The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Natsume's Book of Friends Season 7

Takashi Natsume has been able to see youkai, Japanese monsters, his whole life. He inherited a book of youkai names from his grandmother, Reiko. These names give their owner power over the youkai, so he and his self-proclaimed bodyguard "Nyanko-sensei" spend their days returning them to their original owners. As Natsume finally finds a place where he feels welcome, he meets and says goodbye to new youkai....

Natsume's Book of Friends Season 7 is based on the manga series by Yuki Midorikawa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

It's been a long time since I watched (or read) Natsume's Book of Friends, but it's the sort of story that lives quietly in a corner of your mind, waiting for you to go back to it. It's a gentle, bittersweet series, and this episode is no exception. It follows Natsume and Nyanko-sensei as they interact with a lost yokai soul that has taken up residence in a tiny Nyanko-sensei figurine that Natsume made, a pit stop on its journey home to the Buddha statue it was once a part of.

The quiet melancholy comes from the soul's journey. It isn't dying or anything similar; it's simply returning to the home it was forced out of when the statue was chipped. It's a fragment of a being rather than a full yokai itself, something beautifully demonstrated by the way it lives in the tiny figure. Interestingly enough, while it's occupying the clay, other people without Natsume's gift can see it, and in its previous incarnation as clay made into a bird figure, it was also visible to the monk who owned it. In that form, it couldn't move, adding a little irony to the story – it was in the form of a bird, but it couldn't use its wings to fly home.

Unlike some other tales in the series, this one isn't overtly sad. It has its moments of it, such as when the Nyanko-sensei figurine begins to crack (clay isn't made to run through the forest, after all) and it begins to look like the soul won't be able to complete its journey. But mostly this is quietly uplifting – the little soul protects Natsume until he can see the figurine on its way. When it floats down the stream in a wooden teacup, it feels like we're witnessing the birth of a new folktale about a tiny clay cat setting sail for home. The soul can do that because of Natsume and Nyanko-sensei, and there's something beautiful about that.

If you've never read or watched any of this series before, I can't necessarily recommend starting here. There is a brief recap of the most pertinent information about Natsume and his grandmother Reiko, and we see him giving a yokai back his name as a demonstration of it, but the rest of the episode requires at least a little series knowledge. But if this preview has interested you in the series at all, I urge you to go back to the beginning in either anime or manga form. It's a slow, sweet, and sometimes sad story, and one that's worth your time.