There are no headlines to be found here, that’s for sure. If any series were ever comfortable in its own skin surely it’s Natsume Yuujnchou. It does what it does week after week, season after season, and makes it all look pretty effortless. It loses a bit of that organic quality when Natori and his orbit are in focus – maybe that’s why I like those episodes less. But when it does what it was doing here, it just flows. It doesn’t change and to a remarkable extent, neither does my response to it as a viewer.
We haven’t seen Kitamoto Atsushi for a long time, at least that I remember. I didn’t recall too much about Kishimoto except that he’s not a youkai-seeing person and he’s very even-tempered. As they’re heading over to his place to study he and Natsume stop into an old bookshop that’s been closed so long almost nobody remembers it was a shop. If any human enterprise screams “youkai” it’s a dusty old bookstore, and this old house certainly qualifies. It’s run by an old lady who’s asleep a good chunk of the time, but of greater interest is the young assistant Kaeda (Ichimichi Mao) who seems very annoyed with Kishimoto’s repeated visits and scolds him to stop showing up.
It’s pretty clear pretty quickly that Kaeda, in her Showa-style school uniform, is probably a youkai. That doesn’t explain why Kishimoto-kun can see her but Nyanko-sensei later does do that – the shop is probably a place where the human and youkai worlds meet. The other part of the mystery is the series of scribbled notes Kishimoto starts finding in some of the books. He can’t read them but Natsume can – they’re youkai writing, and the one he sees says “tongue”. Nyanko-sensei warns Natsume that the notes are bad news, probably some sort of curse – and events soon prove that out.
This is pretty much a Goldilocks episode for me. Just enough peril to keep things a bit tense, some epic Nyanko-sensei moments like his brushing himself after a bath, and the best showcase for the background music in the first four eps. There’s also a whisper of romance in the air between Atsushi and Kaeda, though there are obvious problems with that. Between his deadpan and her tsundere they’re tough to get a handle on but him giving her a favorite book to read – and her actually doing so, despite claiming she’s never read a single book – tells an interesting story.
As it turns out, Kaeda is a sort of caretaker of the bookshop – she comes from a book herself (does that make her a tsukumogami?) but she can only materialize when the owner is asleep (fortunately a lot). And the curses are courtesy of Dei, an evil youkai that was sealed in a book and later released when the seal was broken. Kaeda’s relationship with both Natsume and Kishimoto deepens, though obviously in two different ways. Eventually Madara is brought in for a monster hunt, with the aim of re-sealing Dei in his book and allowing the store to stay home without anyone getting demonically cursed.
This certainly has the feel of a one-off, with Kaeda going to sleep it off in her tome after using a ton of power to Ziploc Dei. But as with any good story about books, it leaves you curious about where things might be headed in the future. This is the sort of episode Natsume Yuujinchou seems most comfortable with, perfectly natural in its execution. And no other anime can give you that fix quite the way Natsume Yuujinchou can.
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