History TearJerker / MushiShi

** Her entire ordeal with her family is heartbreaking as well. Because she was born a Mountain Lord, she naturally sought to go out into nature, but her family being her family they wanted to keep their child safe and sound. Her older brother Yoshiro was so heartbroken when she suddenly vanished that he looked for her for ''years'', only to be told by Ginko that she can never go home and to give up searching for her. Even the act of reuniting with her and having her live out a normal life with her estranged family is impossible, as the longer she's away from nature, the more the mountain they live on is thrown into chaos.

* Aki, the MamaBear from ''Cotton Changeling.'' All she ever wanted was a child, and instead she got afflicted with a ''mushi'' that not only produced clones of itself to look like actual children, albeit with strange characteristics such as green hair and abnormal growth rates, but it actually ''killed'' her normal fetus in the womb in order to do this. Once Ginko uncovers the truth about the ''mushi'', they try to force themselves into hibernation and disappear by burning down the house with everyone inside. Everyone survives, but poor Aki is left a sobbing wreck in the arms of her husband as they sit, childless once again, outside the burnt remains of what was once their home. Her backstory is depressing too - her husband tells Ginko that she was originally married to a rich merchant, who divorced her after the son and heir she bore him died.

* The final chapter, ''Bell Droplets'', has several:

* ''Bell Droplets'', where the young, human mountain-master gives up her life to save Ginko. At the same time she's returned to the life stream, her older brother (who never gave up on her even though she was a weird kid and then went missing for over ten years) hears the sound of bells all over the mountain -- the same bells he heard when she was conceived, and knows that she's no longer among the living.

* "The Mud Weeds" is an all-around tragedy of impulsiveness. Two brothers, Shigeru and Shinobu, had a loving relationship, but ten years prior to the story Shigeru stopped talking to Shinobu after the former's daughter Yuri died. After years of agonizing over the guilt, Shinobu reveals that he accidentally killed Yuri and took her corpse up the mountain where the Mukurosou consumed her body. Shigeru gets so upset that he killed his brother it a fit of rage, and then threw his corpse down a cliff to MakeItLookLikeAnAccident. When his nephew finds out, he becomes afraid of Shigeru and lets Shigeru die as he's drowning in a river.

* "The Mud Weeds" is an all-around tragedy of impulsiveness. Two brothers, Shigeru and Shinobu, had a loving relationship, but ten years prior to the story Shigeru stopped talking to Shinobu after the former's daughter Yuri died. After years of agonizing over the guilt, Shinobu reveals that he accidentally killed Yuri and took her corpse up the mountain where the Mukurosou consumed her body. Shigeru gets so upset that he killed his brother it a fit of rage, and then threw his corpse down a cliff to MakeItLookLikeAnAccident. When his nephew finds out, he becomes afraid of Shigeru and is convinced that he'd kill him like he did Shinobu, and lets Shigeru die as he's drowning in a river.

* Following TheReveal in ''Lingering Crimson,'' we see Mikage racked with guilt over stealing Akane's life by stepping on her shadow to escape the ''mushi''. Her husband Youkichi comforts her and himself by hoping that Akane must have also exchanged places with someone else and gone on with her life somewhere else... but at the end of the episode, some time after Mikage's death, Youkichi encounters Akane's shadow and realizes that she was too kind to ever step on another's shadow and consign them to the same fate, and has instead spent decades stranded alone in the ''mushi'''s realm.

* In ''Clothes That Embrace The Mountain'', we are introduced to a man named Kai, who wants to become an artist (much to the disapproval of his father). He finally does leave his small town and, gradually over the course of ten years, makes it big as a wildly popular artist. But after falling into a rut with his work orders piling up, he decides to take a vacation and return to his hometown for a visit. He returns to find the entire town had been buried in a landslide three years before, killing his father among many others. One of the few survivors left, his aunt, reveals that after the disaster his sister sent him a letter requesting help - [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone a letter Kai had burned in the fire without even looking at it, assuming it was yet another work order.]] It's also revealed Kai's sister [[DeathbyChildbirth died giving birth]] a year after the landslide, and her young daughter, Toyo, is developmentally slow. [[TheAtoner Kai]] decides to raise the girl himself, despite his heavy workload.