Secret Santa Review: Mononoke
Kenji Nakamura’s one-of-a-kind supernatural mystery anime has still got it
Welcome to Anime Secret Santa, a gift exchange — founded by our friends at Reverse Thieves and currently run by the Taiiku Podcast — where the gifts are anime review recommendations. This is the second time Mononoke has been reviewed by an Ani-Gamers staffer as part of Anime Secret Santa! Check out Ink’s 2021 review here.
“Mononoke? Like Princess Mononoke?” The series I picked for Anime Secret Santa this year has the unfortunate fate of nearly sharing a name with one of the most famous anime movies of all time. “Mononoke” is, of course, just a word from Japanese folklore, referring to malignant spirits that survive by attaching themselves to negative human emotions. The 2007 anime TV series Mononoke is a strikingly original work, one that still has the ability to surprise new viewers nearly two decades after its release, and deserves better than to be a disambiguation link on a Princess Mononoke Wikipedia page.
Mononoke began as one of the three stories in Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, a Toei Animation anthology series collecting anime adaptations of famous Japanese ghost stories from different creative teams. Director Kenji Nakamura, who helmed the Ayakashi arc “Bakeneko” or “Ghost Cat,” spun out the concept into a full 12-episode series, focusing on a medicine seller who tracks down and exorcises mononoke.
The series follows a strict structure: every arc comprises 2-3 episodes, during which the medicine seller appears, identifies the presence of a mononoke, and begins the exorcism process. To defeat the spirit, he needs to unsheathe a magical sword that requires three pieces of information for each mononoke: its “form” (what shape the spirit takes when doing its ghostly business), its “truth” (the effects of the mononoke), and its “reason” (the circumstances that created it). In some arcs he can figure out one of these relatively quickly, but in others it can take multiple episodes, and repeated explorations of the psychology of the mononoke’s victims, to discover all three.
If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice what Nakamura and his writing team (including some famous names like Serial Experiments Lain’s Chiaki J. Konaka and Princess Tutu’s Michiko Yokote) have created here: a collection of historical ghost stories wrapped around a detective procedural. Every arc features a positively Sherlockian reveal of the final answer, and like all great mysteries, the exact route to the solution is never quite the same in each case. The laconic, constantly smirking medicine seller, who appropriately goes unnamed for the entire series, is a non-character despite his flamboyant and memorable character design. The real characters of each case are the victims of the mononoke, and we discover their underlying fears and motivations through both the trials that each mononoke puts them through and the tricks and techniques of the medicine seller.
With only five cases across 12 episodes, Mononoke delivers a wonderful variety of mysteries: a pregnant woman stays the night in a brothel and is haunted by childlike spirits; three men seek to marry one woman and compete in a game of incense-smelling; and (my personal favorite) an entire train car is spirited away by a mononoke, with seven passengers trapped inside and one thread connecting them all. Not only are the configurations of mononoke and victim different in every case, but the settings vary wildly as well: a prison cell, a ship, a train. That last one highlights something else that goes unspoken throughout the show: the medicine seller seems to float between time periods, appearing exactly the same in both feudal times and the modernizing period of the early 20th century. Continuity be damned, Mononoke is a simple vehicle for ghost stories and I don’t want to know any “lore” about the medicine seller!
I got five paragraphs into a review of Mononoke without mentioning the thing that truly places this show in a class of its own: the visuals. Nakamura has a reputation for pushing the boundaries of anime art direction, as seen in shows like Tsuritama and Gachaman Crowds. Mononoke, his debut as a series director, is depicted almost entirely with bright colors and a textured paper cutout effect, calling to mind the chiyogami paper used in origami, as well as byōbu (traditional Japanese screen painting). The latter is referenced directly throughout the show, most noticeably in scene transitions depicted via the opening and closing of patterned screen doors. (In the final arc, when the story has moved to a train, Nakamura cleverly replaces the screen effect with train doors.)
The animation, on the other hand, is conspicuously limited, with movement in many scenes depicted via low-framerate, motion-blurred animation. It’s unclear if this was a budget constraint or stylistic choice, but either way it works nicely with the rest of the visuals, emphasizing the idea of pieces of paper being moved around to tell a folk tale, similar to the limited motion available to traditional kamishibai performers. A heavy reliance on still shots and densely textured backgrounds initially felt off-putting, until I realized that the background art frequently hides hints about the identity of a mononoke or its connection with the victim, often in the form of paintings or scrolls. The only part that doesn’t quite work is the occasional 3-D animation, which feels out of place in a show so dedicated to the tactile experience of paper.
If you’re familiar with Mononoke, you probably know it as a “weird” show, a prestige project for people who like their anime offbeat and challenging. The reputation is well-deserved: Mononoke is the kind of series that demands your complete attention. The solutions for each mononoke are often obtuse, either hidden behind blink-and-you’ll-miss-it visual clues or left up to the viewer to interpret on their own. Nakamura’s direction is full of abrupt cuts, editing that crosses the line of action, and other tricks that will throw you off balance. The artwork frequently rejects any semblance of realism in favor of a surrealist approach that make even ordinary scenes feel like they exist in a dream world. One story features snowflakes in the background that fall and then abruptly zig to the right or left before falling again. Another depicts background crowds as mannequins (a sly reference to the techniques animators use to differentiate important characters from generic mobs).
Thankfully, Mononoke rewards those who engage with its complexity. Every case leaves unanswered questions and multiple possible interpretations, as evidenced by the copious Reddit threads where fans debate their pet theories for each episode. These ghost stories are never straightforward tales of good and evil, and sometimes you may find yourself cheering for the mononoke over the victims, or changing your perspective over the course of a single case.
I had a great time watching Mononoke, and considering how much I enjoyed Nakamura’s series Tsuritama, it’s probably about time I gave Gachaman Crowds a shot as well. And as luck would have it, there’s more Mononoke where that came from: Nakamura returned to the series in 2024 with a new anime movie, available now on Netflix. I’m particularly curious to see how the series’ unforgettable visual style has evolved now that Nakamura has access to a whole new generation of digital tools.