In a small town in Kyushu, Taro is the son of a sake brewer, an ordinary boy who lives day in and day out without a strong group of friends or sense of purpose. Masayuki is a transfer student from Tokyo with a cheery personality that often crosses the border into arrogant, even bullying, and so he quickly finds himself with more of a bad reputation than a group of friends. Makoto is the class loner, a thug who rarely comes to school in favor of playing the guitar in his room alone.
Is that the whole story? No. Taro sees his dead sister in his dreams, watching her slowly starve to death in the abandoned hospital they were both thrown in when they were kidnapped as kids. Masayuki seems to have vertigo, but his fear of heights wasn't originally caused by him looking down from on high, but rather looking up to see the boy he drove to suicide standing alone on the rooftop. Makoto lives in a family of priests, the side branch of Taro's well-respected family, and shortly after Taro's kidnapping incident Makoto's family took his own life, without a word on how he left his family implicated in the incident in his wake.
Is that the whole story? Even here we haven't scratched beyond the surface. Ghost Hound refuses to answer any of the towering questions it poses about these three boys, if it even poses any. Truth be told, there isn't any reason it should. The start of our story isn't heralded by any cataclysmic events, uprooting their daily lives. The start of our story is a small handful of minor happenings: Masayuki's transfer and subsequent desire to get close to his little pet projects Taro and Makoto, Taro's transferral to a new psychologist, the control of the sake brewery being handed over to a new master brewer, and the continuation of a project to revitalize the town with the new biology research plant near the town's famous dam.
Masayuki decides to force the two of them visit the hospital under the dam as a test of courage while the water is dry, and the result of their quicksilver bond coupled with the intense psychological trauma of the cloying death around the hospital's inner rooms brings them to the world of spirits, the Hidden Realm, where they travel around the town with a new set of eyes attuned to the creatures hiding just on the other side of the coin. Does this set any great events in motion? No, it merely gives them a new world to explore. They use it for escapism, for therapy, for fantasy and for discovery. We see their daily lives in greater detail, juxtaposed against this new fantastical realm. We learn about the town and the spirituality surrounding it through the temple on the hill, with the head priest and his daughter Miyako exploring the implications of their journeys to the Hidden Realm. We learn about the psychology of their traumas and the scientific/anthropological approaches to the Hidden Realm through Taro's psychologist Hirata and the researcher Reika.
We learn and digest an endless supply of information that wraps in on itself, critiquing itself and posing alternate realities every few moments, and yet their whole worlds seem to revolve around just that: information, without a true end goal. Perhaps we want to see the three of them cured of their ailing minds, or maybe this is a sign of a spiritual singularity to come. But Ghost Hound refuses to pull the trigger. They go about their lives, and strange happenings certainly occur, but we live with the constant specter of a world that is just slightly wrong, incongruous to a real functioning microcosm in the mountains.
Part of what creates this masterful atmosphere is the auditory design, which utilizes scratching sounds and electronic glitches to create an air of unrest. Every episode begins with a recap of the previous episodes told without narration, and with the words of the characters muted and replaced with deadened sound effects. Often we hear Makoto's brilliant but subtle guitar solos as a backdrop for a compilation of events, both mundane and absolutely traumatizing. I would guess that the use of such organic sounds and inorganic noise as a replacement for most of the soundtrack was the key inspiration behind Shiki's equally suspenseful use of sound, but the electrical bend of Ghost Hound's sounds puts us inside their brains, giving us the feeling that the electrical impulses that govern their thoughts and feelings are just a little bit off.
The visuals do an equally good job at conveying this disconnect. As Taro thinks back to his kidnapping, it is only near his sister's ultimate demise that he can even make out her eyes, which he covers with a mosaic otherwise. We see them in a fight right before the incident, but we can't hear the words they say. All we see is Taro's perspective, with his sister of only five years older than him towering over him like a monster, yelling at him, trapping him in her shadow. A few moments later we see a paralleled shot of the kidnapper standing over him in a similarly dominating fashion, his body completely made of a black haze. The later shots of his sister lying perfectly still on the cot, zooming in on the fly making its home on her lip, or the hazy point of view shot of the police chasing the kidnapper before he is hit by a truck and transforms into a floating block of cubes as if to signal his immediate death, all create a complete picture of the incident of eleven years prior. And there isn't anything glamorous about it, not even in the most cathartic celebration of anarchy, violence, or retribution. Put another way, it is impossible for either Taro or us to fetishize this sequence like the heroic deaths or dramatic flashbacks of so many other works.
What unfolds between these inventive technical skills and the thoroughly researched scientific and religious exposition is a sensory overload played out in slow motion. The Hidden Realm strattles the line of driving the plot and serving as a backdrop to a fully realistic story, but the images that take place within this elusive fantasy world are no less disturbing or disquieting than the most tangible artifacts of trauma and psychological unrest. A man is left to diagnose his own hallucinations as the town slowly swallows up his sanity, an ambiguous god of the oldest Japanese texts on Shintoism comes back as a herald for the corrupt rise of an old religious cult, and all three of the boys make tentative steps in every direction, hoping to go forward but pushing themselves and each other backwards over and over again. We learn that Taro's family is a hotbed of PTSD, Masayuki's is as apathetic and disconnected as Lain's false family from Serial Experiments Lain, and Makoto's is so structurally unsound that the guitar literally keeps him alive. Even Miyako and her father, who love each other very much, come upon personal tensions that stress their ability to sympathize and assist one another.
Going through Ghost Hound for the second time, I can't help but feel a connection between it and the cult classic Serial Experiments Lain, beyond the fact that the brilliant Chiaki Konaka and Ryutaro Nakamura piloted both works. The common thread between their 1998 manifesto on encroaching technology and the breakdown of physical and mental barriers and this work, a lonely take on spirituality and mental trauma in a rural town, may seem stretched. There's a strong tell that Konaka wrote both: neither has a true narrative structure. Or perhaps it's even more than that; both deliberately eschew a narrative altogether. There is never a moment in the show where a true plot becomes apparent, even in the final struggles that hint at “good versus evil.” Taro, Makoto, and Masayuki have gone through life damaged, never feeling in their own skin. As they catalyze one another's journey of self-discovery, they trigger a new downwards spiral within Miyako, leaving her to negotiate her new identity as well. Nothing really happens to trigger anything that occurs; in some sense nothing really occurs at all. Everything is in the now, even as everyone focuses on the past as a way to escape the future.
The show is constantly pulsing with a subtle energy, a dark force that stands by us whispering in our ears, unsettling us even when everything seems to be normal. Hitchcock famously remarked that a bomb that explodes under a table is a surprise, whereas the bomb that doesn't explode is suspense. The difference is that in the former case we find out the bomb is there when the explosion occurs, and in the latter we see the bomb and wait in anguish for it to blow. Ghost Hound never shows us the bomb, and at best it implies that there really is one waiting. There is no surprise, but the result goes beyond suspense. It's a purer form of anxiety, the kind where everything feels like an unknown bomb could blow at any moment, even if it took years. It feels like we've missed something, that the writing is on the wall but we're just too blind to see it. If I had to give it a word, it would be “hell”.