SHIGOFUMI

My Rating: 5starsvector

Release Date: Japan_01/05/2008

Creator: Ryo Amaiya

Studio: J.C. Staff

Genre: drama, psychological, supernatural

Themes: death, split personalities, mail carriers,communicating with the dead, different realms

Episodes: 12 (30 minutes x 12 episodes = 360 minutes)

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Fumika is a young-looking girl who is a mail carrier that delivers “after death letters” (shigofumi). These letters are written by people after they die and are delivered to the person the letter is addressed to in the living world. The letters contain things that the now-deceased could not say while they were alive, such as things they wanted to say before they died, or even to inform others about who killed them in the case of a murder. Accompanying Fumika is her talking staff Kanaka which can also float of its own accord and likes to be treated as if “she” were human. In contrast to Fumika who is quiet and serious about her job, Kanaka is loud and boisterous. The story follows Fumika and Kanaka as they interact with the living via the shigofumi. Shigofumi mail carriers are assigned a specific area that they deliver letters to, just like a normal mail carrier. When they are not delivering letters from the dead, they are in another realm called Shigo. The mail carriers are usually now-dead humans who do not age, and take on the appearance of just before they died, but Fumika does age, signifying that she is not dead yet.

FAVORITE CHARACTER:

MIKA episode 01

MIKA01MIKA03MIKA09MIKA08MIKA06MIKA14

Personality: quiet, powerful, caring though might not appear so, cool, fast,
good with guns, mysterious, dutiful

Significance: main character, Fumika’s split personality

GENERAL ENVIRONMENTS:
town that Mika is in charge offor being a Shigofumi mail carrier of,
suburban Japan, Fumika’s house, the dimension of Shigofumi mail carriers,
Fumilka’s friends’ houses, high-school, Hospital where Fumika sleeps in her coma

ENVIRONMENTS_SHIGOFUMI17ENVIRONMENTS_SHIGOFUMI07ENVIRONMENTS_SHIGOFUMI13ENVIRONMENTS_SHIGOFUMI15ENVIRONMENTS_SHIGOFUMI05ENVIRONMENTS_SHIGOFUMI18

Where I Started Watching: online (2008)

Number of Times Watched: 3 (2008-2009)

Favorite Episodes: 7 and 8

Mika is really cool; she might not seem strong, but Mika is really powerful. But something about Shigofumi bothers me, it’s because the idea of the dead communicating with the living is not original. In fact the idea has been done before many times, Shigofumi just uses mail carriers as the way of communication. And one other thing about Shigofumi that bothers me is that the series starts out as just a series of stories about the dead writing letters for a living person to read. Where Shigofumi really shines is more near the near the end of the series. The deeper Shigofumi’s story goes is when the best questions of the series get answered like how did Mika and Fumika become two individual people even though Mika is just a split personality of Fumika? What attracted me to Shigofumi ,though, first was the drawing style though the animation is drawn digitally. And because I saw the anime series, I really want to read light novels (anime series was adapted from light novels), but the light novels are in Japanese and I can’t read Japanese.