Journal with Witch

Ikoku Nikki is an anime that’ll get robbed and won’t even make it into the AOTY nominations. What’s notable is what the show doesn’t do. It doesn’t milk grief. The parents’ death exists, but it’s not weaponized. The loss is just there. It sits in the background and leaks into everything without being pushed in your face. In most shows, this kind of setup gets used immediately to pull emotion out of the audience. Ikoku Nikki does the opposite. It makes you want Asa to cry. She almost doesn’t for two full episodes, holding everything in, staying quiet. And because of that, it hits much harderwhen she finally breaks down. Personally, what I loved most is how the show keeps slipping into visual metaphor, cutting away from literal space into emotional space. A conversation in the apartment suddenly places the character in a desert, or somewhere abstract, even though they haven’t moved an inch. It feels like you are seeing the characters’ inner state instead of just the surface of the scene. Anime does this far too rarely, which is irritating, because the medium is perfectly capable of trusting the audience with a metaphor. The last thing that comes to mind for me is Shoushimin Series. I wish more anime actually trusted visual storytelling instead of spelling everything out. I like how the show frames love and care. Makio isn’t warm, she doesn’t say the right things, and half the time she feels emotionally unavailable. But she doesn’t leave. The show lets you sit with that kind of care, the kind that doesn’t look like much on the surface but is still there. Love expressed without performance often gets mistaken for cruelty, and this is something I find deeply relatable. The pacing is slow but it fits. You spend more time watching small shifts than big moments. It feels closer to how people actually deal with things when there’s no clean way to process them. Also the opening and ending are straight BANGERS!! Ikoku Nikki is a story about two people who don’t really understand each other trying to share the same space anyway.

Nowadays I'm not a person who has it in me to write at length, much less something as comprehensive as a full-blown review. Although there are a number of critics whose thought pieces I have great respect for, I've never had their dedication to continuously deepen my knowledge of artistic mediums or develop the eloquence needed to convey my thoughts on creative works in a sufficiently compelling manner. But for all of Ikoku Nikki's fantastic qualities, it's the series' motifs around both journaling and wandering through foreign lands that resonated with me the most and gave me the impulse to try writing my thoughts onit, as my way of stepping into an unknown area outside my present-day comfort zone and getting my own thoughts about the series into text. That might be the best endorsement I can possibly muster to how implicitly powerful Ikoku Nikki is - an anime so deeply evocative that I wanted to try enacting a part of it myself. From a face value reading of the premise, Ikoku Nikki is a story about grief and cohabitation when the reclusive and prickly Makio takes on the guardian role to her newly orphaned niece Asa, and the detail with which the series depicts the specter of death alone would make it plenty distinctive. Beyond just the death and funeral itself, it's also the mess of affairs left behind, the household and all of the little tasks and chores that abruptly freeze in place forever, the notes left behind that nobody will ever truly get clarity on, and all of the little ways that death leaves things in its wake. As it pertains to Makio, it's the fact that the lasting image of her sister will forever be stuck in the final bitter impression she had of her and there's no longer a path to reconciliation. Most crucially of all, as it pertains to Asa, it's the guidance throughout her life growing up that suddenly gets cut off, as if the power went out mid-TV show or the earbuds disconnected mid-song. Even before we get into depth about the people left behind, there's an understanding of death and its aftermath that Ikoku Nikki displays by showing how it permeates into even the most mundane aspects of life, and it's just one of many demonstrations of the show's deeply layered and meticulous writing. That's not to shortchange characters as merely people left behind, because the attentiveness that Ikoku Nikki shows towards death also shows up in depicting life. The characters are written with a realism that elevates them above just feeling like actors made with character designs and voiceovers; they have thorough personalities and intrinsic hangups that make them feel like fully realized people. There's no designated character who's there to play a role, whether as the one-note infallible adult figure or the inherently evil antagonist - just a mix of distinct people visibly shaped by their pasts, trying to get by with each other and life despite all of their internal struggles and incompatibilities. Makio's insight and articulateness as a novelist is weighed against her deep introversion and disorganization; Asa, by contrast, is upfront and orderly but can be naïve and somewhat careless about others' sensitivities not unlike many teenagers in her shoes. Asa's parents in death leave considerably varied legacies simply based on the perspectives of who's on screen, and supporting characters present different sides of themselves with every new scene they're in. Ikoku Nikki's even-handed character writing isn't so ignorantly blissful as to portray coexistence without conflict, and in some cases that conflict even proves to be too much to overcome. However, it's because of this inherent contrast that the moments of connection and intimacy - particularly moments between Makio and Asa - feel all the more cathartic when they do happen. But in Ikoku Nikki's bigger picture, Makio and Asa aren't just contrasting personalities - they're also representatives for many of the series' more intricate themes. Whether in the past or present, the series pulls at an overarching tug-of-war between conformity and freedom, as well as how they pertain to growing into adulthood. There's never a big heinous moment that gave life to Makio's hatred for her sister - rather, the cracks in the relationship between her and Minori were borne out of this contrast and only fractured deeper as they both dug their heels further into their sides on that struggle. Ikoku Nikki takes great care to depict their rationales for going the ways they did and the consequences inflicted on them for going in those directions. Is normalcy and security in society so important that you would suppress yourself as a person out of fear of appearing different? On the other hand, are you willing to endure the isolation and disconnect that comes with staying true to your most unrestrained convictions? Asa gets to be in the unenviable position of as the center of this thematic conflict, having been raised on one end of the spectrum for most of her life only to be abruptly pulled to the other end. Adolescence is already a turbulent period of many people's lives, a conflicted period when the insular structure of childhood gradually gets stripped away for the open and uncertain world of adulthood. For many people, it's when we begin to discern between listening to the authoritative figures around us and listening to ourselves as we develop our own senses of judgement. We're all left to decide what the right balance of societal adherence and independence is, when to stand out - how we want to stand out - versus when to blend in, and the extent to which we control how we're viewed by others. It's one of life's calibrations where the dial just never seems to be set quite right, and the series knows that better than anyone. Asa grew up with the rigid structure that both propped up and imprisoned her mother, which makes Makio's unwillingness to box her in with rules an adjustment that she can't bring herself to trust right away. Over the course of the series, we see this overarching balancing act between normalcy and distinctiveness play out in many different ways, whether that be about pursuing career paths, discovering one's sexuality, putting out artistry for others, or grasping for self-actualization in a meaningful way. Many of the struggles Ikoku Nikki portrays, despite feeling deeply personal, remarkably feel ubiquitous to life's questions, and the series does this without ever pulling the viewer out of its very natural dialogue. The emotional intelligence and intricacy Ikoku Nikki displays amplifies one of its greatest traits as a drama: the ability to be moving without being manipulative. Ikoku Nikki's approach to drama is almost antithetical to its genre in how understated it is, and when there are outbursts of emotion, they come out with the gradually accumulated weight of everything that came before. Nothing feels acted out or scripted, as if a writer is trying to guide you on how to feel or a seiyuu is trying to hammer home specifically how you should feel in a given moment. Like Makio, the drama of the series is cluttered and unstructured, without any didactic lesson plan or specific plot beats figured out. Like Asa, it's in constant search of itself and trying to make sense of the world it's in. The lives they live aren't orchestrated around typical narrative structures - they just simply exist in their current circumstances and try their best to get through everyday life's demands. It's a shade of drama that's heavy and moving because of how authentic it feels - not actively sought out by the plot, but brought upon its characters through the inevitability of their internal struggles. It can't be understated how important it is to see Ikoku Nikki in an animated medium. Shoujo and josei series centering around real-life settings and grounded character drama have long slanted towards live-action adaptations - heck, the live action adaptation of this very series made it to screens well before the anime did. Being a very grounded everyday story, there aren't any large action pieces or magical effects that employ flashy or extensive sakuga sequences - in fact, many of the anime's primary scenes are just conversational pieces. But one of the key advantages of animation and fiction is that the viewer is allowed insights into moments that would often be highly impractical to replicate in an realistic setting. With Ikoku Nikki, it's taken even further. Rather than reduce every scene to talking heads, Ikoku Nikki takes advantage of the animated medium to visualize its many different motifs. Makio's introversion and Asa's loneliness are often abstractly compared to journeying through a desert or trying to assimilate in a foreign land, and there are many moments like these that are effortlessly conveyed from the characters' internal thoughts into an animated medium. If a character has rather imaginative thoughts and emotions, they can come through more seamlessly in animation, whereas a live-action setting wouldn't portray an internal monologue or thought process similarly without coming across as obtrusive or stilted. Words of the past can easily come to the forefront as visualizations in the present, as if to show how past events still affect people in the current day. Given how prone to exaggeration anime can sometimes be to anyone with even a little experience with the medium, Ikoku Nikki's utilization of the medium seems extremely muted, relatively speaking. But it's no less vivid or imaginative for the matter, and even invites the viewer to visualize along with the characters as it realizes many of the metaphors it presents on screen. There hasn't been another series that has taken root in my consciousness quite like Ikoku Nikki has. In its chronicling of a seminal chapter of Makio's life and Asa's growth into adulthood, the series consistently proves to be rich and contemplative, inviting a torrent of different reflections and ponderances of life, whether it be about grief, conformity, patriarchy, introversion, agency…the list just goes on and on. It almost does the series a disservice to review it technically; even if I compliment Miyuki Ooshima's imaginative direction (as a first-time director!), the excellent seiyuu work, Kensuke Ushio's signature ambient score, etc., nothing I could reduce down to words would convey everything I want to convey. It wouldn't convey how the whole of the series transcended its many immediate strengths. It wouldn't convey how every time I think of new little details, they paint the series in better and better lights. And it wouldn't convey how Ikoku Nikki managed to speak on such an extensive and intimate array of human struggles and imperfections without ever seeming like it has to try to - all of which I'll be coming back to for a long time to come.

This is a slice of life series that seemingly combines a somewhat atypical premise with a theme or topic that I’m fond of, so it became instantly interesting for me to check out. The second one is childcare, as in, an adult character seeing their life changing because they start to take care of a child, in the likes of Aishiteruze Baby, Usagi Drop, Kotaro Lives Alone or something like that, or so I assumed, but since the kid in this series is a teenager and not a child, that dynamic is different than the one from those shows. And although some aspects of the everydaylife of Makio, the adult of the story, do change, you don’t feel like living with another person really changed her life all that much, which to be fair it was also the case in all the aforementioned series. I mean she and some other characters do mention how much of a responsibility and change for her it means to take her niece in, but the viewer never really feels it all that much. The other aspect is grief, which I don’t remember being explored in anime all that much. There are shows about the afterlife, but most focus on, well, people living a second life after dying, rather than how the left behind are affected. There are also series where the topic is part of the themes but maybe for one or few episodes, and not the core element in it. Off the top of my head I can name Bimbou Shimai Monogatari and perhaps Tsuma Shougakusei ni Naru, which I haven't watched yet, as examples that feature the element to some extent, but not many more titles. Regarding this, I have to recognize that the beginning of the anime is a bit weird, given the personality and lifestyle of Makio, as well as her previous relationship with her sister, you ask yourself why would she take her niece in. And Asa also seems very indifferent after losing her parents and being left alone, although that is dealt with eventually and gradually within the show. Indeed, a good portion of the initial episodes is about Asa coming to terms with her loss, introspecting about her feelings regarding the tragedy, her previous life with her family, and finding the right words to express herself about both what happened and just her feelings in general. And I said initial episodes because, although the theme is present, it’s not like it is explored that deeply or seriously, as the tone is for the most part that of a common slice of life, with some comedy mixed in. Eventually, the topic mutates into something else, as Asa questions her relationship with her family and even if they loved her at all, which transforms into her wanting to start to live her life her own way, find out what she wants for herself, despite what others might think about it. One could even say that that ends up becoming the main theme of the show, as we also follow the other characters introspecting about their relationships and paths in life and how they got there, and how happy or not they are with that. We see Makio fighting with her sister, the latter being explored more than what was shown on her really bad initial impression and how she felt about not being able to achieve what she wanted in life, Makio’s ex thinking about his mental health and clashing with his father, he and the lawyer defying social machismo, Asa’s friend, Emily, accepting being a lesbian, and more stuff. Which means that, with this theme, we get more character fleshing as we explore the feelings and backdrops of the characters, but I also have to point out how the plot develops more typically than it seemed at first, and the initial topic seems to have been lost somewhere down the line. The series stopped being about grief and became a coming of age and self discovery show, which is fine but far more typical, common and well not as interesting in my opinion. As for characterization, even if the characters are fleshed out, there’s no strong development for anybody, which makes sense because most of the cast is adult and have normal lives, so it’s not like they are going to have a mind-blowing revelation or change that might impact them in any particular way. Asa is the one that gets most of the focus in that regard, and although you can see her slowly wanting things on her own and finding how to express herself; I wouldn’t say she changes much from beginning to end. As for the conclusion, it clearly skipped some content and used a big time skip, while at the same time featured an in-story narration to deliver a meta message to the audience. A bit weird and doesn’t feel entirely complete, but it’s fine, and hey, it’s a slice of life series that actually ends, how about that? Audiovisually the anime is very polished, the artwork was done with a lot of care, the character designs are simple but do stand out by not having typical looks, although they do have some classic noitamina feel to them. The backgrounds are pretty, the motions are ok though nothing special, and even though there are not that many special effects to speak of, the directing changing locations and times during conversations to convey different feelings and characters introspecting can make entire conversational scenes far more dynamic. There are also some visual metaphors at times to reflect what the characters are saying or thinking, like Asa’s desert, Makio’s wandering through passages of her novels, or Asa looking at a void, representing her heart and connection with her mother through a journal in her mind. The music and sound effects are relaxed and fitting, the opening and ending are calmed jpop songs and kind of beautiful. The voice acting is mostly mature and normal, in a non-typically anime kind of way, so it was a nice touch, and it’s particularly impressive from Asa’s seiyuu in her debut role, being able to convey her different feelings, moods and singing parts just fine. Also there were some appreciated quiet moments. All in all the audio complements very well with the visuals in making what would normally be a typical slice of life story, into something that at times can have quite the atmosphere. In all, if you’re looking for a slice of life story, Ikoku Nikki might provide a good, relaxed but also a bit of an emotional time. It has an interesting premise, although it changes into something more typical, a decent, kind of looked into cast, good visuals and directing, and although it’s mostly relaxed, it can also feature its fair share of emotional yet not exaggerated nor manipulative moments about forging your way in your life and coming to terms with losing someone in it. I wouldn’t say it’s amazing nor that rewatchable or anything, but I found it to be a well made slice of life show, and the only title I liked from its season.

Stories about grief often promise catharsis. They move toward reconciliation, emotional breakdowns, or some decisive moment that restores order to a broken life. Ikoku Nikki chooses its own unusual rhythm. Instead of dramatizing loss, it meanders in the strange and disorienting aftermath of it, the uncertain days when nothing feels resolved and two people who barely know each other must learn how to coexist in the shadow of something that cannot be undone. The story begins with Asa Takumi, a teenager who suddenly loses her parents and ends up living with her reclusive aunt, Makio Kōdai. At a distance, the premise resembles the familiar outlineof a “found family” narrative, and yet the series soon reveals that it has little interest in easy emotional comfort. Makio is not the warm and nurturing guardian this kind of stories usually provide. She is socially awkward, blunt, and deeply uncomfortable with the responsibilities suddenly placed on her. Asa, meanwhile, is left navigating grief, adolescence, and a new home with someone who can barely navigate human relationships herself. Instead of offering reassurance she cannot genuinely provide, Makio allows uncertainty to exist. She does not pretend to understand grief perfectly, nor does she attempt to fix Asa’s pain with comforting words. Their relationship therefore develops without immediate closeness or sentimental bonding. It grows through friction, hesitation, and repeated adjustments. They are not immediately family. They simply become two people learning how to live beside each other. In this sense, the series treats grief not as performance, but as disorientation. Loss here is not a dramatic turning point but an invisible fracture in everyday life. Conversations stall. People say the wrong things. Silence fills the space where certainty used to exist. However through those imperfect moments, the story captures something subtly profound about how people rebuild emotional stability little by little after loss. The storytelling approach reinforces this atmosphere. Much of the narrative unfolds through brief conversations, reflective pauses, and seemingly ordinary daily interactions. The tone is slow, calm, and introspective, often resembling slice-of-life storytelling more than conventional drama. Even though many people find themselves tearing up or deeply relating to the characters, the series rarely pushes its emotional conflicts into dramatic territory. Here, the focus remains on how individuals process grief internally through reflection, gradual acceptance, and incremental adjustments in perspective. In terms of visual design, the artwork serves the story effectively, though it rarely strives for grandiosity. The character designs are clean and expressive, but they do not necessarily stand out as extraordinary within the medium. One interesting aspect, however, lies in how Asa and Makio are depicted. Their appearances carry a somewhat gender-neutral quality. They could almost be look as male or female depending on interpretation, even though the script and voice acting clearly establish them as women. The visual neutrality may be an intentional choice, allowing the emotional core of the story to resonate with everyone without being constrained by gendered expectations. Another cool layer that gives Ikoku Nikki its subtle magic is the way it mirrors real-life healing. Think journaling, but in anime form. Makio and Asa don’t explode in big emotional meltdowns, yet they process grief bit by bit: reflecting, misstepping, taking pauses, then trying again. It’s like watching a “diary therapy” in motion. Learning to live with pain, acknowledge it, and slowly let life continue. Healing doesn’t crash into their world as a big revelation; it sneaks in during ordinary days, hesitant conversations, and the quiet moments when they just…exist. For anyone who’s ever written down feelings, vented to their room, or just stared at a wall trying to make sense of life, this hits in a strangely comforting way. Just imagine your own awkward slow-motion journey of getting your emotional life together…that’s basically what Makio and Asa are doing, but in a cozy slice-of-life package. Still, several limitations are worth acknowledging. The narrative focus remains almost entirely on Asa and Makio, which gives the story intimacy but also narrows its scope. Secondary characters exist, but the emotional center rarely moves beyond the two protagonists, making the world of the story feel somewhat limited. Additionally, the slice-of-life style of storytelling often softens the dramatic tension. Because the tone stays gentle and contemplative, the dramatic aspects of grief and conflict never fully dominate the narrative, even when the themes themselves are heavy. None of this makes the story fundamentally flawed. In fact, it remains a thoughtful and emotionally perceptive work. Yet it also feels like a narrative that still had room to evolve further. Greater exploration of its supporting cast or a slightly broader dramatic range might have enriched the story’s emotional landscape. Moreover, certain nuances and backstory details like why Makio harbors tension toward Asa’s mother, the origins of her discomfort around children, and more of Asa’s life before moving in are condensed. This makes some emotional beats feel less fully developed than they might in the manga. The adaptation does a lot with a little, but those who have followed the manga can see the wider emotional landscape and character histories that enrich the narrative even further. In other words, the anime is already compelling on its own, but the story’s depth and context expand when considering the broader material. Even so, the understated strength of Ikoku Nikki resides precisely in its restraint. Without framing grief as something to conquer, the series portrays it as something people learn to live beside, over time. Healing does not arrive as a sudden revelation, rather emerges through ordinary days, hesitant conversations, and the gradual realization that life continues even if it now moves in unfamiliar ways. The story’s most honest insight is grief does not disappear. It simply becomes another part of the life we learn to carry. Anyway, keep in mind that no opinion is ever purely objective, and every perspective remains open to discussion. Even so, each viewpoint still holds its own value. If you happen to see things differently, simple mutual respect is more than enough. That same respect is the spirit behind this reflection as well. Wishing everyone a peaceful day ahead, and thank you for taking the time to read.