Journal with Witch – Episode 1

Content Warning: Depictions of grief, the foster care system

What’s it about? Asa’s parents have both died in a car accident, leaving her at the mercy of her awful extended family. Her reclusive novelist aunt Makio offers to take her in, and their shared loneliness might transmute into something different.

Journal with Witch is a keenly observed show. Every moment is exquisitely boarded, perfectly edited, and loaded with meaning, both telling you vast amounts about each particular character while speaking profoundly to the human condition, intimacy, and ambiguities of grief. It is the kind of show you want to tell everybody you know to stop what they are doing this second and watch, so that you can gush about the character designs, the acting choices, and just about everything.

Take the opening scene of the show, where Asa is singing the OP, seeming to imagine what it must be like to be Makio plugging away at her novel. Asa gets slightly too loud as she sings the words “I hope you listen,” Makio looks over, and Asa apologizes. This is a casual intimacy that is recognizable to me–toeing right on the line of annoying your loved one because one enjoys their attention, but not wanting to actually bother them. Asa also deeply longs for Makio’s attention, given her intense loneliness in her grief–she wants her presence to be felt, to know she is not an annoyance, even if she is being annoying. Makio’s response, to ask her to sing Justin Bieber, and the resulting cut from her barely squeaking out the first syllable of “Baby,” has all of the editing genius of a perfectly cut scream.

Throughout this scene of cooking, we watch the care with which Asa is constructing the meal the two of them will share, with each moment painstakingly animated, and we can’t help but wonder at the extent to which Asa is being parentified, even as she is being cared for by Makio. Foster children often find themselves forced to grow up too soon, uncared for in the ways they need to avoid the responsibilities of adulthood.

Makio, it is clear, is wildly unprepared to become a parent, as well-intentioned as she is. During the most powerful scene of the episode, the lines of the notebook Makio gives her slowly transition into the dunes of a desert that Asa finds herself metaphorically cast into. Every second of the 10 second transition from notebook to desert is necessary in its confrontation with emptiness.

Journal with Witch is deeply aware of the problems with Japan’s foster care system, and is very much working in a long tradition of shows that do battle with its harms, chief among them March Comes in Like a Lion. It is Makio’s strong sense of duty and justice that allows her to care for Asa when she needs it most. At Asa’s parents’ funeral, Makio sees Asa’s future stretched out before her as a vast desert of uncaring adults who would rather gossip about her parentage within earshot of her than help her find a stable home. After witnessing this (and only after witnessing this, given her unintentional cruelty in the waiting area before she understood the situation), Makio joins Asa out in the desert, joins her in the loneliness–because she knows that this is not any way to treat any child. (It’s worth noting that Makio is one of the most autistic-coded characters I’ve ever seen).

It is hard to overstate how highly I recommend this show. Its meditations on the death of parents and grief as an mourning one’s inability to fully love call to mind in their poignancy Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which is the highest praise I can give a show. As I told my roommate about it, showing them moments from the opening scene and the scenes in the coffee shop, I started to tear up, thinking about how happy it made me.