Short Synopsis: Natsume goes after a promise that Reiko once made but never fulfilled.
Highlights: How does this series manage to stay so heart-warming and relaxing?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
This episode showed yet again that this series has enough inspiration for its stories, even though the main premise of Natsume, returning the names of the youkai only takes about five seconds. This time, we see that Reiko did more than just take a bunch of names when she was young, and this episode shows that she also was a blatant liar. It’s frustrating: we hardly know anything about her. All that was revealed was that she’s basically being portrayed as the antagonist of this series, and how forcefully collected the names of many different youkai. But we never get to see her intention behind it, why did she do these things in the first place? What did she look like when she grew up?
This episode was all about good friends, getting into fights, symbolized by Natsume’s two classmates who got into a fight, and just as easily made up again. The youkai in this episode also got into a fight with his best friend (because he let his name get taken away by Reiko), but the difference here is that they never bothered to look for each other, and just stayed at the same place, which yet again shows that the sense of time for Youkai is considerably different from that of humans. They seem to have no problem with waiting for decades at the same spot, and talk about things that happened fifty years ago like they happened yesterday.
I’m really not sure about that black-haired classmate of Natsume… he appeared (and disappeared) a bit too coincidentally in front of Natsume when he was needed the most, and at the same time he can’t be another youkai, as Natsume’s other classmate was perfectly able to see him. Unless, of course, said classmate (I believe she was the class president) can also see them occasionally.
One of the highlights, I think, is Sasada’s (class rep) overt interest on Natsume. It’s just fun to watch her curious about Natsume
Why do I feel like Natsume is almost always cleaning up his grandmother’s mess?
Helen: well, she’s definitely an interesting kind of “villain” in this series. And Natsume is just too nice to refuse cleaning up the mess that she left.
Tanuma’s not a spirit. Natsume’s classmates we’re the first ones to tell him that Tanuma was looking for him in episode 3.