This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Wynne. Thank you for your support.

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“There must be a paradise waiting for us somewhere.”

The image of a vampire in a garden is a pleasant one. Consider it for a moment; the bloodsucking creature of folklore allowed to sit in peace, the Sun gently lighting her face in the way it does for the rest of us. Throughout Vampire in The Garden, we examine this visual metaphor, jewel-like as it is, from several angles. Some of these are surprisingly literal, others symbolic, but it’s clear from the outset, and throughout the miniseries, that the primary meaning is not that of a greenhouse or anything of the sort. It is of a garden of Eden. An imagined, perfect paradise beyond this world, in which there is no strife, violence, or hatred. In which two people who love each other can be together, even if they are from vastly different circumstances.

Even if the whole world is arrayed against them; arrows aimed at the throat.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Vampire in The Garden is yet another anime this year to focus on vampires and romance, following after the second part of The Case Study of Vanitas, but presaging summer seasonal hit Call of The Night. It has a bit in common with both of those, but its real roots lie much deeper; back in the era of 90-120 minute OVAs. Vampire is a little longer, the five-episode mini-series clocks in at about 2 hours, but it is very much a single, self-contained story. And what a story; this is easily one of the year’s best anime, no mean feat in 2022, which has been absolutely swamped with great shows. As for the production-side of things; it’s a Wit Studio project, helmed by director and series compositor Ryoutarou Makihara, his first time at the helm since the obscure Empire of Corpses.

There are two main things one must understand about Vampire in The Garden in order to properly appreciate it. 1: it is an intensely queer story. While it is true that the themes found within it could be generalized out to apply to other situations, there is a reason that both of its leads are women, and the story simply makes far less sense if you try to rationalize your way into believing that our protagonists, Fine (Yuu Kobayashi), and Momo (Megumi Han), aren’t in love. 2: it is a tragedy. Gay romances that end in heartbreak get a bad rep these days for understandable reasons, but such a thing should only truly be objectionable if it doesn’t have something to say, and Vampire in The Garden has plenty to say. Throughout, it demonstrates a keen eye for imagery and paints a very emotionally honest portrait of life as a queer person in a society that is not very accepting of those.

Consider our protagonists. On the one hand, we have

Momo; a hardworking factory girl with a talent for tinkering, who lives in a massive compound called the Tower, run by her authoritarian, abusive mother. She longs for an escape, and a flight of fancy—fixing a broken music box, forbidden, as all music and art are, in the Tower—spirals into a tragic adventure. Her close “friend” Milana is shot during a raid on the Tower by vampires, the eternal enemy of mankind in the bleak, frozen, post-apocalyptic world that Vampire takes place in. But, of course, if things were as simple as “humans vs. vampires”, we wouldn’t be here. In a combination of panic, confusion, and the urge to seize the chance to escape, she meets–

Fine; queen of the vampires. Flighty, constantly neglecting her duties by choice. She too longs for escape, and it’s a chance encounter with Momo that sets them off, together, on an adventure far from the Tower and far from Fine’s own ostensible demesne, ruled as it really is by her consort/vizier Allegro (Chiaki Kobayashi). Together, Momo and Fine are star-crossed lovers in the most classic mold possible; a Romeo & Juliet of the modern age. You already know how this story ends; amid a field of moon azaleas, somewhere deep within a cradle of earth, all graves, shed petals, and teardrops. But that doesn’t make it a journey not worth going on.

That journey sees Fine and Momo searching for that mythical paradise. Initially, they seek such a thing solely to escape the shackles of the human/vampire war itself, but before long, they’ve grown close enough that it’s clear that the promise of somewhere where humans and vampires can live together in peace, and thus where Fine and Momo can live together in peace, becomes their primary motivator. At the start of this story, Momo loses Milana, who she is clearly quite close to. We learn much later on that Fine lost someone she was quite close to, Aria, a long time ago. Momo and Fine’s relationship, as deeply upsetting as the circumstances it was born in are, is one that springs from mutual loss. They find comfort in each other in a way that feels truly human.

Their first stop is the catacomb-esque opulence of Fine’s manor, where Fine helps a wounded Momo recover. It’s here where they first start to trust each other and their relationship goes from something uncertain and tenuous to something very real and immediate. The good times are fleeting, of course, but they have meaning.

At one point, Momo stumbles into a cinema, and is so rattled by the film idly left playing—probably the first she’s ever seen, mind you—that Vampire itself dissolves into a nightmarish patchwork of loss and traumatic imagery, and it is Fine who must calm her down. For not the last time in the series, Vampire is astoundingly lyrical, a tapestry of images both in the forefront and background that imbue the world with tactility and meaning;

a bath,
a record player,
an opera singer
whose voice, spilling
out of the player
laments the loss of those
she loved

There’s a garden – a beautiful, green, lush, literal garden – where Fine grows all manner of plants, in defiance of the Sun itself. She teaches Momo to sing, to appreciate art and music. For this, she is rewarded by the pursuing humans of the Tower, and then, separately, the vampires, raiding her mansion. Both of our protagonists are pursued–

Momo by her mother’s forces.

Fine by her own subjects.

–and the mansion ends up in flames as they flee, starting a pattern that will repeat several times over the course of Vampire‘s five episodes. Momo and Fine arrive somewhere, settle there for a short time, and then are driven away by these twin forces independently pursuing them. It is worth noting that they never directly do anything we’d understand as wrong, it is simply that the very act of a human and a vampire living together is unconscionable to the people of this world.

Throughout, as these entwined swathes of fire pursue its protagonists, Vampire is able to capture a gripping, rare feeling. On the one hand, you can appreciate much of these more action-oriented scenes for what they are on a technical level, and say that Vampire, especially its first half, is a kickass action-post apoc-sci-fi-fantasy adventure. This is true, but on the other hand, it is also a near-hallucinatory torrent of love and loss; trauma, laughter, music, snow, iron, blood – mixed together, and adjoined end to uncomfortable end, a feeling evocative of memory itself. Much like the music box that serves as a leitmotif throughout the series.

Everywhere Fine and Momo go is a false promise, in a way. The manor, of stability. The segregated two-island vampire / human town they visit in episode three, of unity. The too-good-to-be-true village in the far north in episode four, of community. And finally, the blasted-out ruin of some long-forgotten metropolis in the final episode, an already-broken promise of civilization itself.

This extends somewhat to the supporting cast as well. Momo’s mother is portrayed as disturbingly, realistically abusive, swinging wildly from backhanding and berating her daughter and pleading for her forgiveness and asking for a hug. When Momo finally turns her away near the very end of the show, it’s hugely cathartic. Later in the story, we meet Elisha, the representative of the idyllic / winter horror village in episode four.

In addition to enabling the false promise of community and hospitality that the village itself represents, she’s also quick to attack Momo as a hypocrite when things go south. This is, of course, nonsense. There is a vast gulf between harming people accidentally, or in self-defense, and doing so as part of a convoluted scheme to live a life of privilege, which is what Elisha’s village is doing.

There’s also Momo’s uncle, who leads the human forces that seek to recapture her, and in the final episode it’s revealed that he too once fled from home with a vampire he loved in tow, only for that story to end on a harsh, bitter note. This recontextualizes his earlier actions; like Momo, he longed for an escape from the drudgery of a world defined by petty, pointless conflict. Unlike Momo, when that escape was ultimately denied to him, he turned his anger outward.

Which leads us to Vampire’s conclusion.

Just based on what kind of story this is, it will not surprise you that only one of our protagonists is fortunate enough to live through the ending. Fine’s death is a long, torturously slow process. At first, she seems to die rampaging amidst muzzle flash and rubble, but the truth of things isn’t that simple. A serum that turns vampires into berserk beasts—a plot point back from back in the first episode, and one which I should point out, basically causes them to transform into what humans think they are—can’t be countered so easily. She does save Momo, and her final confrontation with Momo’s uncle actually ends when she stops attacking him. What truly rattles the man is not the notion of vampires attacking him, it’s of them not doing so, because it means that there isn’t anything inherently stopping vampires and humans from living in harmony, it really is just all circumstance; grudges, old wounds, and unsolved problems.

Momo’s own last confrontation is the aforementioned rebuke of her mother, as she carries the still-dying Fine to her final resting place; a warm cave below the cold surface, where the queen of vampires finally dies, amidst a bed of porcelain-white flowers. The very last shot of the main body of the series is –

Momo,
kneeling in front of Fine’s body,
taking a sharp, deep breath;
preparing to sing.

She herself lives on, and Fine is gone, but not forgotten.

The main reason that Fine and Momo don’t both survive is that, unfortunately, that is rarely the case for real queer couples in these kinds of situations either. But we shouldn’t take this to mean that Fine and Momo’s entire journey was pointless. Instead, it is the very fact that Fine and Momo did journey, and journeyed together, that is, itself, the true paradise they sought, however fleeting it may have been. There is a real, resonant beauty in that notion, even if it is a very sad and tragic sort. Something like;

“If we don’t have each other forever, at least we had each other today.”

The series offers a single post-credits scene; a sunlit garden, where Momo cradles a young vampire child in her arms. This scene’s nature—real or metaphysical, future or afterlife—is left ambiguous. A ray of uncertain hope that pierces the gray skies of an even less certain present.

I have to confess, Vampire in The Garden has proven very challenging to “review”, in as much as this even is a “review” of anything. This is a work of uncommon grace and elegance, as even its ideas which sound, on paper, inadequate, or like they’re trying too hard, are executed absolutely perfectly in the miniseries itself. There are several other axes I’ve barely even touched on; the visual beauty of most of the show’s backgrounds, for example. Part of me does feel that I haven’t entirely done Vampire justice, but perhaps that is simply a limitation of my medium. Some things must be seen to be felt.

And of course, all criticism is, in the end, but a reflective prism of the original. Here, for the first time in a long time, I have felt honored to be that reflection; I am but a mirror to moonlight.

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