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.

The power of human understanding is profound, but how much do humans truly understand other people? We can try to shed light on someone else’s heart through communication, but what happens when that light is too bright for someone else? They will look away. Ikoku Nikki is about a lot of things: grief, loneliness, communication, and finding solace and healing. Ikoku Nikki takes the delicate subject of grief and tells us that emotions are not linear, but rather, something that does not arrive as one wills it to. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, introduced the “five stages of grief” model, whichincludes denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While this model is widely used to describe human emotions, reality suggests that everyone follows a different path. Asa experienced this early in her life, as her parents were killed in a car crash when she was a teenager. As Makio, the sister of Asa’s mother, took Asa into her home and became her legal guardian, one of the first things she said was: “My place is never clean. And I’m usually in a bad mood. I can’t even guarantee that I love you. But I’ll promise you this. I will never trample on your feelings. If you can accept that, come stay with me tomorrow, the next day, and every day after that!” “With eyes like a wolf… she saved me from my loneliness.” One of Makio’s main values is that everyone is entitled to feel, and no one can get in the way of one's own emotions. She taught Asa about that early on in their cohabitation. As a writer who writes books for young people, a strong understanding of how young people feel might have been in Makio’s arsenal, but she never forced her opinions on Asa. While Makio might be a bit of a reclusive author and not a professional in the social aspects of life, her entry into Asa’s life, and vice versa, might have been the best thing to happen to both of them, given the circumstances. Makio does not have the answers for Asa, but she suggests that Asa write her thoughts in a journal, which fits Makio's own personality as a writer. Time and time again, Asa tried to navigate her new reality of loneliness. She wondered why she did not cry at her parents’ funeral, which is a “natural” reaction to the death of a loved one. To that, Makio told her that she’d cry when she felt sad. Society usually tends to put people into boxes and expects certain things to happen. Makio took Asa away from the prying eyes of society, and so, Asa questioned why she did not act in the performative way society expected to see. I was very impressed with the visual storytelling at play in this anime. The production is by no means lavish, but the anime makes the most out of limited production with apt metaphors. The most prominent one was depicting Asa’s loneliness as a desert. It represents her feeling isolated and lost, even when surrounded by other people, as she tries to process her grief. Her feeling of emptiness is represented using the vast expanse of an empty desert landscape, so much so that the lines in her journal become the lines of trodden sand. There are also times when the world around Asa just dissolves into the desert sand, which is a good sense of visual contrast that subtly tells the viewer how Asa was feeling at the moment. Although Asa’s grieving process may be the main hook of the story, Makio also gets her own focus within the story, and I resonate with her character a lot. While Asa struggles with loneliness, Makio thrives with loneliness. As somewhat of a reclusive author, she works a lot in the waning hours of the night, with a lot of her work done in solitude. Imagine this - I am sure many of us have written long pieces of writing, whether it be for school or for work. Cramming to meet a deadline and writing in the middle of the night is something that I am sure many students have experienced. More or less, this is the life that Makio consistently lives, and she clearly enjoys this solitary feeling of writing to be able to do it for so long. As such, her social skills are not her strong suit. I, myself, am much the same, because I also love writing. I am not a professional author, nor do I plan to be at the moment, but my passion for writing has not faltered. I, too, love writing in the middle of the night, because it is in utter silence where thoughts come to my head. Heck, even some of this review was written in those quiet nighttime hours. “Just like you can't understand the suffocation that I feel, I can't understand your loneliness. Because you and I are two different people.” Makio does not “get” Asa’s loneliness, but I am sure she empathizes in a way. Makio’s loneliness is a choice, while Asa’s loneliness is due to a loss. Asa was desperately looking for water in the desert to quench her own thirst, looking for a motherly guide in Makio. Is it true that when two lonely people meet, it can solve the loneliness of both parties? Not necessarily, but the two people can support each other. The thing that Makio constantly hammered into Asa’s brain was not to put too much stock in what other people say. This value was likely shaped by how Makio’s sister talked down to her on a regular basis and how she criticized her body of work. Makio eventually came to resent her sister, but she did not let her words affect her too greatly. She was able to guide Asa just a little bit, so that Asa’s life is her own, and no one can tell her otherwise. How one decides to live is their prerogative. One pitfall of shows like this is being overly melodramatic. *Ikoku Nikki* is not a show that has the characters crying or having loud outbursts often. Rather, it deals with sensitive subjects in a more nuanced way and focuses more on communication and human connection. Sure, in Episode 8, there is a very touching moment of realization for Asa, but it is a moment that feels cathartic rather than outright sad. If you have not watched the show yet, do not expect it to be a conventional tearjerker, because that is not the show’s identity at all. Kensuke Ushio is becoming one of my favourite anime composers, if not my favourite. His minimalist piano and electronic music soothes the soul, and his usage of field recordings makes his soundtracks feel more emotive and atmospheric. He has a way of making music that fits each scene with perfection. I will admit that his soundtrack for this anime is not as memorable as some of his other soundtracks, such as for A Silent Voice or Liz and the Blue Bird, but you can always count on him to elevate an anime adaptation. If there is one shortcoming of this adaptation, it would be the pacing. There are moments that feel a bit sudden, such as Asa’s junior high graduation, which I felt was not properly built up. Currently, the anime is adapting about two to three manga chapters per episode, and for an anime that focuses on character moments as much as this one, I feel the pacing could have been a bit slower, so we could really explore the characters with a bit more depth. This was a very impressive directorial debut from Miyuki Ooshiro, as she made use of limited production to direct something quite special. She had a good amount of experience under her belt, with her work on Natsume’s Book of Friends, which is a show that tackles emotional subjects as well, although not nearly as dramatically. It is not often that we come across an anime like this, and it is one that resonates with me deeply. If you are someone who has lost a loved one or felt the weight of social expectations, it may resonate with you, too. If you are not, maybe you will enjoy the slow-burning story of people navigating their lives and finding their own answers. It is not perfect, but it deals with grief, loneliness and the power of communication quite tactfully. Asa coming to terms with the death of her parents was a touching process with a strong realization, and Makio, thrust into the role of a parental figure, was an interesting development in her life, given her struggles in daily, conventional life. Both of them try to find their own answers in life, and it certainly is not an easy thing. When they find some, it might be the best feeling in the world. In tough times, the world may seem empty like a desert, but finding your own oasis is what it is all about. “If I keep giving water to my own loneliness, could a flower bloom in the dead of night?”

It would be easy to point to something like Kübler-Ross’s “The Five Stages of Grief” as being the script through which we experience shocking loss. The problem is that doing so presumes that we as people operate in such a methodical manner. We don’t. Especially since not all losses are created equal, and everyone is just as different as everyone else, there’s a certain extent to which those who grieve (even in the world of fiction) need to be given a degree of latitude. It’s particularly true when loss happens to one’s own family, regardless of whether there were close ties or not. Throw init being your parents, that it happened in a flash, and that you haven’t even entered high school proper yet, and it’s not simply that “they’re dead.” There’s nothing simple about that. Your life has been violently uprooted, and you find yourself thrust into feelings that you don’t necessarily understand because nothing can properly prepare you for them. Within *Journal with Witch / Ikoku Nikki*, Takumi Asa must confront this reality, and initially, it seems like there’s no one who is really going to help her do it. Moving in with her aunt Makio, Asa finds someone who is not only blunt about her own nonfeeling towards her own sister’s passing, but also that it’s unlikely that Makio would ever come to love Asa herself. It’s not all bleak, though. Like the true writer that she is, Makio insists that whatever Asa is feeling concerning her parents’ deaths is hers alone, and that no one has the right to tell her otherwise. Giving Asa a journal in which to record her thoughts, the steps towards personal healing and reconciliation take their root. What Makio says might sound noble, no doubt, but in terms of providing Asa with some kind of stability, it leaves much to be desired. She is positioned far away from the family both in terms of how she relates to Asa and with her own personal history, which helps orient the anime’s central thesis. Makio seemingly has no positive things to say about her sister, and with the recollections we are privy to seeing, there was a seemingly-insurmountable divide between them. She seems certain of that. Juxtaposing Makio’s detachment from Asa’s own uncertain feelings and confusions, in essence, sets up two people brought together by circumstances and needing to understand each other. Despite often being in a world unto herself (and an untidy world at that, if the state of her room is anything to go by), Makio’s decision to take Asa in proves to be sincerely healing for both characters. By taking on the role of Asa’s caretaker, Makio puts herself in a position where she must care on some level beyond a simple “How are you doing” sentiment. Though perhaps unintentional, it forces her to reconcile that perhaps her own view of her sister isn’t quite as one-dimensional or steady as she so believed. The intertwining of Asa’s memories and experiences, coupled with Makio’s generosity, reopens lines of communication and feelings that were once closed. They’re triggered by even simply being around old family, seeing old possessions, and standing in Asa’s presence. One must imagine how many silent days Makio spent, her only true companion being the tapping away at her keyboard, her family not even passing through her mind. But with Asa there, she’s reminded every day. The result is a kind of stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling both of the moment and of the larger narrative through its imagery. Despite being an anime, *Ikoku Nikki’s* visual language relies more heavily on strong drawings and layouts as opposed to frothing at realism or smoothness on-ones. Transitions from one moment to the next often happen in quick cuts or with contrasting colors and visuals, yet the underlying thread that leads from one thought to another is always coherent. By allowing the anime to “cut to the quick” so to speak, director Ooshiro Miyuki allows a flurry of hazy sensations to fill the screen, letting the emotions clash or harmonize as the moment demands. Shadows and symbols of the past can move freely. Because such moments include both Asa’s feelings and Makio’s feelings, it unites them as people having to deal with their own complexities in their own ways, even if their personal journeys’ starting and ending points happen at different places: native to them, foreign to everyone else. Asa’s own complexities arise from realizing that there are aspects of her own parents that she never truly knew or understood. For as much as we might like to pretend that we understand everything and everyone in our own lives (especially in our teenage years when we’re forced to simultaneously still be children yet become adults, as well as deal with our own emotional hangups), we are still only ourselves. It is not anyone’s fault, but rather is simply the way in which we inhabit the world, and because despite being individuals, there is surprisingly little we have control over. Spending time with Makio and the other adults requires Asa to acknowledge the pluralities of perspectives about her parents, their own relationship to one another, their relationship to her, their relationship to others, and so on. As such, Asa’s own emotional compass swings between lashing out, devastation, feeling adrift, and often at the mercy of other people’s actions. In her search for answers, she’s desperate to find some kind of stability, some kind of solid ground to place her footing and begin putting her life back together again, whatever that may have looked like. It’s not a teenager throwing a fit: it’s a teenager not even being sure how she’s supposed to cry for help since she can’t make heads or tails of her own self. But the adults in her life, by choice or because they simply don’t know how, can’t provide her with the answers she wants. *Ikoku Nikki’s* strength lies in how it does not provide neat little boxes wrapped with bows, that it respects the individuality of its characters to live by their own convictions and philosophies, even if they fly in the face of one another. Asa confronts the duality of standing out vs. not wanting to stand out / feeling uneasy about that conundrum, while Kasamachi deals with his own relationship with his father and how it too greatly affected him. Asa’s mother made a bid to be normal, and her father certainly made little effort to make his presence known spiritually or emotionally. In that sense, Asa’s journal writing itself moves without direction because she doesn’t know which direction she’s supposed to move in with all that she’s been told or given. It’s only when she starts the process of greater self-actualization that she finds not only a purpose for her journal in terms of hobbies (Makio’s rich vocabulary gives her plenty of material), but also in deciding something truly for herself. Asa is not the only young person in the story who needs to make decisions. Sprinkled throughout *Ikoku Nikki* are pockets of other grief stories, though their gravity is ultimately less than the overarching question of Asa’s parents’ deaths. At first flush, these moments appear to come out of nowhere, and it’s easy to dismiss them as lazy storytelling or injections of melodrama. Why should we be concerned with characters like Chiyo and her freakout over medical school she applied to, or Yoshimura’s treatment on the baseball team? Like *Takopii’s Original Sin*, the point is not to emphasize a “who had it worse” question and play a comparison game, but rather to illustrate that Chiyo and Yoshimura, like Asa and even Emiri, all have their own griefs or loneliness hanging over their shoulders. Things they love being ruined or opportunities taken from them through forces seemingly beyond their control show that grief is not a passive phenomenon, no matter who it impacts. Those impacts have outward reverberations, even if only when glimpsed for a moment. *Ikoku Nikki’s* empathy lies not in the small and large tragedies that befall them, but rather in recognizing the powerlessness that grief, malaise, or mourning brings. When that powerlessness comes from others, no matter how fleetingly we may have glimpsed it ourselves, the only way to respond is in our own way, even if it’s more declamatory or visceral than others. And yes, it may include deciding to talk to the people you once did a little bit less about certain things because they can’t take a hint. Even Makio, with her supposed certainty about her feelings concerning Asa’s mother, feels powerless to either love Asa in the way we expect familial love to be, or in how she tries to explain herself. But at the end of the day, she chose to take Asa in, because having something is better than being left on your own with nothing. Being powerless doesn’t mean being alone. Asa’s moving through herself and glimpsing all these expressions of grief, subtle and unsubtle, brief or longstanding, fellow teenager or friendly adult, implies a grand synthesis of how we take in our own experiences and forge a new self through grief. In that sense, Asa is never alone because she has taken on so much from her parents’ deaths and through existing in the here-and-now. It is the ultimate non-answer, the kind of sentiment that would make its home on my grandmother’s old crocheted pillow, but doesn’t carry meaning on its own. Saying it feels insincere compared to the actual experiencing of it. *Ikoku Nikki* doesn’t claim that everything will be perfectly fine and dandy with grief and mourning, regardless of how much time has passed. Grief is not something that only gets put in a book that gathers dust and is eventually forgotten as time moves forward. It’s always present, finding ways to peek into our lives in either passing moments or deeper contemplations. Yet it’s because it’s always present that we must learn to internalize and accept its presence. We will change because of it, and that’s okay. Asa didn’t need “fixing” so much as needing to accept her own feelings, including all the contradictions, convictions, and condescension therein. She’ll never truly grasp the full portrait of her parents, nor how their deaths impacted her or Makio, or the others whose lives were changed as a result. But so long as Asa, and they, takes lessons both from the living and the dead, they’ll be one step closer to the best version of themselves, realizing that it’s less about the answers and more about the steps we make and the breaths we take. For Asa, she’ll draw in her breath and sing her first notes. As long as she does her best, what a lovely song it will be. ________________ RIP Grandma Milly – I’m so grateful that I could be with you until the very end. I love you and miss you <3