TYPE-MOON Review: Kara no Kyoukai/The Garden of Sinners Chapter 3: ever cry, never life (Remaining Sense of Pain)
Intrepid, I continue my descent into anime studio ufotable’s adaptation of TYPE-MOON founding writer Kinoko Nasu’s late 1990’s novel series Kara no Kyoukai/The Garden of Sinners. Now I’ve reached what’s perhaps the darkest and most uncomfortable installment so far. TRIGGER WARNING — this film depicts brutal gang-rape and bloody violence, so only read ahead if you’re comfortable reading a discussion of such subject matter.
Of ufotable’s original eight-part film series, the first four episodes are jumbled in terms of chronology, and film three — Remaining Sense of Pain — comes third. It’s preceded by fourth, first, and then followed by the second chronological story, which will be next on my itinerary after this. Remaining Sense of Pain introduces a character who may prove familiar to Fate/Grand Order players — 4-star archer Fujino Asagami, renowned as one of the rarest characters in the game (or at least she was, until some recent surprise rate-ups). She’s also a prime example of the rule that the Archer class contains anything and everything except actual archers.
In Kara no Kyoukai’s world, during the July 1998 timeframe of this episode, Fujino is not a Servant/Heroic Spirit — she’s just a normal girl… Well, as normal as a serial-murdering, numb-to-pain teenage girl with Mystic Eyes of Distortion can be. She’s a student at Reien Girl’s Academy in Misaki city, so wears a regulation uniform oddly similar to a cassock, or nun’s religious habit. TYPE-MOON obsessives may be aware this is the same prestigious private school attended by Witch on the Holy Night/Mahoyo’s inscrutable witch Alice Kuonji, a decade earlier. It also seems that at some point even prior, terrifying puppeteer/mage-turned-private-investigator Touko Aozaki also attended the same academy. If only there were some pictures of Touko wearing that uniform… I’m getting distracted here, let’s move on.
At this point in the story, our main female protagonist and “murderphilic” Shiki Ryougi has recently awoken from the coma she mysteriously fell into at the end of the last episode, and is now working for Touko as some kind of enforcer for her supernatural private investigation company Garan-no-dou (The Hollow Shrine). Touko is running short of cash, mainly because of an ill-advised and very expensive impulse purchase of a Victorian-era Ouija board, so she reluctantly takes on a case from a wealthy client — to hunt down and if necessary even kill his daughter who has been implicated in a series of bizarre, violent murders.
Each episode of Kara no Kyoukai so far has focused on serial murderers of one kind or another — in the first it was a dying, blind woman who had been mysteriously granted a ghostly astral body, and who lured teenage girls to commit suicide by throwing themselves from the roof of an abandoned skyscraper. In the second, the viewer was left in the dark as to the true identity of its perpetrator, hinting it was either Shiki’s alter ego SHIKI, or someone else with an interest in implicating her. In this story, we’re left with no ambiguity as to the murderer — we see the horrifying mode of death, and the assailant — a very troubled girl with out-of-control emotions and confusion regarding her experiences.
Remaining Sense of Pain opens with a dimly-lit scene of horror and violence as the bare-breasted, doll-like body of Fujino Asagami is gang-raped by a group of sneering, jeering young men. Not only do they repeatedly penetrate her against her will, but they beat her spine with a stick, and apparently stab her abdomen. This brutality awakens something in her that results in all but one of her rapists dying horribly with heads and limbs violently twisted off, the floor and walls drenched in their blood. It’s a grim way to start a film, and it’s depicted in dark, grimy fashion — so dark that any attempt to take screenshots results in grainy, blurred images difficult to decipher. Fujino’s suffering is thankfully not glorified, the scene is about as far from titillating as it can be — more than can be said for certain other anime with similar subject matter. Her revenge isn’t even cathartic — it’s bizarre, and gross, and off-putting — and that’s exactly the tone that director Mitsuru Obunai appears to be aiming for.
Anyway, male protagonist Mikiya Kokutou finds a shivering Fujino, and white knight that he is, takes her home and cares for her, putting her to sleep on his sofa, though she disappears before he awakes. She has other people to hunt and kill — one of whom is Mikiya’s younger ex-school friend Keita. Keita has unfortunately fallen in with some bad company, and has become a serial gang-rapist — he’s the only one who escaped Fujino’s earlier horrific revenge rampage. Mikiya tracks him down at another friend’s request, before Fujino can find him instead. Mikiya’s dark, blank expression of disgust as his friend describes his repugnant exploits is deeply chilling. Despite this, Mikiya still agrees to shelter him. I don’t know, I’d imagine calling the police or kicking him out to face Fujino’s wrath may have been more just…
While Mikiya hunts Keita, Shiki hunts Fujino — and meets her on three occasions. The first, Fujino is placidly sipping tea with Mikiya’s sister Azaka (presumably in-between murderings), the second after Fujino twists the limbs of one of Keita’s acquaintances, and the last, climactic, time within the structure of a large bridge. For someone who claims to enjoy murdering, we haven’t actually seen Shiki kill anyone so far. Fujino seems unstable and her unusual powers and bloodlust turn themselves on and off at random. Shiki’s only interested in killing the crazed murdery version of Fujino, and just kind of… wanders off… when she reverts back to cowering girl status.
Kara no Kyoukai seems to have quite a small cast, of intimately-connected characters. Fujino in particular previously met (and fell in love with) Mikiya when she was in middle school (it’s unclear as to whether he recognises or indeed even remembers her), she’s friends with and attends the same school as Mikiya’s sister Azaka, plus she’s the heir of a rich, prominent family with a similar supernatural secret to Shiki’s family. Touko herself comments that in a way, Fujino is Shiki’s opposite — while Shiki’s father strived to train and challenge Shiki to develop her innate inherited gifts, Fujino’s father tried to suppress his daughter’s power with drugs, the side effect being to completely deaden her sense of pain. This leaves Fujino bereft of a central aspect of human experience, affecting not only her sense of self, but ability to empathise with other humans.
Fujino’s affliction is interesting from a medical perspective. Some people are born without any kind of pain perception (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain and Anhidrosis/CIPA)— it’s incredibly rare though, is associated with mutations of the NTRK1 gene, and also affects the ability to produce sweat. It’s not something that develops later in childhood — you’re born with it. The source novel suggests a spinal cord cystic lesion “syringomyelia” as a potential cause of Fujino’s absence of pain awareness, though as a physician, that’s not quite what immediately springs to my mind. Usually syringomyelia is associated with a wider range of neurological deficits, such as weakness and paralysis, and doesn’t usually affect the entire body. Anyway, patients with CIPA tend to accidentally damage their bodies. A lot. I would have expected someone like Fujino to have sustained multiple deformities of her extremeties by now, caused by repeated accidental damage and subsequent infections. Turns out pain perception is absolutely essential to even normal day-to-day function. I don’t think a brutal injury to the spine would be enough to kickstart pain sensation either— that’s not how the nervous system works. Writer Kinoko Nasu’s not a medical doctor though, so I don’t really want to nitpick! The ultimate reason for Fujino’s condition is semi-magical anyway.
I also find Fujino’s character interesting because she’s a cute girl (whose design and personality reminds me a lot of Sakura from Nasu’s later Fate/Stay Night) who the viewer is invited to both empathise with and condemn. She’s been horribly abused, and is experiencing physical pain for the first time, so in a way her desire for vengeance is justified. However it’s clear she’s just as twisted inside as the corpses of her victims. Shiki confronts her after the murder of Keita’s acquaintance — she’s smiling, suggesting that she subconsciously enjoys killing. It takes until Fujino kills a completely unrelated person, and become an irredeemable murderer, for Shiki to finally snap and go all-out in her fight with her.
That final fight is quite spectacular, featuring ufotable’s signature smooth and dynamic animation and impeccable sense of detail, set to the stirring, thumping beats of Yuki Kajiura’s always-fantastic electro-classical soundtrack. The fight takes place inside a new bridge — what the anime adaptation leaves out is that it’s Fujino’s (step)father’s company who is responsible for building the bridge. In completely destroying it, Fujino manages to take revenge against the father who has rejected her and wants her dead. During the fight, the true source of Fujino’s pain is revealed — yes, she’s had a spinal injury, but she wasn’t stabbed as she thought — the pain deep in her abdomen is due to an untreated chronic appendicitis, an infection that has progressed, untreated, possibly to rupture and peritonitis, and will probably kill her.
After Fujino manages to destroy Shiki’s left arm (hence the appearance of the prosthetic arm in episode one), Shiki becomes wise to Fujino’s ability and is able to fight back. Shiki’s actions are utterly badass as she “kills” her own arm, rips her clothes to make a tourniquet to stem the bleeding, and still fights off Fujino’s Mystic Eyes with her remaining arm. Even then, she decides against killing the now-pathetic Fujino and instead “kills” her appendicitis instead, saving her life. Wouldn’t it be amazing if real-life surgeons had access to Mystic Eyes of Death? Seems like Shiki has a soft heart underneath all that apparently murderphilic exterior gruffness. She even teases Mikiya that she has a little murderous impulse developing towards him too. I think in Shiki-speak, that probably means she loves him.
Despite its grim subject matter, dark scene composition and oppressive atmosphere, I enjoyed Remaining Sense of Pain. It feels like little jigsaw pieces are starting to fit together, and I’m very much looking forwards to the next episode filling in some narrative gaps between the previous episode and this one. I’ve lots of questions regarding what this story will eventually be about, and what kind of person Shiki actually is, but I expect answers will come to those who are patient. Once again, it’s definitely not an anime film for the mainstream, it’s very much an acquired taste (I don’t even tend to watch this genre of entertainment in live action very often), but I remain along for the dark, unsettling rollercoaster ride. I’ll be back soon to write about episode four — Garan no Dou (The Hollow Shrine).
Kara no Kyoukai/The Garden of Sinners Chapter 3: Remaining Sense of Pain
Directed by: Mitsuru Obunai
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: 9th February, 2008
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: 57 minutes
BBFC rating: 18
RRP: Blu-ray CE box: £180 (can be found online for as low as £90)
Fan-translated novel link: here
