Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

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In its fifth episode, Call of The Night refocuses on its first thought as a creative work. Namely, that Ko is down absolutely awful for Nazuna, and is maybe a slight bit in denial about it. Just a smidgen. The series recenters the two’s dynamic here, as after several episodes of also palling around with Akira, she’s entirely absent from this one. Thus, it’s just Nazuna and Ko.

The episode actually opens in Nazuna’s apartment, where we learn that the vampire version of waking up in the middle of the night is waking up in the middle of the afternoon. (This is where the show puts its allotted few scant minutes of actual daylight per episode. I have noticed that in restricting its usage of normal sunlight so heavily, Call of The Night basically inverts the usual day/night dynamic of most anime of this sort. It’s a neat trick.) Here, she does things like miss a FedEx delivery, paly a video game she’s not really that invested in, and other such Normal Things for people who are teenagers or young adults to get up to.

She seems a bit lonely, underneath that teasing vampire facade, but perhaps I’m just projecting a touch. Most importantly, she visits a bath house, and from there the episode’s plot springs.

You see, she’s only in the bathhouse for a little while when she gets a beep from Ko. As such, she leaves in a hurry, and when she meets Ko, her hair is all down and soft-looking.

This causes Ko to become self-conscious of the fact that, oh yeah, this pretty lady who sucks his blood every night is attractive, and he kind of falls down the stairs of being awkward and being aware that you’re awkward but not really being able to do anything about it for the remainder of the episode. When Nazuna sinks her fangs into him, perhaps finding his squirming cute, she actually bites him so hard that he cries out in….well, I’ll leave cries out in what up to you, dear readers. Suffice it to say, this is the hardest that the series has yet leaned into the whole “bloodsucking as sex” metaphor.

^{Sometimes I feel obligated to try to come up with clever captions for these pictures, but I really don’t know how I’d make this more of a sex joke than it already is.}

Would you believe the two end up at a love hotel by accident? Yes, just like that episode of My Dress-Up Darling from earlier this year, and I’m sure I’m neither the first nor last person who will compare the two. But while I found that episode to be one of MDUD’s weaker forays, this episode—and this part of it, in particular—is surprisingly nuanced. More or less; Ko is definitely attracted to Nazuna, he knows that, and she knows that. Apparently, drinking someone’s blood lets a vampire get a sense of their thoughts and feelings via taste. This is a weird and cool bit of worldbuilding tossed in here, perhaps as a metaphor for Nazuna’s being generally more experienced than Ko is.

More to the point; Ko feels bad about his attraction, because he does genuinely consider Nazuna a friend, and those feelings rest uneasily together in his mind; he feels like he’s, to quote the subtrack directly, doing something “immoral.” Nazuna, interestingly, waves the entire notion off. Be immoral, she says. That is what nighttime is for, after all. The only thing she cautions him against is “being lazy about [his] emotions.” Feel anything, but feel honestly.

It’s hard to know if the show herself will still be backing her up there in six weeks, but it certainly is for now. Later on, the topic of conversation turns toward other people whose blood Nazuna has sucked, and Ko, perhaps predictably, gets a bit jealous. (She tells him, in an apparent attempt to make him less so, that she also sucks women’s blood. One might call her bi-neck-sual, if they had a love of awful puns, and I very much do.)

Nazuna also reveals, upon taking Ko back to her apartment, that her job is actually how she meets most of the people whose blood she sucks. What is her job? Well, she is a “professional cuddler.”

Yeah, really. I did not know this was a thing either. Maybe it isn’t! Who knows?

What that seems to entail is a kind of non-sexual prostitution where she wears a slightly revealing nurse getup and gives people massages or the like while lying down with them but, pointedly, without actually doing anything beyond that. Frankly, I am a little torn here. Part of me thinks this is a bit of a cop-out. There isn’t anything wrong or immoral about sex work and I feel like that might’ve made more sense given the episode’s whole theme. On the other hand, it might make Ko and Nazuna’s relationship seem even dicier than it already is, so maybe it’s fine that they didn’t go that route. Who can say?

Nazuna proves herself to be pretty knowledgeable about massage work. (Watching this part of the episode honestly kind of made me want one myself. I do have pretty stiff shoulders.) She’s also, as we’ve long known, very adept at relaxing Ko, and just when she’s about to sink her teeth into him yet again, her door bell rings, and the episode’s denouement makes an abrupt swerve into cringe comedy.

The person at the door is one of her regular customers, and Nazuna is—or at least claims to be—far too tired from massaging Ko to actually help her out. So, Ko will have to do it in her place, using the knowledge Nazuna’s imparted to him.

Cue the credits!

Yes, on that particularly odd cliffhanger, today’s episode ends, promising next week’s will be perhaps a bit heavier on the wacky hijinks side. (Although honestly, who knows? This show is a bit hard to predict.) Overall, I like this episode. I know some folks find Nazuna and Ko’s relationship rather unpleasant, but for my part, I think the show manages a decent job of selling it as being good for both of them. This episode serves as a sort of back to basics, while also progressing that relationship along. The night keeps calling, why would Ko stop answering?

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