Natsume’s Book of Friends
I stumbled across the fifth season of Natsume’s Book of Friends on Crunchyroll and have been inspired to start rewatching the series from the start. Will it be as delightful to watch as I remember it being? Signs so far point to yes.
About the anime
Natsume’s Book of Friends (Natsume Yūjin-chō) is a Japanese anime series based on a shōjo manga by Midorikawa Yuki. Its protagonist Natsume Takashi is a boy with the power to see and interact with the yōkai that wander about everywhere, unseen by normal people. He learns of his grandmother Natsume Reiko’s Book of Friends, a collection of names she won from yōkai in duels. As the inheritor of the book, he could use it to force yōkai to do his bidding. He chooses instead to seek out the yōkai in it and return their names to them.
The yōkai in the anime are spiritual beings in Japanese folklore that can be related to natural features, animals, people, or even everyday objects—variously small, large, silly, scary, grotesque or elegant, and often dressed in traditional Japanese clothing. The old-timey pastel-shaded cell animation (the first series came out in 2008) is a good match for the wood-block prints of the Edo era, which often depicted yōkai.
At the start of the series, Natsume is scared and distrustful of the creatures that have complicated his childhood, and lonely because everyone shuns the child they see seemingly staring at blank walls and running from nothing. It changes when he learns about the book, and gains a yōkai companion in Marada/‘Nyanko-sensi’. He finds himself learning more about yōkai and helping them with their problems, and in time feeling more friendly towards them. Marada, as Natsume’s self-appointed bodyguard, complains that he is too ready to help others.
The series mixes monster-of-the-week episodes with longer arcs as Natsume gains new friends, both human and yōkai, and learns about the secretive exorcist families of people who share his rare ability to see the yōkai world, but see them only as enemies to vanquish or enslave.
Theme
This makes it sound like a horror series, so it might be surprising that it is more commonly described as slice-of-life, and compared to ‘healing-type’ anime (a genre where not much happens, mostly in pretty, rural environments).
While there are some dangerous yōkai, and Natsume does on occasion explore spooky abandoned school buildings or put himself in real danger, most of his adventures are very mild peril, and are resolved with kindness and empathy rather than fighting.
Many of the stories are poignant meditations on loneliness and the struggle to make or recover connections. Compared to yōkai, humans are short-lived, ever-changing, capricious and chaotic beings. Yōkai have familiar emotions and personalities, but are also alien in perspective: often a yōkai will do the same thing every night for hundreds of years—and when they do change, it is the result of some chance encounter with a human. Natsume Takeshi might well discover a yōkai who his grandmother Reiko met and then forgot about when she was a girl, who is still waiting for her return at some long-abandoned train station. When Takashi turns up, they find it difficult to believe he is not the teenager they met 40 years ago.
Another theme is Natsume slowly coming to trust in his new happier life, with foster parents who love and care for him, and friends who value him as a friend—even his schoolmates who don’t know about the spirits, but just shrug off his occasional habit of running away from nothing or falling in to a river for no reason.
Watching the anime
The anime has been broadcast (starting in 2008) in seasons of 13 episodes of 24 minutes. I’ve been watching it on Crunchyroll. For reasons best known to themselves, they have the first three seasons grouped together as one 39-episode season which used to be titled Natsume’s Book of friends but is now Natsume Yujin-cho, and separate series Natsume Yujin-cho 4 and 5. Season 6 is listed but its videos are not available (at least, not in the UK, I assume because of licensing).