Shin Sekai Yori 22 — Journey to Tokyo

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This episode was mostly a setup showing the journey to Tokyo (which looks beautiful, by the way). Saki and Satoru escape from the Queerats and battle monsters. The party is supplemented by a library and Kiroumaru.

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Pretty standard adventure fare. Lots of icky bugs that freak out Saki. Not the show’s most exciting episode. But still excellent for what it is. I was surprised, as usual, when the episode was over.

Parenting

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In the last episode, Saki learned that her parents had gone to face the fiend in the village, and were likely to never return. Saki’s mother left a letter (abbreviated version below):

Dear Saki,
I love you.
— Mom

PS: Go dig up my cache of biological weapons and murder that bastard.

This was definitely not the letter I was expecting. It seems a rather cruel wish to hoist on your child. I’m surprised that Saki’s mother didn’t take it upon herself to do the dirty deed, if it is so necessary. Hoisting the task on your only daughter seems so contrary to human love.

Fiendish Speculations

Saki’s words this week strengthened my suspicions. I don’t think the kid is actually a fiend at all. There is a psychological component at play in death feedback. You can kill anything as long as you don’t regard it as human, which is why the villagers can kill Queerats without any problem, but not other humans.

The “fiend” has likely never seen another human before, and was raised among Queerats. Hence, he probably sees Queerats as humans and Homo Sapiens as animals. I suspect that if he believed he killed a Queerat he would die.

Further Thoughts

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Nice boat.

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I like here how Kiroumaru first addresses Saki and Satoru as gods and then changes to humans. I think the humans’ reputation has at the very least faded from this incident.

16 thoughts on “Shin Sekai Yori 22 — Journey to Tokyo

      1. well maybe they fail the bomb, so kiroumaru desses up into a human and sacrifices himself, the fiend notice it was not a “human” and gets killed death feedback.

        either way he will 100% have a major role by defeating the fiend

        sry for my bad english

      2. It seems like the bombs not much better than old fashioned fists anyways, since you have to get them to sniff the powder.

    1. Yeah, that’s true, I wonder if he’ll be able to kill Kiroumaru. Kiroumaru looks so radically different from every other Queerat so it makes me wonder though. It’s weird that no one in the show even seems to notice this.

  1. I don’t understand why they are continuing to search for this bioweapon even after they have learned that it is highly contagious and affects only Cantus-users. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. Infinitely preferable would be one individual willing to strike at the fiend in a moment of self-sacrifice, rather than risk the infection and death of the entire human population.
    Even if they didn’t do this, how are they going to infect the Fiend? Doctor its morning gruel?

    1. -i understood that it is not highly contagious but higly effective
      -they do need to kill the fiend only with the bioweapon, the queerats are not theproblem
      -they can’t kill each other at all, so nobody can’t selfsacrifice himself
      -kiroumaru coul’d do the injection.

      1. They made it sound like it was highly contagious? Maybe I’m wrong though. If Kiroumaru can do the injection, why doesn’t he just chop the kids head off? Seems easier than going to all this trouble.

    2. Same, I don’t get it either. It seems like it would probably do more damage than a single fiend would, and additionally, who knows how they can actually deliver it to the guy.

    1. You’re right! I’d totally forgotten about that…. Well there goes that theory.

      On second thought, didn’t they say that what happened at the battle was that the Queerats’ weapons all disappeared? He said that they fought to the death with their claws and teeth but were outmatched, I think. So it’s possible that the fiend took their weapons and then the army did the actual killing when they were unarmed?

      1. That is true too. They were all supposed to be mutilated or something, so that kind of leaves their actual killers ambiguous. Kiroumaru also mentioned being afraid of the fiend’s powers and only escaping due to luck and the selflessness of his troops, so that could imply that the fiend did more than just disarm his soldiers.

        1. Yeah, it could have been either way. We’ll have to wait and see. But my intuition leads me to expect that the writer wouldn’t have introduced this ambiguity if he wasn’t planning to take advantage of it.

  2. I had expected something different from the remains of Tokyo, perhaps like in Jintai w/ some rotten office buildings. But here, there are no remains at all, at least not on the surface! There must have been a catastrophic event taking place ages ago.

    “Go dig up my cache of biological weapons and murder that bastard.” I guess you also can get yourself killed very easily if you mess with that anthrax powder!

    ” Lots of icky bugs that freak out Saki.” I would sure freak out in her place, as well.

    1. I’m not sure if there was a catastrophic event, or simply the build-up of Cantus leakage over the centuries. I think it’s been thousands of years since people lived in Tokyo, so I’m not that surprised so little is left. Another random thought: with global warming, sea levels are supposed to rise. Tokyo would probably be underwater by now. Maybe they somehow brought in sand to save Tokyo from drowning, but now all the skyscrapers are underground. That’s why the virus was in a normal room that happened to be deep underground.

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