A Sea of Writings (Episode 20)

A Sea of Writings is the 20th episode of the Mushishi anime series.

There lives a girl whose leg is paralized because of a mortally dangerous mushi which it contains. The girl is a descendant of a woman who agreed to contain this mushi to help overcome it by imprisoning it in a human body, but it was not defeated, it continues to live in the bodies of her descendants. That mushi was a horrible creature aiming to kill all living things, mushi, beasts, and humans alike; it appeared long time ago during a natural disaster, a vast drought, that endangered all. No record of its appearance or properties survived, noone knows what it was like and what it did, how and why did it want to kill everything and everyone.

The girl's name is Tanyu, she lives in a lone house away in the wilderness along with an old Mushi-shi, who had brought her up and had thought her a way to quell that Mushi out of her body with time. She writes down all the tales about Mushi which she has been told by her teacher and other Mushi-shi guys, who mostly told her about killing it. The mushi comes out of her and is sealed up in the scripts she makes. She's grown sick of those cruel tales, and at that time Ginko comes to meet her and tells her stories of another kind.