Grant Wood, American Gothic. 1930.

The countryside, or inaka, holds an odd place in Japan’s culture.  The inaka represents tradition, the world of farming and quiet village life.  There’s a lot of nostalgia for its rural simplicity.  But economic realities are harsh: Inaka communities are dying because, frankly, no one lives in them anymore.  Today, there are hamlets nestled deep in the mountains that can’t be reached by either train or bus, where a few ancient residents survive on weekly grocery trucks from faraway civilization.  Even in what passes for towns in the inaka, you will find ghostly streets of rust and closed shutters.  It’s a very lonely existence.

In Shiki, the inaka wears its good and bad on its sleeve.  In the village of Sotoba (literally “Outside Place”), we hear gossiping old folks and the naysaying of born-and-bred xenophobes.  We see boredom and emptiness.  But when one of their own is in trouble, we also see an entire village band together to rescue their black sheep.  Residents of the countryside will complain that there’s nothing to do and little excitement, but at the same time, living anywhere else will never be an option.  It’s a curious mixture of disdain and pride, to know inaka life.

But this is a horror show, and horror we get:  Dead bodies rotting in the oppressive heat, being eaten by maggots.  Quiet houses where people die alone, and days will pass before they’re found because they are the only ones there.  And we hear the endless screaming of the cicadas, the song of summertime, so loud and so ubiquitous in the country that you can almost forget that you’re completely and utterly alone.  In an endless sea of rice and forest, no matter what happens, no one will come.  That, too, is the inaka.  Or it can be.

The freakiest part of the first episode was in its last few seconds.

Perhaps what we’re seeing in Shiki (and other shows set in the inaka, like Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) is the countryside from the point of view of the frightened city slicker.  It’s kind of like how every American horror movie has to be set in a terrible wasteland somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line, but not exactly.  Unlike your average Yankee, even urban Japanese know the inaka very well.  The relationship is more ambiguous than just fear alone.