Category: Natsume Yuujin-Chou

Short Synopsis: Natsume meets a female Youkai, who longs to see a person from her past again.
Highlights: The female youkai and her character-development in just one episode.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Natsume Yuujin-chou isn’t exactly my favourite show to blog. Don’t get me wrong, it’s without a doubt my favourite series this season, and I love it to bits, but because it’s so incredibly relaxing, it almost puts me to sleep, especially late at night (and for once, that’s a good thing). I don’t have much inspiration to write about after its episodes let go of me.

This episode, Natsume meets a youkai who was originally a small bird. Out of her siblings, she was the only one to survive, and after seeing her brothers and sisters die, she changed to a demon. She got changed back into a youkai by the attention of one guy, who kept bringing her food. Why he kept doing it I don’t know. He couldn’t see her in this episode anymore either, but the Youkai is still incredibly grateful for what he did.

This series is still so refreshing, that it focuses on the nice side of the youkai. Series as xxxHolic and Mokke also had occasional episodes where the youkai and spirits were moved by the niceness of people, but most of them were either evil or minding their own business. Natsume Yuujin-chou shows a different side of the spectrum: there’s your occasional evil youkai, there are also a bunch that are minding their own business, but the big focus in this series is how a bit of effort can mean a whole lot to another person. Especially youkai, who have the tendency to get much more emotionally attached to the major events in their life than most humans do.

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.

Short Synopsis: A haunted building-episode.
Highlights: Natsume’s relation to his classmates continues to develop.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Seriously, this series gets better and better with every episode, and I already considered it as one of the highlights of the summer-season. I’m really not sure how the creators did it, but their sense of characterization is amazing. But then again, this was to be expected, considering the director: both Baccano and Jigoku Shoujo had a huge cast of characters, with nearly every one of them having its own identity and likable from the start. So, what happens when you assign a director who is excellent at characterizations on a story that lives because of its characters?

This episode shows the most hostile Ayakashi so far, who kidnaps every one of Natsume’s classmates when they go and explore a strange abandoned building. He doesn’t even care about getting his name back, and is acting all out of some sort of grudge (if I understood correctly, it’s some kind of hate for people). But what caught my attention the most is another one of Natsume’s classmates. We don’t see the black-haired guy in this episode, but there’s a girl who has discovered that he can see spirits, because she noticed how he keeps talking to people from out of nowhere

On a side-note: this series is without a doubt the hardest to understand from the new season, simply because those Ayakashi keep speaking in some strange ancient dialect that doesn’t show up in the dictionary that I’m using. Japanese already is hard enough to understand without some random dialect thrown into it.

Short Synopsis: Ayakashi can be… quite obnoxious at times.
Highlights: The extra depth given to Natsume’s desire to find someone like him.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Okay, so for those who were wondering: there’s no Blade of the Immortal this week. The second episode of it airs next week, after which it’ll go into yet another hiatus. Ah well, I’m glad that these hiatuses are around the beginning of the series, and not the end.

In any case, without Blade of the Immortal, there’s no doubt that Natsume Yuujin-chou is my favourite series this season. It knows how to tell an excellent story and the cast of characters is also absolutely lovable. From the outside, it just looks like “Ayakashi of the week” (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but such a formula can get stale very easily), but every episode so far has added so much more than that. Since giving the name back to an Ayakashi is nothing special and just takes a few minutes, the creators can really start to colour outside of the lines.

This episode added quite some funny comedy to the mix. A couple of gods come and bug Natsume in order to get rid of some nasty Ayakashi that were bugging their shrine, and even though he refuses, they keep harassing and annoying him. What caught my attention the most, though, was the focus of Natsume, trying to find someone like him. And this is where this series sets itself apart from Mokke and xxxHolic: Watanuki had Yuuko, and Shizuru had her grandfather, but Natsume is all alone in his ability to see and sense spirits. At one time, he thought he had found a woman who could also see them, but she too turned out to be an Ayakashi. The only support he’s had so far is from other Ayakashi.

This episode changes this, by introducing two characters who finally understand him a bit. One monk who is looking for his daughter if I understood correctly, and one high-school student who can also see spirits, just like him.

Short Synopsis: This episode shows how Ayakashi also can friendly ask their names back from Natsume’s Book of Friends.
Highlights: Storytelling at its finest.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
As for the shows I’m not going to blog:
– Hidamari Sketch is nice, but I’m getting a bit bored of Shinbou’s style ever since Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei.
– Strike Witches has an interesting view at modern Japanese folklore with its kemonomimi-ish mecha musume, but I wonder whether it can live up to its sister-series, Sky Girls.
– Ryouko’s case files has “I have no life so I’ll just tell my evil plans to any random Joe who happens to be passing by”-villains. It lacks subtlety, that snake came from nowhere, and it’s the big disappointment this season for me.

Natsume Yuujin-chou, however, is well on its way to becoming one of my favourite series this season, along with Blade of the Immortal. I really liked this episode. Like expected, the creators have a great way of characterization, and the entire episode is a bit unconventional, but it works perfectly. This episode’s message was also a pretty interesting one.

This series follows in the same veins as Mokke, where Youkai and gods have entire personalities, and only a select amount of people can see it. It’s a bit more mature, but that’s to be expected with the lack of ten-year old children. This episode sees how a small local god wants to get its name back, though when Reiko collected his name, she stuck it along with the name of another Ayakashi, who needs to be found first if he wants to get his name back.

Along with that, this episode addresses how people nowadays visit their local gods less and less. Our god in this episode only has one person who regularly visits him, and this is an old woman. At the end of the episode, she ends up at a hospital, making her unable to visit the shrine of said god anymore. Because of that, this god disappears in the end, despite having finally gotten his name back.

It’s interesting how important names are for these Youkai, and this isn’t the first series to address this fact. Tenpou Ibun Ayakashi Ayashi and Mononoke also played around with words like this, though Natsume Yuujin-chou is the most personal of the bunch.