TYPE-MOON Review: Kara no Kyoukai/The Garden of Sinners Chapter 1: Thanatos (Overlooking View)
The availability of TYPE-MOON’s founding writer Kinoko Nasu’s work has long been scattershot and inconsistent in the West. His most well-known visual novels Fate/Stay Night and Tsukihime have never been officially available, and apart from anime adaptations of his earlier work and the ongoing mobile gacha game Fate/Grand Order, fans have mostly been forced to rely on dubiously legal fan translations. Hopefully this state of affairs will change following the 2022 English release of Mahotsukai no Yoru/Mahoyo (Witch on the Holy Night), and the upcoming Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- remake translation due in 2024.
Written in 1996, Mahoyo was Nasu’s first novel, and the initial reference point for all of his “Nasuverse” stories that follow. However Mahoyo went unpublished, and until its conversion to PC Visual Novel in 2012, it was the missing cornerstone of TYPE-MOON’s mystical fictional universe. Written between 1998 and 1999, Nasu’s second attempt at prose fiction was the anachronic novella series Kara no Kyoukai (translated literally as “Boundary of Emptiness”), self-published and serialised on the website Takeboki. Nasu then collected the stories and self-published them in physical hardback in 2001, a year following the release of TYPE-MOON’s first visual novel, Tsukihime. It wasn’t until 2004 that Kodansha published a commercial hardback version of Kara no Kyoukai, with a paperback edition following in 2007. Kara no Kyoukai’s prose version has never been officially translated into English, though a complete fan translation is available online.
Both Tsukihime and Kara no Kyoukai act as semi-sequels to Mahoyo, as each of Mahoyo’s two Aozaki siblings feature as supporting characters in these subsequent stories — younger sister Aoko in Tsukihime, and older sister Touko in Kara no Kyoukai. Prior knowledge of Mahoyo isn’t essential to understand the plot of Kara no Kyoukai, but the integral lore and mechanics of magic followed in both this and Tsukihime were first codified and explained in Mahoyo.
Although in the West we never officially received the novels, distributor Aniplex eventually saw fit to release revered studio ufotable’s anime adaptations in subtitled form (with the title now localised as The Garden of Sinners) via some extremely expensive blu-rays. Animated between 2007 and 2013, the Kara no Kyoukai anime comprises eight theatrical movies of varying lengths, plus an OVA and a short film. With a viewing order mirroring the novel’s non-chronological storytelling structure, Kara no Kyoukai seems to have acquired a reputation for being impenetrable and difficult to watch, an admittedly gorgeous series with a bar of entry high enough to put off all but the most ardent TYPE-MOON fans.
I have to admit I’ve attempted to press my way through the series on two prior occasions, but found myself distracted/frustrated partway through and given up. My wife bought me the now long-out-of-print UK DVD box-set for Christmas upon release back in 2014. It’s not her kind of thing, so I tried to watch it myself and didn’t get very far. A few years later when my eldest son reached adulthood, I tried to watch it with him, but he got bored and wandered off, and I didn’t have the motivation to complete the journey alone. Now I have the excuse of writing a series of articles about Nasu’s works, so that will motivate me to finish! Finally! (Hopefully…) The 2019 UK blu-ray version seems identical to the previously released DVD, so I don’t feel it’s justified shelling out for the high-def versions at £180 RRP (apparently discounted down as low as £90 in some online stores). Additionally, the final movie and accompanying short film have never been released in the UK, as Aniplex for some reason refuses to sub-license it. I may need to access that via… other… means.
The first film is called Overlooking View, though I wonder if “Panoramic View” would be a less clumsy, more fitting title? Chronologically, its placement is fourth in continuity, taking place during September of 1998. In it, we’re introduced to series protagonist Shiki Ryougi, a somewhat sullen young woman who habitually wears a kimono seemingly at all times, occasionally donning a stylish red leather jacket when she really means business.
Shiki’s male friend Mikiya Kokutou plays a brief but significant role. It’s unclear at this stage exactly what their relationship is — Mikiya is bright, cheerful and chatty, while Shiki tends to communicate more via glowering and snark. When Mikiya is possessed by a mysterious force and falls into an unresponsive trance, Shiki is forced to retrieve his soul at great cost to herself. Mikiya spends most of this first film sitting emptily on a sofa.
Both Mikiya and Kokutou work for Mahoyo’s mysterious Touko Aozaki who runs the occult private detective agency Garan-no-dou (Hollow Shrine). They become embroiled in a strange case where a series of unconnected suicides involving school-age girls occur in quick succession at the same abandoned building. It’s about ten years after the events of Mahoyo, and Touko is older, perhaps wiser, and her hair has grown longer. She still smokes constantly, and continues to develop her magecraft involving advanced puppetry. In fact she provides Shiki with a fully-functional prosthetic arm, presumably following some kind of severe injury in a chronologically earlier story.
We learn almost nothing about Shiki herself — though Touko remarks that at some point in the past Shiki was “empty” like one of her dolls — in general she’s a woman of few words and potent violent action. Shiki possesses Mystic Eyes that allow her to see the fault lines in every kind of matter, using them to kill even ethereal spirits with her knife. The source material calls them “Mystic Eyes of Death Perception”, but they’ve not yet been explained on screen as of this film. Her eyes glow a cool blue colour when activated, and the climactic fight scene between Shiki and the malevolent spirit that has been luring girls to their deaths is spectacular and cool, with stunning animation that expertly combines atmospheric 3D CG background work and silky smooth 2D character animation. No wonder this was the studio chosen to entrance the world with its later Demon Slayer adaptation.
At only fifty minutes duration, there’s not a huge chunk of story to get your teeth into, nor are there many answers given. It’s primarily a mood and noirish atmosphere piece — deliberately paced to the point of almost obtuse slowness, it always looks beautiful. There’s little extraneous dialogue, and the film resolutely refuses to hold its audience’s hands. It dares you to stay awake through some of the more ponderous, languid scenes, as not paying attention will lead only to confusion. I’d hesitate to call it “entertaining” so much as entrancing.
Yuki Kajiura’s score is incredibly atmospheric. Shiki’s theme is one of my favourite pieces of classical/anime music, melancholy and evocative. The superb ending song Oblivious by sadly long-since-dismantled band Kalafina is at once both epic and haunting. The music certainly helps elevate the entire production into the higher tier of more serious, dramatic anime.
Themes of emptiness and hollowness are markedly recurrent — Touko’s dolls, Shiki’s hidden history, Mikiya’s coma-like state, the name of the detective agency, the inner desolation of the terminally-ill, hospitalised antagonist. Already the threads are laid for further thematic exploration later, along with simple dangling plot threads like “who gave the antagonist the power to control an astral body?” that are sure to become important later.
After watching the film, I also sought out the fan translation of the original novel so I could read for myself the source material. The first novel contains stories one to three, and the first story is very short at only 37 pages. Overall, the shape of the narrative is more or less the same, but Shiki herself narrates much of it, which is quite jarring considering how few words she utters in the film. We get a lot more backstory about how Shiki and Mikiya were childhood friends who promised to attend college together, but after an accident Shiki was left in a coma and Mikiya had to go on ahead of her until she woke up.
Mikiya also narrates some of the story, and his possession is much less of an issue — it still happens but seems almost to be a footnote. The anime really punches up Shiki’s visceral reaction to him being stolen from her. Additionally, Shiki doesn’t appear to have a prosthetic arm in the book, or if she does, it’s not directly referenced. The action sequences are also much more muted, so most of the epic action in the film is a complete fabrication from ufotable — I’m not complaining though!
Unlike Mahoyo or Fate, there’s little in the way of light relief or humour in Kara no Kyoukai so far. This is Nasu in grim, serious mode, prominently featuring graphic suicide and mutilated bodies — I can see why it may be an acquired taste. I feel more prepared to plumb the depths of Nasu’s troubled psyche now though, having been inoculated by his previous works. I plan to watch each of the subsequent episodes, read the accompanying novella, and write about them in turn — and now the introductions are out of the way, I expect each article will be a bit shorter than this one!
Kara no Kyoukai/The Garden of Sinners Chapter 1: Thanatos (Overlooking View)
Directed by: Ei Aoki
Screenplay by: Masaki Hiramatsu
Story by: Kinoko Nasu
Based on: The Garden of Sinners/Kara no Kyoukai novel series by Kinoko Nasu
Music by: Yuki Kajiura, Kalafina
Production studio: ufotable
Original JP release: 1st December 2007
JP Distributor: Aniplex
UK home video release: 22nd December 2014 (Limited Edition DVD Collection), 25th November 2019 (Collector’s Edition Blu-ray set)
UK distributor: MVM
Language: Japanese audio with English Subtitles
Runtime: 49 minutes
BBFC rating: 15
