Parasyte (寄生獣 or Kiseijū lit. "Parasitic Beasts") is an interesting anime taken from an award-winning manga/comic-book published in Japan over a period of 7 years from 1988 to 1995.
It follows the life of a high schooler named Shinichi Izumi, who accidentally survives the attack of a parasitic alien invader because he is a restless sleeper and accidentally tangles himself in a phone cord while sleeping to the point that the burrowing alien larva has no choice but to establish residency in his arm by eating his right hand, rather than proceeding to his brain and consuming his head. As camouflage, rather than taking the shape of his head and assuming his identity, the alien disguises itself as Izumi’s right hand, Preventing from fulfilling its primary function, the parasite goes into survival mode and establishes a symmbiotic relationship with Izumi, protecting him from its fellow aliens, who sense the presence of the parasite AND that something is not right. Izumi, over protests of the newly-named “Migi” (short for right-[handed]), attempts to intervene in an alien feeding and ends up being stabbed through the heart by another parasite. Migi revives him by using its own tissue to help repair the heart, and while doing so loses control of bits of itself that establish uncontrolled symbiotic relationships with various organs and tissues throughout Izumi’s body, making him both slightly alien and immensely stronger than a normal human. He is even able to kill an alien by himself by catching it off-guard and throwing it through a brick wall. He also loses the capacity to cry and his friends note that he is distinctly colder than he used to be. Migi, in turn, without the protections established by assuming its primary mode, starts to take on at least a few human characteristics, like a need for sleep, and [perhaps] at least a tiny sliver of capacity for empathy. The story is an interesting examination of what it means to be human, and is told from the perspective of a mostly-human caught in the midst of an unrecognized alien invasion (human authorities around the world gradually become aware of the invaders but refuse to warn the general public for fear of panic), and from the perspective of one of the invaders unable to continue as an accepted member of its kind. As I noted, it was given literary awards in manga form, and is now the inspiration for a 2-part live action sci-fi movie. An amusing aside is that, due to the right-to-left nature of Japanese comics, the translator simply reversed raw image of the entire comic during translation, so that the various panels are read in the normal English way, left-to-right. As a result of this mirror-reversal, “Migi” is translated as “Lefty” in the English version of the comic. Parasyte is definitely an upper-tier anime worth watching. It is available for viewing free (aside from commercials) at crunchyroll.com
