TYPE-MOON Review: Kara no Kyoukai/The Garden of Sinners Chapter 8: Epilogue (The Garden of Sinners)
While the seventh and “final” of studio ufotable’s The Garden of Sinners/Kara no Kyoukai anime movies was released in Japanese cinemas in August of 2009, it took until February 2011 before the films were all released together on Japanese blu-ray. Accompanying them was a new chapter — a 33-minute OVA epilogue, adapting the final short segment of Kinoku Nasu’s third novel. Directed by ufotable president Hikaru Kondo, it’s a single-scene intimate two-hander between series leads Mikiya Kokutou and Shiki Ryougi. Sort of.
Deliberately framed to mirror the original meeting between Shiki and Mikiya back in Chapter 2, the setting is a lonely hillside road overlooking a wintertime Mifune City, the panorama doused in sepia-toned half-light as a blanket of perpetually-falling snow muffles the ground. Once again, Mikiya climbs the hill, his black-clad body protected from the cold flakes by his umbrella. Rather than a young schoolboy this is now an adult Mikiya — battle-scarred and dragging his left foot, leaving a a contiguous trench in the snow rather than discrete footprints. Despite the ravages of time, he still smiles in wonder at the aloof, beautiful figure of Shiki Ryougi as she gazes over the city landscape in her high-class pink kimono.
Answering a question we perhaps never realised required answering (why when Mikiya first met Shiki at school she did not recall previously meeting him on the snowy hillside), Shiki informs Mikiya that today she manifests her third — or perhaps original — persona (I’ll call her Void Shiki, as she’s called in FGO). Mikiya seems to recognise this, and they embark on an odd, prolonged conversation ripped almost entirely from the novel with minimal editing. This is how half an hour is filled — with deep concepts and meandering philosophical musings that may not make much sense to anyone not fully on board with Nasu’s favourite concepts of “The swirl of the root” and “origin”. Nasu has a “gift” of saying not an awful lot of value by expending an enormous volume of words… In this epilogue, Void Shiki is very little but Nasu’s mouthpiece.
It’s telling that Nasu is a psychology graduate — much of Void Shiki’s monologue touches on the link between mind and body, and the origin of intelligence. It’s quite interesting but very verbose, and to be honest I found my attention drifting. Nasu has an irritating habit of contrasting opposite notions that don’t immediately make sense — perhaps that’s a failure of translation, or perhaps he just likes talking out of his arse? For example: “The Shiki who affirms everything so as not to get hurt” and “The Shiki who negates everything so as to get hurt”. I don’t know if I’m just stupid, but I honestly don’t understand what this is referring to. Nasu’s exposition is full of nonsense like this that on the surface sounds like he’s trying to say something clever, but he fails completely to communicate what that is to me.
Shiki’s nature appears to reference the Taiji — yin and yang — as was expounded in Chapter 5: Paradox Spiral. She had two conflicting personalities, with male and female identities, but this current Void Shiki existed in her body before either of those other personalities were formed as a result of the Ryougi family’s magecraft. Void Shiki is the base personality, generated from the body, while the other two personalities were generated from her mind. Neither personality were aware of Void Shiki, sandwiched between them. It’s all a bit odd, and mostly I have to shrug and say “ok Nasu, whatever.”
The whole epilogue OVA seems rather extraneous, in that although I suppose it’s nice to have a beautifully animated and very chill coda, the ending of Chapter 7 was already very satisfactory. Chapter 8 doesn’t need to exist, and if anything it stretches slightly more than eight pages of tortured prose into over half an hour. No amount of insanely detailed character animation and moody camera angles can distract from the ponderousness and padding of what could have been communicated efficiently as a five-minute epilogue to the previous film.
One problem is that this isn’t even a conversation between the two main characters — it’s a conversation between Mikiya and a previously hidden personality who has only appeared briefly, once. Rather than offer direct emotional closure, their conversation mainly functions to expound on Nasu’s worldview and doesn’t sound remotely natural. As a thematic coda to Nasu’s obsession with his “origin” concept and his examination of the Taiju it’s effective, but outwith a very narrow TYPE-MOON lore scope, it amounts to essentially nothing.
It appears that Void Shiki is directly connected to The Origin/The Root/The Akashic Records and is apparently all-powerful… but does nothing with this as a story concept. It’s just sort of stated and left at that. Mikiya tactfully declines her offer to magically fix his blinded eye (with the sensible reason that “Shiki only knows how to destroy things, so I’d rather not end up in a worse state”). Shiki’s attraction to murder is explained by Void Shiki’s connection to The Root via her awakened origin of “nothingness”, as this somehow makes her able to experience death without dying. Again, with this I just have to respond “Ok Nasu, whatever.” These plot points only make sense in the deepest darkest recesses of the TYPE-MOON universe, and I can see how other less knowledgeable viewers could be put off by this esoteric gibberish.
Chapter eight is an excellent example of style over substance — it looks gorgeous, and with yet another Kalafina ending track it of course sounds amazing, but the overly-verbose pseudo-intellectual gobbledegook monologue that comprises almost its entire runtime means this really isn’t worth your time. I can see myself one day re-watching at least some of Kara no Kyoukai, but this unnecessary sepia-toned appendage will probably stay in its box. Of course even with this, I’m not done with the franchise yet. In 2013, ufotable released a sequel anime movie — Future Gospel (Recalled out Summer) and a short film (Extra Chorus). I was advised to watch Extra Chorus first, so I’ll be back soon to discuss that.
Kara no Kyoukai/The Garden of Sinners Chapter 8: Epilogue (The Garden of Sinners)
Directed by: Hikaru Kondo
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: 2nd February 2011
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: 33 minutes
BBFC rating: 15
RRP: Blu-ray CE box: £180 (can be found online for as low as £90)
Fan-translated novel link: here
