Vampire Princess Miyu: Volume 1

Blood is warm and sweet

Minor spoilers

Himiko Se is a spiritualist—a catch-all term that describes those who protect humans from demons and other creatures of the dark. She is a study in contrasts—fashionable, but dead broke; a skeptic who does not believe in her own profession.

One night, Himiko witnesses a young girl dressed in white and red—a girl with a silent, masked companion; a girl who can hover in the air and create flame in the palm of her hand; a girl who can also exorcise evil beings; a girl who knows Himiko by name, and who warns her not to get involved.

Oh, by the way, this girl also survives on human blood. Her name is Miyu, and she is hardly a typical vampire, since sunlight, crosses and holy water affect her not at all. She is a vampire princess—a being whose only purpose is that of binding stray Shinma (demon-gods) to the darkness where they belong.

Volume 1 contains the first two episodes of the series, "Unearthly Kyoto" and "A Banquet of Marionettes."

Unearthly Kyoto
When anxious parents call Himiko to the ancient capital of Kyoto to perform an exorcism on their young daughter Aiko, who has been in a coma for two months, the spiritualist does not initially believe the daughter is really possessed. But the Kyoto area has also been plagued with a rash of vampiric killings—women drained of every drop of blood—and Aiko may be involved. The appearance of Miyu leads Himiko to believe the vampire princess may also be involved with the killings, leading the spiritualist into an obsessive desire to hunt down and destroy Miyu as a monster.

This episode sets up a convention of place—a sort of dead dreamworld belonging to Miyu, a land of skeletal black trees bearing bosomy albino fruit, and a watercolor sky the tint of freshly-shed blood. Whenever Miyu has something important to convey to Himiko, the scene shifts to her dreamworld. It's startling and effective.

A Banquet of Marionettes
Kei is a beautiful upperclassman at high school who seems supremely bored with his privileged upbringing. Nothing much matters to him—until the day he meets a doll-like girl who promises she can grant him eternal youth and beauty. Also hidden here is Miyu, posing as a schoolgirl, who desires Kei for his beauty as well as his blood, and Himiko, who is investigating a rash of disappearing girls and the appearance of odd marionettes.

Drawing heavily on the visual style and sound effects of kabuki theater, "A Banquet of Marionettes" contains some of the most visually creepy sequences in this series—of marionettes who bleed, of human-looking beings who come apart. It is also, oddly enough, the most romantic of the episodes, describing a doomed-yet-inseparable set of lovers; this ought to appeal to goth sensibilities.

The Vampire Princess Miyu OAV set consists of only four episodes on two VHS tapes, but it has some of the most intriguing direct-to-video anime released in the last twenty years. The character designs are beautiful and well-drawn, backgrounds are properly eerie, and the mood is creepy and fragile—but, surprisingly for a series about vampires, there's very little gore. The series deals primarily with the quiet, implied chills of the supernatural, and not everything is spelled out for the viewer. Unfortunately, since each episode is less than half an hour in length, there isn't too much time for character development, particularly in this first volume. Viewers who want more Miyu will have to go on to the manga and/or TV series to sate their cravings.

One concept the series begins to explore is monstrousness, and what the precise definition is. At one point, Himiko angrily denounces Miyu as a blood-drinking monster and Miyu replies sadly, "People always talk like that... with clouded eyes and tainted lips... even though the truth is always within them."

The truth, of course, is that we are all monsters. Some are just more adept at hiding it than others.

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