentation of the material and what the material itself implies. There exists an entire social sphere of game participants, such that mentorships are given and training—be it physical or mental—is developed. Players are aware of rumors and legends like the infamous Candle Woods game, and the “Wall of Thirty” implies a vernacular among veteran game players that is well-known enough to be a thing that they’re wary of succumbing to, arbitrary as the number might be. Information is not the most closely guarded secret, and participants seem able to find each other in the real world if they so choose. Players evidently are not forced into the games (contrary to what some in the show might say), which implies that their independence is acknowledged by the organizers, despite the sheer sadism they feel of watching them get eviscerated.
If the superstructure of the real world compels or tricks the characters into participating, the anime gives no indication that the larger society does so beyond half-abstractions or vaguely sensible allusions related to capitalism. Aspects of the world are shown to be decidedly plain when abstraction is left at the door. SHIBOYUGI’s death games might be the primary ground for the material’s sense of character exploration, but a largely psychological or cerebral glimpse doesn’t clarify or demonstrate the mouths to feed (after all, the title mentions putting food on the table) or lives to live outside of the games. The “deranged world” thus feels far more in-line with the death games and how Yuki and others navigate them through their own psychology rather than the real world that engineered the games’ existences in the first place. The answer is a formless ghost, present but seemingly unapproachable and ungraspable.
Character problems or ideologies that lead them to the games therefore seem individualistic as opposed to being something far more social in scope. As such, most of the characters that receive a more thorough or sharper focus beyond the vague in some way, shape, or form are presented as either psychopathic, antisocial, cynical, or some combination thereof. A character that expresses interesting in killing in the real world appears more conceptually compelling than someone playing the games primarily because they need the money. Many of these girls likewise are tied together through mentorship or deranged forms of “love” with someone else, seeking connection in and through the games that actively seeks to break them. In that sense, there’s kinship between them and Yuki. Real lives are as much a death game as the death games themselves. They walk through the valley of the shadow of death. They fear no “evil,” for their rods and staves / their needs that the death games fill comfort them.
But the affect isn’t quite so precise. When everyone important is deranged or messed-up (or well on their way to being so), the knife is dulled. Intrigue towards them tends to derive from Ueno’s directorial treatment via his style rather than what the anime’s writing presents. As though pulled out of a hat with numerous slips of paper to choose from, references to stories can read as shockingly clunky compared to the cold blunt slicing of Yuki’s introspection. The oblique nature of the real-world depictions and the expansive quiet and space within the death games cannot always make up for the lack of developmental endgame. Because many of the “later” arcs are centered around these characters and their warped worldviews, they don’t always make for the most fascinating foils to Yuki both in concept and resolution. The games being shown achronologically correlates to total increased carnage from one game to the next, as well as moving from trap navigation to battle royales. Consequentially, the structural meat of both the games and who awaits inside for Yuki to face may swing between blood to something resembling polyfill fluff. It’s as though as the series continued, it could take on ghostly visages of what it was at first despite my loving its aesthetic more with each passing minute.
But I feel that I’m being a bit unfair. Only yesterday, I published an online article about how being overly concerned with The Plot™ or its writing unjustly penalizes some anime and diverts attention away from what they do so well. I might as well have written about SHIBOYUGI. I cannot say that the underlying writing within this anime actually thrilled me most of the time, but seeing Ueno’s direction gave such pointed and neverendingly conscious texture to what might have otherwise passed as apparition. That alone made watching the anime worth it. For all my grievances, I find myself in the frankly intriguing place of sincerely recommending SHIBOYUGI even though I don’t think I can bring myself to say that I like it. I guess I find the notion of wanting someone to discover for themselves what it has to offer too enticing a prospect to pass up.
That discovery for oneself is a game unto itself, too. And, as Jigsaw once so famously said, “I want to play a game.”
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