Tag: Ikoku Nikki

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Brief Thoughts on: IKOKU NIKKI – Episode 3

“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.

One of my favorite things about this anime, which is used in a couple of different ways over the course of this episode, is Makio’s very authorial and writerly narration. She describes Asa’s empty apartment, which they visit in this episode, this way, and it really adds an ineffable something to the characterization as opposed to if we heard fewer of her thoughts. It gives the work a very “literary” quality, which makes sense both on an obvious level because Makio is an author, but also on a less obvious once, in that she seems to use this formal discursive register to separate herself a little bit from the events she and Asa are going through. It’s an interesting tension, and one I hope the series continues to explore as it goes on.

One way this forms a tension is in her statements to Asa, that Asa’s feelings about her parents’ passing are her own business alone. She’s said this a lot over the course of these three episodes, and while she clearly does believe it to some degree, she also doesn’t believe it so much that she doesn’t ask questions when Asa comes home from her first day back at school—the graduation ceremony, ironically—in tears, having even gotten lost on her way back. Asa presses her for asking about it, and—again, I think this is an interesting bit of tension—Makio says she shouldn’t put so much stock in what other people say

The entire episode of Asa going to school, only to learn that her friend Emiri has inadvertently let the entire class and faculty know about the tragedy she went through, and acting out at both Emiri and that faculty is an interesting one. We don’t really see Asa acting this emotive very often and she’s clearly very angry that everyone will only think of her as “that girl with the dead parents”, she says as much. (All the while the visuals transpose the characters into a surreal Maypole Dance setting.) Emiri and Asa were friends before this, but she spends most of the rest of the episode ignoring her and, on her way out the door, says she hates her.

We return to Makio attempting to figure out what exactly happened here, and when Asa throws the whole “no one’s business but your own” thing back in her face, that is when she tells Asa that she shouldn’t put so much stock in what other people say. Even more interestingly, this is immediately before talking about her own schoolday friend (Daigo Nana, who we met last week), and how Nana wrote her a letter on their last day of school together that meant the world to her. These pieces of subtle hypocrisy aren’t drawn a ton of attention to, other than Asa calling them out the one time, but they’re very interesting and paint Makio as a very complex character.

Again, I’m just really interested to know where else we’re going here. You could easily make the case that this is an outside candidate for the best thing airing right now, and given how stacked this season is, that’s really saying something.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, The Weekly Orbit

Brief Thoughts on: IKOKU NIKKI – Episode 2

“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.

There’s a lot of stuff crammed in here. Overall, this is a great second episode for what is quietly shaping up to be one of the best anime in a very strong season.

I love Makio’s blonde friend Daigo Nana [Matsui Eriko], who we meet for the first time here. Asa seeing her and Makio interact gets us a lot of interesting thoughts from Asa herself, who finds the two’s interaction decidedly un-adult-like. There’s a particularly funny moment where, via smash cut, Asa compares Nana’s cackling laugh to the trumpeting of an elephant, just one of a number of really good scenes from Asa’s imagination throughout the episode. Nana’s whole bit of sharing a gyoza recipe with Asa is great too, and in general I hope to see a lot more of the character. Asa’s reaction to the meal itself is interesting as well, and points to the continued major role of food as an element of the series. She tries to remember her mom’s home cooking, but while she recalls liking it at the time, she can’t remember what she was actually served in them anymore. Pointing at, perhaps, more distance between Asa and her late mother than might have previously been safe to assume.

Then there’s Makio’s meetup with her ex, a man named Kasamachi Shingo [Suwabe Junichi doing his “hi, I’m Suwabe Junichi” voice]. I am trying quite hard to fight off my ambient misandry and not just assume the worst of Kasamachi right off the bat, but his conversation with Makio here doesn’t especially endear me to him. He feels the need to tell Makio that he was “hurt” by her decision to adopt Asa, which sure seems like making it about himself. (Him being a dedicated reader of Makio’s books also feels a little…I don’t know, off somehow. Not that I have a right to criticize as a 30-some woman who still watches shonen anime.)

Still, there’s a difference between a bad person and someone who’s just a bit thoughtless, and he strikes me more as the latter. He offers advice for getting Asa set up with insurance and such. I admit I was still a touch on-edge throughout that entire scene, though. Probably more to do with my own biases than anything else.

The best bit in the episode, however, comes in between these two major segments, and is actually probably this, a conversation between Asa and Makio where they try to be a bit more open with each other, right until the subject of Asa’s mom comes up. It’s a very impressive trick to get your audience this mad at a woman who’s literally dead with only a couple of lines, but Ikoku Nikki pulled it off.

When I was young, the stock line I always got hit with when I failed to do something my mother just assumed I’d be able to do easily was “I know you’re smart” said in a vaguely disapproving tone. I guess for Asa and, hell, Makio as well, it was that instead. Maybe that’s oversharing, but I find fiction like this to be good for helping to process complicated emotions that are difficult to speak about directly. For that, it’s one of my favorites so far of the young year.

Programming Note: I think posting episode writeups individually is the way I’ll be handling this going forward, even for shows like this one where I don’t actively plan to write about every single episode. These will be filed under the same archive as the “Let’s Watch” columns even though they’re a slightly different thing. I can’t imagine the subtle distinction matters to anyone but myself 😛

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: IKOKU NIKKI

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.

In keeping with the spirit of the show I’m covering, and in my ongoing quest to make my first impressions writeups less identical, here, presented in no particular order, is simply a list of things I liked about the premiere episode of Ikoku Nikki. (English-market title Journal with Witch, but, seemingly, almost no one calls it that.)

1: Its non-linear storytelling. We start with a flash-forward, only establishing the actual premise after the OP sequence plays. This allows us to meet our main characters, the recently-orphaned Takumi Asa [Mori Fuuko, in her first starring role], and her aunt, the eccentric Koudai Makio [Sawashiro Miyuki], on their own terms, before learning of the accident that deprived Asa of her parents and Makio taking her in.

2: Its use of limited, but bold visual techniques. In particular, with its frequent cuts to the desert Asa imagines as she attempts to write in her journal, it reminds me of the sometimes casually-hallucinatory bilocational direction of the recent mystery anime Shoshimin Series. Of course, the context is very different, but I grew very fond of the technique in that series, and I am happy to see a similar method used here to elicit different emotions. Asa calls this desert “loneliness”.

3: Makio herself, a decidedly disheveled woman of 35 (making her the increasingly-rare anime character older than me) who lives in an unkempt apartment with bits of paper scattered everywhere. She is characterized as shy and just generally a bit of a weirdo. To say I felt seen, as someone in my 30s who also makes a living (well, “a living”) off of writing as Makio appears to do, also fitting pretty much all of these descriptions, would be an understatement.

4: When Makio gives Asa the journal, we see its rows and rows of ruling lines slowly morph into the sand dunes of the desert. This sequence in of itself is incredible, especially for how little is actually involved in it, but it’s Makio’s advice to Asa on journal-writing that really sticks with me: you don’t have to write anything you don’t want to, write only what you want to in that moment, and what you write needn’t even necessarily be true.

5: In general, stemming from both of these prior points, both Makio and Asa have fairly understated characterization. I admit I often struggle with fiction like this, as someone with generally low emotional intelligence who is bad at observing people. (And of course, observation of real people generally informs the sort of gestural tics and other expressive signals that act as a tell in this sort of thing.) Even so, I welcome the challenge here. I think perhaps what’s objectively true of Makio is less important than what Asa thinks of Makio, as a life raft in a sea of indifference. I am interested in seeing the two of them grow together, and that, really, is the main reason I found this premiere so compelling.

6: Of course, the louder and more direct bits of characterization help. Makio’s loud declaration that despite hating her mother and not even being sure she’ll be able to properly love Asa, that she won’t let her just be passed around by her family, is the episode’s best scene.

7: The scene where Asa, in her lonely desert, discovers Makio walks it as well. Without directly saying anything, the series draws a line between these two people, their minds, and their lives. It is proven to Asa that she is not alone. This really ties the episode together for me, and I am absolutely fascinated to see where the series will go from here.

It is shaping up to be a very strong anime season. That’s a good thing, but a problem with that is that works that are somewhat less conventional, like Ikoku Nikki, risk being overrun by their flashier peers. I really hope that doesn’t happen, there’s a ton of potential here, and what is here already is very, very good.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.