The perpetual motion machine that is the Natsume Yuujinchou anime just keeps chugging along.  Maybe disc sales are down a bit (though remarkably little for a show on its fifth sequel), but in truth it can’t be said to be slowing down.  Every year or three we get a new season, there are usually a couple of OVAs to go along with it, and for the first time we’re getting a theatrical movie in 2018 – which is a pretty huge milestone.

One telling sign of the extraordinary care the anime staff has always put into their work with this series is the generally stellar quality of the “filler” material, both inside and outside the structure of the TV series.  The best of the OVA material has been as good as anything Midorikawa-sensei herself could have written, and while a more up-to-date manga reader may correct me, I’m fairly certain this special episode is anime-original.  Original or not, it’s Natsume Yuujinchou at its pure, undiluted best.

Unfailingly, Natsume Yuujinchou can always take me back to the same emotional place, no matter how much time passes or how much changes in my life.  And like no other series, Natsume tugs at my heartstrings.  I cry very rarely and even less where anime is concerned, but this series is better at making me do so than any other.  And the fact that it can do it with a one-off episode like this, where I have no pre-existing buy in with the premise, is all the more remarkable.  I am resolutely of the opinion that this show is best when it’s simplest – pure, elemental tales that touch us at the deepest level because of the universality of the feelings they evoke.

I can intellectually poke holes at an episode like this one, or at Natsume Yuujinchou in general.  But results are results, and the emotional impact speaks louder to me than any abstract criticism I think of after the fact.  Have we seen lots of similar stories before?  Sure – but they all connect in a slightly different way.  Maybe part of the draw here for me is my deep and abiding love of Shrines, which evoke timelessness and the passage of time simultaneously.  Japan has tens of thousands of them, large and small, but it’s the remote and wooded ones that viscerally resonate the most – especially the ones that seem abandoned or ignored.  There was a time when all of these places played central roles in the lives of local people, even if it was hundreds of years ago.  Now they sit derelict and forlorn – and what’s more, there are thousands of Shrines in Japan that are gone forever, paved over in the name of progress.

The state of the Shrine in this story isn’t quite that desperate, but it does reek of pathos.  A centuries-old sacred Gingko tree has fallen to lightning, but the truth is that tree had already been largely forgotten after the construction of a new path to the Shrine.  Natsume happens upon the youkai that inhabited that tree, trying to make his way home after nearly being turned into decking.  The tree is now just a stump, but the old youkai hangs on, trying to remember a promise he made with a human that the trauma of the lightning strike has forced him to forget.  Natsume (much to Nyanko-sensei’s irritation) promises to return daily to bring the old youkai water, in the hopes that speaking with a human will jog his memory.

Eventually – with the help of the arrival of the Shrine matsuri – the youkai does remember that promise.  He made it to a little girl who’d fought with her friend, now in the hospital, telling her that if she brought the friend back he’d show them something amazing that would heal their friendship.  But the girl never returned, so naturally Natsume (much to Nyanko-sensei’s even greater irritation) decides to try and find her, armed only with the knowledge that she lived at a bakery next to a florist near the station.  He doesn’t find that girl but he does find her friend, the florist’s daughter (who has a little girl of her own) – who tells him that the promise girl died in a car accident before they ever had a chance to reconcile (did Rumiko-sensei write this episode?).

I could feel the tears coming even before we reached the story reached its denouement here, and it didn’t disappoint.  This is the sort of thing Natsume Yuujinchou does better than any other series, pretty much.  The idea may repeat itself, but it’s no less powerful for that – some things transcend the gap between us, things like empathy and compassion.  The old youkai had approached the girl out of kindness in the beginning, and his need to keep his promise bound him to this world even after he should have returned to the Earth and nourished the trees around him.  And in return, he received a gift – knowledge about what happened, and a chance to use his powers to make the leaves ring like bells one last time and make a child laugh.  Mock that if you will, but not me – I know emotional heft when it punches me in the jaw.