Character · Mushishi
Ginko
One green eye, white hair, and a cigarette lit for reasons that have nothing to do with the habit.
In Otakana the clue reads: White-haired traveller who studies mushi
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Mushishi
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Ginko walks from village to village looking into problems no doctor can name: a boy who writes in a script nobody taught him, a woman whose dreams arrive before the events do. The cause is usually mushi, life forms older and simpler than plants or animals, invisible to most people and drawn to Ginko in particular. His smoke keeps them at a distance, which is why he never puts it out.
He is a researcher rather than a hero. Most episodes end in an explanation and a compromise instead of a victory, and sometimes the compromise costs the person who asked for help. Mushishi refuses the shape of a fight almost completely. The tension comes from not knowing whether a household will accept what he tells them, and what it will do if it does not.
Yuki Urushibara serialised the manga from 1999, and Artland animated twenty-six episodes in 2005 with a soundtrack of birds, water and very little music. Nearly every episode stands alone, so it is one of the few series you can start anywhere in. Ginko lost his memory and one eye before the story begins, and picked the name he uses afterwards.
Spelling GINKO
GINKO is five letters and hides nothing, yet it collects wrong guesses anyway. Readers who know the tree write GINKGO, with a silent G that has no business here. The name is Japanese, gin for silver, matching the hair, and the character chose it himself. Five letters, two of them vowels, ending on an O rather than the U an English ear expects.