Are you familiar with the title Shiki? There was an anime running last year with that title. It’s a really interesting and often disturbing horror piece. And there’s a character, a buddhist monk called Seishin, who has really… unique views on the world. If you didn’t watch the whole of the series yet, don’t read on.

In my honest opinion, Seishin is just crazy. It’s one thing to be a depressed monk stuck at the end of nowhere. Okay, he had a difficult childhood, he’s writing horror novels, he attempted suicide during his time at the university.

I can understand his way of thinking so far as it goes “i don’t want to kill anyone, be it human or else”. Obviously this makes him a vegetarian, though i guess he would be able to lament hours about how sinful it is to chop trees to build houses or to reap crops to make bread, because that kills the plant in question. It may be called some insane extreme pacifism, that he refuses to raise a hand at the shiki/okiagari even when they already slaughtered the village, the village Seishin was born and raised in, where he was supposed to know and be acquaint with everyone, a place that he was supposed to support.

Even handing himself over to the shiki would make sense if it was meant as a sacrifice to keep them away from the people of the village, like Seishin’s father sacrificed himself.

But no, he goes there and he helps them. He helps them, when he knows they are continuously killing villagers. That they are justifying their murders with their need to “stay alive” – which in itself doesn’t make sense, considering that Sunako herself says that it’s not pleasant to stay alive as a shiki.

All right, Seishin decides that he needs to save this hundred year old blood-sucking murderer demon pure and innocent little girl from the hands of the people of the village who fight for their lives crazy and murderous mob of villagers. What’s that if not helping someone who kills people? Wasn’t Seishin against killing at all costs? That one vampire, who will kill countless people for certain worth more in his eyes than those people she would kill, people who would lead perfectly normal lives without killing anything, maybe except a rat in the basement?

And then he kills the big bearded man (forgive me for not remembering his name) to save Sunako. He kills.

He’s always going on about with Sunako how there’s no murder without intent, and how there’s always a reason behind that intent. So what? It’s bad he failed to kill himself, because he didn’t really want to? Does just having a reason to kill justify killing? Are you serious? It would be better if he succeeded with his suicide, for the whole of humanity.