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It would be easy to point to something like Kübler-Ross’s “The Five Stages of Grief” as being the script through which we experience shocking loss. The problem is that doing so presumes that we as people operate in such a methodical manner. We don’t. Especially since not all losses are created equal, and everyone is just as different as everyone else, there’s a certain extent to which those who grieve (even in the world of fiction) need to be given a degree of latitude. It’s particularly true when loss happens to one’s own family, regardless of whether there were close ties or not. Throw in it being your parents, that it happened in a flash, and that you haven’t even entered high school proper yet, and it’s not simply that “they’re dead.” There’s nothing simple about that. Your life has been violently uprooted, and you find yourself thrust into feelings that you don’t necessarily understand because nothing can properly prepare you for them.
Within Journal with Witch / Ikoku Nikki, Takumi Asa must confront this reality, and initially, it seems like there’s no one who is really going to help her do it. Moving in with her aunt Makio, Asa finds someone who is not only blunt about her own nonfeeling towards her own sister’s passing, but also that it’s unlikely that Makio would ever come to love Asa herself. It’s not all bleak, though. Like the true writer that she is, Makio insists that whatever Asa is feeling concerning her parents’ deaths is hers alone, and that no one has the right to tell her otherwise. Giving Asa a journal in which to record her thoughts, the steps towards personal healing and reconciliation take their root.
What Makio says might sound noble, no doubt, but in terms of providing Asa with some kind of stability, it leaves much to be desired. She is positioned far away from the family both in terms of how she relates to Asa and with her own personal history, which helps orient the anime’s central thesis. Makio seemingly has no positive things to say about her sister, and with the recollections we are privy to seeing, there was a seemingly-insurmountable divide between them. She seems certain of that. Juxtaposing Makio’s detachment from Asa’s own uncertain feelings and confusions, in essence, sets up two people brought together by circumstances and needing to understand each other.
(Makio’s philosophies concerning life, as well as her attitude towards Asa’s mother in particular, provide Asa with no direct answers. Asa therefore must come to her own reconciliations and live into them)
Despite often being in a world unto herself (and an untidy world at that, if the state of her room is anything to go by), Makio’s decision to take Asa in proves to be sincerely healing for both characters. By taking on the role of Asa’s caretaker, Makio puts herself in a position where she must care on some level beyond a simple “How are you doing” sentiment. Though perhaps unintentional, it forces her to reconcile that perhaps her own view of her sister isn’t quite as one-dimensional or steady as she so believed. The intertwining of Asa’s memories and experiences, coupled with Makio’s generosity, reopens lines of communication and feelings that were once closed. They’re triggered by even simply being around old family, seeing old possessions, and standing in Asa’s presence. One must imagine how many silent days Makio spent, her only true companion being the tapping away at her keyboard, her family not even passing through her mind. But with Asa there, she’s reminded of what was, and is, every day.
The result is a kind of stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling both of the moment and of the larger narrative through its imagery. Despite being an anime, Ikoku Nikki’s visual language relies more heavily on strong drawings and layouts as opposed to frothing at realism or smoothness on-ones. Transitions from one moment to the next often happen in quick cuts or with contrasting colors and visuals, yet the underlying thread that leads from one thought to another is always coherent. By allowing the anime to “cut to the quick” so to speak, director Ooshiro Miyuki allows a flurry of hazy sensations to fill the screen, letting the emotions clash or harmonize as the moment demands. Shadows and symbols of the past can move freely. Because such moments include both Asa’s feelings and Makio’s feelings, it unites them as people having to deal with their own complexities in their own ways, even if their personal journeys’ starting and ending points happen at different places: native to them, foreign to everyone else.
(The anime’s narrative, along with its editing, operates on something akin to stream-of-consciousness storytelling. Phrases, poses, or situations trigger similar or even-if-only-tangential recollections that reflect moments and feelings as being built up over time)
Asa’s own complexities arise from realizing that there are aspects of her own parents that she never truly knew or understood. For as much as we might like to pretend that we understand everything and everyone in our own lives (especially in our teenage years when we’re forced to simultaneously still be children yet become adults, as well as deal with our own emotional hangups), we are still only ourselves. It is not anyone’s fault, but rather is simply the way in which we inhabit the world, and because despite being individuals, there is surprisingly little we have control over. Spending time with Makio and the other adults requires Asa to acknowledge the pluralities of perspectives about her parents, their own relationship to one another, their relationship to her, their relationship to others, and so on. As such, Asa’s own emotional compass swings between lashing out, devastation, feeling adrift, and often at the mercy of other people’s actions. In her search for answers, she’s desperate to find some kind of stability, some kind of solid ground to place her footing and begin putting her life back together again, whatever that may have looked like. It’s not a teenager throwing a fit: it’s a teenager not even being sure how she’s supposed to cry for help since she can’t make heads or tails of her own self.
But the adults in her life, by choice or because they simply don’t know how, can’t provide her with the answers she wants. Ikoku Nikki’s strength lies in how it does not provide neat little boxes wrapped with bows, that it respects the individuality of its characters to live by their own convictions and philosophies, even if they fly in the face of one another. Asa confronts the duality of standing out vs. not wanting to stand out / feeling uneasy about that conundrum, while Kasamachi deals with his own relationship with his father and how it too greatly affected him. Asa’s mother made a bid to be normal, and her father certainly made little effort to make his presence known spiritually or emotionally. In that sense, Asa’s journal writing itself moves without direction because she doesn’t know which direction she’s supposed to move in with all that she’s been told or given. It’s only when she starts the process of greater self-actualization that she finds not only a purpose for her journal in terms of hobbies (Makio’s rich vocabulary gives her plenty of material), but also in deciding something truly for herself.
(Asa is consistently denied easy answers from the adult cast, in-part because there are no easy answers to Asa’s frustrations, and because they themselves move through life according to their own histories and philosophies. It supports the theme of Asa needing to find her own way through her feelings, including all the conflicting information)
Asa is not the only young person in the story who needs to make decisions. Sprinkled throughout Ikoku Nikki are pockets of other grief stories, though their gravity is ultimately less than the overarching question of Asa’s parents’ deaths. At first flush, these moments appear to come out of nowhere, and it’s easy to dismiss them as lazy storytelling or injections of melodrama. Why should we be concerned with characters like Chiyo and her freakout over the medical school she applied to, or Yoshimura’s treatment on the baseball team? Like Takopii’s Original Sin, the point is not to emphasize a “who had it worse” question and play a comparison game, but rather to illustrate that Chiyo and Yoshimura, like Asa and even Emiri, all have their own griefs or loneliness hanging over their shoulders. Things they love being ruined or opportunities taken from them through forces seemingly beyond their control show that grief is not a passive phenomenon, no matter who it impacts. Those impacts have outward reverberations, even if only when glimpsed for a moment. Ikoku Nikki’s empathy lies not in the small and large tragedies that befall them, but rather in recognizing the powerlessness that grief, malaise, or mourning brings. When that powerlessness comes from others, no matter how fleetingly we may have glimpsed it ourselves, the only way to respond is in our own way, even if it’s more declamatory or visceral than others. And yes, it may include deciding to talk to the people you once did a little bit less about certain things because they can’t take a hint.
Even Makio, with her supposed certainty about her feelings concerning Asa’s mother, feels powerless to either love Asa in the way we expect familial love to be, or in how she tries to explain herself. But at the end of the day, she chose to take Asa in, because having something is better than being left on your own with nothing. Being powerless doesn’t mean being alone. Asa’s moving through herself and glimpsing all these expressions of grief, subtle and unsubtle, brief or longstanding, fellow teenager or friendly adult, implies a grand synthesis of how we take in our own experiences and forge a new self through grief. In that sense, Asa is never alone because she has taken on so much from her parents’ deaths and through existing in the here-and-now. It is the ultimate non-answer, the kind of sentiment that would make its home on my grandmother’s old crocheted pillow, but doesn’t carry meaning on its own. Saying it feels insincere compared to the actual experiencing of it.
Ikoku Nikki doesn’t claim that everything will be perfectly fine and dandy with grief and mourning, regardless of how much time has passed. Grief is not something that only gets put in a book that gathers dust and is eventually forgotten as time moves forward. It’s always present, finding ways to peek into our lives in either passing moments or deeper contemplations. Yet it’s because it’s always present that we must learn to internalize and accept its presence. We will change because of it, and that’s okay. Asa didn’t need “fixing” so much as needing to accept her own feelings, including all the contradictions, convictions, and condescension therein. She’ll never truly grasp the full portrait of her parents, nor how their deaths impacted her or Makio, or the others whose lives were changed as a result. But so long as Asa, and they, takes lessons both from the living and the dead, they’ll be one step closer to the best version of themselves, realizing that it’s less about the answers and more about the steps we make and the breaths we take. For Asa, she’ll draw in her breath and sing her first notes.
As long as she does her best, what a lovely song it will be.