Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

A genre represented a bit sparingly in the usual churn of seasonal anime is the historical drama. That’s not to say that there aren’t any—this isn’t even the first one I’m covering this season—but they’re a little less common than some genres, and when they do happen, they tend to stick to a pretty narrow geographical range; Japan itself, or, sometimes, China. As its title suggests, Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, is an outlier in this regard, and it actually starts farther west than that, in Iran, but while this is notable on its own, it’s not the only reason the series is worth attention.

For one thing, this is the latest offering from Science SARU, who are pulling double duty this season between this and their upcoming Ghost in the Shell reboot. (Witch in Mongolia in particular is the work of a creative team led by chief director Yamada Naoko and director Abel Gongora.) Here, they’re working to translate the striking art style of the original manga, whose creator goes by the pseudonym Tomato Soup, into animated form. The result is something that, likely more by convergent evolution than anything, looks just a bit like Kaiba‘s art style, but translated into a rich and breathing portrait of the medieval middle east as opposed to that series’ far-future psychadelic sci fi. So what you have here is a very strongly-realized historical setting presenting a compelling story about the power of knowledge and how it can help us deal with our circumstances, even when those circumstances are very bleak indeed. That’s interesting. That’s something truly different.

Of course, being a series set in the real-world past does come with a few hurdles we all need to jump together as viewers. To put it more bluntly; slavery is a major plot element of this series. I will never tell anyone that they have to put any discomfort with that aside and just push on through, but I think there is a huge, huge difference in how the practice is depicted here—an honest acknowledgement of a historical reality—and, say, the two-bit power fantasies of bottom of the barrel narou-kei dreck, which is where this stuff tends to pop up most frequently in anime. If you want your off-ramp, it’s here. This stuff is part of the story, and I am going to talk about it as frankly as the story itself does, there isn’t really any way to write about it without doing so.

Because—silly as this may sound—the actual events of the story are very important to establishing what the story is going for here, I am going to recap these first two episodes, looping in my own thoughts and observations where applicable. If this seems a little more “recappy” (and longer) than my usual first impressions pieces these days, that’ll be why.

Seeking a new servant in her household after the death of her husband, a woman named Fatima [Kuwashima Houko] visits a slave market run by a man named Ahmad [Takaoka Binbin]. There, she’s sold a new housekeeper and, in return for Ahmad knocking a few hundred dinar off the price, she’s also to take in a young girl named Sitara [Sekine Akira]. Fatima’s brother Muhammad [Mogami Tsuguo] attempts to instill some learning in Sitara, as Ahmad told Fatima that the girl has a knack for it, but finds himself frustrated when she’s unable to even learn the very basics of Quran recitation. Frustrated, Muhammad says that he’ll just pay back the discount and return her. Left alone after this, Sitara attempts to escape.

She does not, quite understandably, want to spend the rest of her life enslaved. She says she’s going home, but in her attempts to find her way out of the manor, she gets lost. In a garden, she encounters a young boy, also named Muhammad [Saito Jun]. (He’s the elder Muhammad’s nephew, son to Fatima and a late father. I will be differentiating him and the elder Muhammad by age.) She takes an immediate interest in him, including teasing him after her headdress accidentally slips off. Unfortunately! This leads to her being caught, and upon being scolded she breaks down that she misses the home that she and her mother used to serve in. (Zumurrud [Nikray Farahnaz], one of Fatima’s other servants, is unsympathetic and tells her that if she really wants a home to call her own, she should study hard so she’ll get bought by a worthwhile master. Ouch.)

In spite of this, the younger Muhammad makes an earnest attempt to connect with her. Enough of an attempt that he tries to teach her a little something; taking a metal bucket from Zumurrud, young Muhammad drops it in the courtyard from a great height, making a terrible racket. When this sends everyone but Sitara and Zumurrud into a momentary panic, he notes that, because these two had the time to see that the bucket was about to fall, and therefore to prepare themselves, they knew to cover their ears and avoided the clamor.

The younger Muhammad says that this kind of foresight; preparation to avoid calamity, big or small, is what defines learning. In saying this, he calls back to an earlier line from Fatima—when attempting to convince the elder Muhammad to teach Sitara the Quran, she explains that seeking knowledge is the duty of all Muslims—and highlights what is sure to be a main theme of the series.

This is enough to convince her to take studying seriously. And thus, we are treated to a montage. Sitara learns household tasks, learns to pray, and recieves an outfit from the house. As the montage (and Fatima’s period of prescribed mourning for her husband, the synchronization of the two feels deliberate) ends, Sitara speaks with the younger Muhammad once again. The two are clearly close at this point, and she’s surprised (and a little upset!) to learn that he plans to journey to Nishapur, and to other cities of the world beyond, to learn as much as he can about the world from as many different peoples and faiths as possible. It’s an admirable goal, and young Muhammad believes that it’s what his father wanted for him, but Sitara is visibly upset by the prospect of not seeing him again, and it’s not hard to conclude that the two have some nascent feelings for each other. No matter, young Muhammad promises Sitara that he’ll write to her. Now, Sitara is illiterate, but this is his way of encouraging her to practice her letters. He wants to become a great scholar and, hopefully, someday, teach many young folks like herself. With some sadness, she and the rest of the household see young Muhammad off on his journey, and the narration tells us that he will become a person of some renown. (This is true, because the younger Muhammad is the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.)

The narration also tells us something else, however. That this is the last time he and Sitara will ever see each other in person.*

We cut to eight years later. One of Sitara’s recitation practices is interrupted by the sounds of the Tussian militia outside, heading off to fight a band of troublesome nomads. This disruption is quickly forgotten as one of young Muhammad’s letters arrives. In it he talks about how in love he’s fallen with the sciences; astronomy, geometry, medicine, and how he prefers their methods of learning to the purely theological. He also encourages his family to let Sitara learn these disciplines, as well, suggesting Ptolemy and Euclid as starting points. Euclid’s Elements is a bit hard for her to grasp, but when Fatima introduces her to a book on astrology and astronomy (recall, this was the 12th century and the two were not well delineated), she’s captivated. In here, Fatima repeats the “seeking knowledge” line, once again underlining it as a main theme of this story.

Back in the manor proper, one of Fatima’s other servants, Anis [Ise Mariya], scolds Sitara as she burns something in the oven. It’s true, she tells Sitara, that some slaves are given education to entertain or delight their masters, but decisions of this nature aren’t made by the slaves themselves. “We’re property, not people.” She says, in a way that is so matter of fact that what she’s saying actually comes off as more chilling. All the moreso because of how this episode ends.

The militia, mentioned briefly earlier, are revealed to have fallen to the nomads. The episode closes on a brief exchange between two of these men; a commander of some sort, and his superior, on horseback, who asks if Tus has any scholars because he’s “looking for something.”

When the Mongols are inbound to the city, Muhammad and the rest of the household treat them more like a natural disaster that will blow over. The slaves, along with the rest of the valuables and Fatima as well, hide in a spacious cellar underneath the manor while the elder Muhammad takes his sons up to the mountains to hopefuly ride out the proverbial storm.

Fatima and Sitara have a bit of a heart to heart in the standstillish world of the cellar, speaking about Fatima’s books (a collection her late husband spent a lifetime building) and how important they are.

She also asks Fatima if she “cares for” Muhammad, and both her actual reply and the little flight of fancy she has—she and Muhammad decked out in fancy clothes, eating pomegranates together—make it a clear yes. Fatima says that she wants Sitara to serve Muhammad “by his side, as a human being.” For someone in Sitara’s position, that’s high praise. Days pass, and after a few, there’s some noise outside the cellar. Fatima assumes it’s the older Muhammad, returned to come get them. It is not.

It is here that we are formally introduced to the Mongols invading the city. We don’t learn his name just yet, but the leader of this little expedition appears to be a prince, one of the sons of Genghis Khan. For whatever reason they may have, he is looking for a copy of Euclid’s Elements, a book that has of course come to mean a lot to Sitara over the years. Unable to restrain herself, she shouts at the Mongol prince to return it and calls him a thief. Unfortunately, not only is the prince clearly offended by the mere act of being yelled at, he has a servant on hand of his own, who translates the insult into his language. This is enough to incur his wrath; he tells Sitara—his servant translating all the while—that bravery from one as delicate as she is unseemly, and promptly brings down his sword on her head.

Fatima, of course, cares enough for Sitara to not stand idly by while she’s attacked, and jumps in front of the blade. Dying in Sitara’s arms, she calls her her daughter. It is a sad and tragic event, and it does not seem like it’ll be the last of those in this series.

Brought up in the first episode is the limit of theoretical knowledge. The younger Muhammad embarked on his journey in part because his own teacher scolded him for his lack of life experience. Here, we see those limits in plain relief. There is simply not anything that Sitara, as she currently is, could possibly have done.

No matter the era, the place, or the reason, an invading army is almost never welcome. Witch in Mongolia portrays this pain with a very raw, immediate touch. After Fatima’s death, Sitara is left to watch as the invaders plunder the manor, and when they finally lead her away in a train of captives, we see the beautiful sandstone buildings and sky-blue dome tops of Tus rendered as so much rubble underneath the smoke and fire.

This happens all over the world, and has happened, from the dawn of human history to the present day. The methods change, both those for delivering the killing blow and those for extracting the wealth, but the fundamental injustice of the strong trampling the weak has not. Tus, after its sacking in 1220, was, in fact, eventually rebuilt, but it did not last, and the city didn’t survive the 1200s. Those are incalculable lives and stories either lost or displaced, and Witch in Mongolia is about just one of them. As Tus burns, Sitara and a throng of other captives are marched out of the city and into the surrounding desert. She manages to meet back up with Zumurrud and Anis, although the former is badly suffering from watching her brother be shot by archers before her very eyes. Later, the captive train comes across a field of the dead, and a woman attempts to run off upon recognizing one of the bodies. She, too, is promptly shot to death by one of the Mongol archers.

This is all very, very bleak. Obviously. Even saying as much feels a bit trivial. Keeping Sitara going are memories of her time with Fatima, eagerly awaiting the bloom of the flowers in Safar and her letters from young Muhammad. It may seem somewhat strange, to an audience living in the modern world, and given Sitara’s own reaction in the opening minutes of the first episode to the prospect, that she looks back on serving under Fatima so well. But, we must remember that despite their arrangement being what it was, it is clear that Fatima cared a good deal for Sitara, and it was under her tutelage that she was able to learn about the world. I am of course not remotely saying—and I do not think the show is trying to say—that this justifies the practice, merely that it explains Sitara’s own feelings on the matter. It’s also important context for the decisions she makes toward the end of the episode.

When the train of captives reaches the Mongol city camp, the exhaustion and emotional turmoil is too much. Learning from some of its few survivors that Nishapur, too, has been burned to the ground (for the crime of defending itself; an entire city for the head of the invading force’s commander, per the Khan’s orders) pushes everyone to the absolute brink, as it now seems impossible that even young Muhammad is still alive. It’s too much for Sitara, too much for Anis, and too much for Zumurrud, who, later this same day, collapses, dying as she remembers her brother Mikhail, leading Sitara to wonder if she wasn’t missing her brother the entire time they lived together with Fatima. Sitara losing more people close to her does nothing to help her emotional state, of course. Anis attempts to calm her down by telling her not to blame herself for Fatima’s death. She reasons that, as slaves, they aren’t really held responsible for what they do in the same way as a free person would be. Whether she truly believes this or is saying it as much to comfort herself as Sitara isn’t entirely clear. But, it ends up not mattering, as with Zumurrud’s death, Anis has clearly reached the end of her rope as well. Overnight, she lunges at one of the Mongol soldiers out of nowhere, and is shot dead.

With essentially everyone in her life now gone, Sitara wonders if she shouldn’t just pick a direction and walk; an arrow will pierce her, too, if she does this for long enough, she thinks.

Then, unexpectedly, she’s interrupted not by one of the Mongol soldiers, but by the Mongol prince’s servant, the translator who was with her when Fatima was killed. He obliquely offers her a way to reclaim the copy of Euclid’s Elements that the prince stole, and on that note, the premiere comes to a close.

All told, this is clearly the opening act of a very considered story with a lot of long-term goals. I really, really want to know how the translator is going to go about getting the book back. It’s clear that this is, at this point, one of the very few things Sitara still has from her old life to hang on to, and that it’s an object with such obvious ties to the story’s themes is interesting as well. (And accordingly, what she might do with that book is inherently interesting as well.) Something I’ve neglected to mention up until this point is the opening narration, which promises us a “witch who made a vast continent her plaything.” I don’t know, precisely, how we get there from here, but I want to find out.

^{*In real life, there is apparently little to no evidence that these two people knew each other, but drawing a connection between the two—Sitara is based on a real figure as well, known only by that name and as “Fatima” to the historical record—is a fair use of writer’s privilege I’d say. For both the former of these particular factlets and the aforementioned historical identity of young Muhammad, I must thank my good friend Zersk (googling “Muhammad of Tus” and the like was getting me nowhere), who, fun fact, is also the artist who drew the witch icon I use to comment on this website. 🙂}

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