Journal with Witch is kind of a miracle.

It’s an SoL series about a young girl Asa going through it after the death of her parents in a car accident, yet it never wallows in the depression or teenage angst that that setup would imply. No, instead, when Asa ditches school, all the adults in her life find her drinking boba tea and proceed to get it as well, talking around her like she’s not even there. I was giggling like a maniac.

It’s about the neurodivergent aunt Makio who lives alone learning to care for her, but this isn’t a story about fixing her or making her more outgoing. No, if anything, her experiences and the way she views others end up having more influence on the more socially normal Asa, showcasing an understanding of loneliness that Asa uses to embrace her own loneliness later.

It’s a meditation on grief and loss and though there are tears, the series never lets the characters or the audience get comfortable with their feelings. It provides a nuanced perspective on complicated feelings following the loss of a loved one. It's about the people who step into your life when you need them and the relationships you form with them, and it's about opening up and being available to others when you've spent so much of your life shutting yourself off.

It’s also a story of the family and friends that step up for you while dealing with their own hang-ups and difficulties. The series may focus on Asa’s loss as its inciting incident, but these characters have lives before and after those deaths happened. Makio struggles with her writing and tries to reforge a relationship with an old flame. Asa confronts the emotional baggage her parents left her with, both from before and after their deaths, and leans on friends, opportunities and Makio and her inner circle to find the strength to pick herself up and keep pressing forward.

This could so easily have been just the two of them going through it, but no, the series has far wider aims. Shingo coming back into Makio’s life, clearly hoping to rekindle what they had but also recognizing a hurt that stems from some unknown past trauma (my money’s on a miscarriage), is a consistently fascinating voice of understanding for young men in life and on a career path expecting to make it on the first try or risk feeling like a failure. Kyouko Koudai only gets one episode, but the perspective she brings to the relationship between her daughters and the love she clearly had for Minori left a deep impression on me. Emiri being a close friend to Asa, making mistakes and causing a rift between them, only for Makio to help her discover her own sexuality and a way for her to find her own happiness absent Asa is among the most subtle and powerful arcs in the series.

And then there’s Minori. She’s such a complicated character, a sort of villain of the early series that slowly takes more human shape as the series goes on. She’s no monster, but an overbearing mother who wanted far better for her child than she’d achieved. She loved Asa, there’s no doubt, but she lived with a distant and unloving husband having failed to meet her own high expectations. She’s the spectre that still haunts Makio, judging her decisions as a person and as a guardian to Asa, and her oppressive influence holds Asa back for a long time, too… but that accusing stare and pointing finger were always there in the mirror for Minori, a constant reminder of how far she’d fallen short. Episode 7 is the best written episode of television I’ve seen in ages, just a perfect distillation of so many of the themes and complexity of this series smack dab in the middle.

All this would make for an impressive character drama, which Journal with Witch absolutely is. What makes it excellent, though, is how little it explains. At several points during the show, Makio refuses to give Asa clear-cut answers to her questions, and it feels like the show is doing the same for us. Still, each answer has meaning, and I love the way they come together in the finale, bringing us one of the strongest moments of the series as Asa cycles through her life held between her parents and their expectations (or lack thereof in the case of her father), only to find strength in her struggle for herself.

Which leads me to the desert.

Over the course of the series, different characters represent their inner worlds in dramatically different ways. For Asa, it’s just a desert. The journal itself becomes part of the lonely journey she takes through that desert. She’s often not alone there - Makio is regularly there and we see her friends traverse it, sometimes on camelback, but they are always far away from her or moving away. Unlike Makio, she never finds an oasis there, never becomes fully comfortable with loneliness. Instead, she asks: “If I keep giving water to my loneliness, could a flower bloom in the dead of night?” The desert becomes an opportunity to create something out of that lonely space, to embrace what separates her from others. It’s a far cry from the incredible shot of the two of them in episode 4 where they are literally alone together, Makio immersed in writing her book, and Asa bawling with her knees pulled up to her chin. It’s a long journey from that point to literally dreaming of the future in the finale, something Asa couldn’t have imagined doing for half the series.

But the series only infers what these spaces are to each of them. Makio’s oasis is clearly a place of calm for her, a respite from a noisy world that has always been more trouble than it’s worth to interact with. There is that moment in the final episode where Asa briefly stands in her own oasis, one very distinct from Makio;s that is borne of connection with everyone she’s singing to. We only get a peek at Emiri’s shoreline, but you have to wonder if those delightful lapping waves could change to rough seas as the weather whips up. Their inner worlds speak volumes, and tapping into them was my favorite part of the show.

This show is just excellent. It’s the kind of show that can hit hard when it wants, but it doesn’t need to do so. Even its most emotional scenes aren’t there as histrionics - they’re real and grounded, showcasing the heavy burden of lives lost and the holes they leave behind. If anything, it makes those moments in the last episode where future Asa is speaking about her past feel a little trite by comparison. It’s beautiful to have her dreaming of the future, but having a future Asa reference back to events just feels like the hand of the writer reaching into the show, something it never needed.

Thankfully, that doesn’t take away from the powerful themes and characters on evidence here. It’s a show I’ll find myself thinking about months from now, and rewatching again and again.