Natsume Yuujinchou 12

I have a lot to say here, but I guess I should say the most import­ant thing is that there is a second sea­son of Nat­sume Yuujin­chou. Yup, so don’t expect the plot to fin­ish over this and the next epis­ode. Just expect QUALITY. Because yes, Nat­sume Yuujin­chou has really turned out to be a very enjoy­able show. In fact, I think I will bestow upon it the award of best anime tv series of the sum­mer sea­son of 2008. Admit­tedly sum­mer was fairly hor­rible alto­gether. Xam’d is also a bet­ter show but Nat­sume gets the award because Xam’d isn’t tech­nic­ally a sum­mer show, it just got the nod to be avail­able to that elite group of Amer­ic­ans who own PS3’s, Xam’d has only begun to air on Japan­ese tv recently, mak­ing it an Autumn anime.

But yeah, enough of that, onto the latest episode!

Youkai Can­ni­bal­ism

The epis­ode begins with Nat­sume meet­ing this indis­tinct blob. Yeah, they don’t put too much effort into cer­tain youkai do they. Well any­way, it attacks Nat­sume and leaves him with a blood-red tattoo.

Pretty cool tatoo actually

Actu­ally it’s some dan­ger­ous curse mark that Nyanko is wor­ried about enough to get Nat­sume to call for help. Again he uses the ‘Book of Friends’ reason for want­ing to help Nat­sume, but by now we know how much he cares for him. For one he has to take the ridicule from whatever youkai he sum­mons for 1) not being able to pro­tect Nat­sume  and 2) being this size

Yeah, Nyanko reacted badly to touch­ing the curse mark. So Nat­sume finally uses the book of friends for the use all those nasty youkai’s want it for, to sum­mon nasty creatures and make them do your bid­ding. So all mighty Nat­sume sum­mons a cer­tain power­ful youkai who we have seen before…guess who?

Rejoice, because due to pop­u­lar demand, the over­grown ass has returned!

Kudos for Nat­sume not flinch­ing in these instances. Turns out this guy ain’t much use, so he sends them someone else who is good at these curse things. Well, by now I think there is only one char­ac­ter in the open­ing song who has yet to appear.

Now here is where the epis­ode begins to get inter­est­ing. Nat­sume is start­ing to be loosely fol­lowed by this shadow thing, another simply anim­ated youkai type thing. Except this time there is some­thing sin­is­ter about this guy. It’s a play off the ghost story that every­one knows. Nat­sume calls it Merry, where you get a phone call and it says ‘It’s Merry here, I’m out­side your house’. And then the next day he calls say­ing he’s out­side your door etc.

One of the oddest groups of people you will ever get in a single screenshot

Merry is a much dif­fer­ent prob­lem from the type he usu­ally has to face. Hinoe did her research and found out that the tat­too is a 5-day mark that means if Merry touches Nat­sume in the next 5 days, Nat­sume dies. This means Nat­sume can’t use him power punch he has used on oh so many occa­sions. Also, nobody other than him can touch it, so Nyanko can’t help him this time either. Hinoe is still a bit huffy with Nat­sume so she’s not much use either at this stage.

And that was when Nat­sume got the Hiroko and became Xam’d

Nat­sume decides he can’t stay at his house so he makes up some bogus excuse and leaves. Prob­lem is the curse is get­ting fairly pain­ful at this stage so finally Hinoe, see­ing a bit of Reiko inside of him, shows him how to sum­mon a light spirit.

Does he have to read all of that?

So Merry appears and Nat­sume goes to sum­mon a light spirit, which turns out to be…

But if Nyanko has taught us any­thing from this series it’s that don’t judge a youkai by it’s size and this little dude turns out to be more than enough. So now we find out why Nat­sume has gone through all of this. It’s simply because the over­grown ass wanted to see if he was worthy enough to hold his name.

And we fin­ish the epis­ode with Nat­sume get­ting a clip round the ear

Impres­sions:

Now that was a good epis­ode. It was dif­fer­ent from the last few epis­odic tales where Nat­sume affects the life of cer­tain youkai’s, in a Mushishi style. It was more a story about Nat­sume him­self. But what made the epis­ode for me was Merry. Damn, that guy was freaky!

Another thing quite import­ant here was Natsume’s rela­tion­ship with his fam­ily. In the Manga Nat­sume is ang­sty and viol­ent, solv­ing a lot of his prob­lems by just hit­ting things. They played down his angst a lot in the anime but remem­ber, he was tossed around by dif­fer­ent rela­tions, not really wanted by any of them. So his rela­tion­ship with his fam­ily is very import­ant to him here. Just the act of being told off for run­ning off was a sign to him that they cared.

Only one epis­ode left, and then we have to wait till 2009 for the second sea­son. Oh well, here’s a pic­ture of Nyanko to make up for it