I think it’s OK to admire a series that’s steadfast and unerring in knowing exactly what it is, and utterly determined to deliver it.  Unless of course it’s something utterly stupid and demeaning like Nande Koko ni Sensei ga of course, but we can safely say Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san is about as far away from that anal fissure of a series as it’s possible to get and still be called an anime.  Well, maybe not as far as possible, but pretty damn far just the same.

What we have here with Sewayaki Kitsune is a sort of living embodiment of a sub-genre that’s been around on the fringes of anime for decades, but is only really of late being recognized as a distinct category.  That would be the “healing” series, which is closely related to slice-of-life but legitimately a discrete subset of it.  This show takes it quite literally, as the titular kitsune does to the protagonist exactly what these sorts of series purport to do for the audience.  Whether you’re receptive to that or not is probably an individual thing, and I have serious questions about how much of this I could take (this is one full-length I almost think might have been better as a short) but it certainly does its job for one week.

Doga Kobo seems to specialize in this sort of show, and they’re clearly quite comfortable with the material.  Basically, we have a badly overworked salaryman named Nakano who’s on the verge of collapse, and the Kami who decides to come down and help him life the black malaise gathering around him by pampering him mercilessly.  Naturally the fellow is confused and alarmed at the presence of a little girl with a tail and fox ears cooking dinner in her apartment, but Senko’s persistence eventually wears him down and he decides to take her up on her offer.  Plus, he appears to have a furry fetish.

We do get a little flashback here to when Nakano was a boy visiting his grandmother in the mountains, where he and Senko-san apparently had their first encounter, and she mentions owing a debt to his family.  But I kind of doubt there’s going to be a lot of hard-core plot to this series – it’s really about the pampering.  If there were any question what it was on about, Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san even gives us an omake where we’re literally an audience insert character being pampered by Senko-san.

All in all this is pretty harmless stuff, despite Senko’s tail possibly being an erogenous zone.  And the execution is rather good on the whole, I think, with just enough (and I mean just) humor to take the edge off all the fuwa fuwa.  Maybe Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san will surprise me and offer up a story that has a bit of an edge to it, which would certainly make it easier to stick with it for a full cour.  But even if this is all it is, this show figured to be exactly what it advertises, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.