Journal with Witch ‒ Episode 10

©ヤマシタトモコ・祥伝社／アニメ「違国日記」製作委員会

This episode aired on March 8th, International Women's Day. By Journal with Witch's normal merits, that would already be an auspicious coincidence. Through the josei manga lens, Tomoko Yamashita's writing has proven poignant and powerful when it comes to the lives of its female characters. I'd argue that these rich portraits of various kinds of womanhood make Journal with Witch one of the most explicitly and excellently feminist anime I've ever seen. This week, however, as if to mark the day of observance, the adaptation turns its attention towards misogyny in particular.

While I'm confident anybody choosing to read this review could define misogyny, the pervasiveness of misogyny, societally and culturally, makes discussions of it necessarily complex. Even the most basic overview would be outside the bounds of my allotted space, so I will not get too in the weeds. Nevertheless, I want to commend the series for its characteristically sharp approach to the everyday struggles of women.

We start small with Emiri's breakfast. Emiri notices that her mom serves her dad while forcing her to serve herself. To an extent, this double standard would annoy any teen, but this specific image—the housekeeper mother doting on her newspaper-reading husband—evokes the facade of the nuclear family, a pleasant patriarchal lie that throttles women's ambitions. Journal with Witch ratchets up the misogyny in the next segment, where a variety show turns Kojima, a scientist, into a spectacle, with the hosts gawking in disbelief at her profession before their conversation devolves exclusively into commenting on her appearance. To them, Kojima's occupation is merely an adornment with which they can further objectify her. Finally, Emiri's dad provides his commentary, acknowledging the sexual harassment on TV but chuckling at how it would only be considered such “in this day and age.” If this show were set in the United States, he'd probably include a snide jab about “wokeness.” Emiri, no longer able to stay silent, speaks up for herself and womankind as a whole.

I love this scene. It is short and leaves most of its commentary unspoken, trusting the audience to put themselves in Emiri's shoes and feel what she's feeling. I wanted to give her a high five when she sipped that soup. I have no other notes for her. She nailed it.

Still, Emiri's victory is pyrrhic. At the cafe, she overhears other girls speak flippantly about resigning themselves to marriage. While she tries to draw on Makio's words of wisdom (imagined but accurate), the click of the mechanical pencil reveals how heavy these accumulative microaggressions weigh on her. Even her attempt to meditate the annoyance away gets interrupted by Asa, whose ill-timed text surely brings to mind her best friend's constant prodding about Emiri's presumed straight romantic life. Queer women in particular, by rejecting foundational patriarchal norms, find themselves under constant attack. It's an exhausting existence.

That's why I'm happy and impressed that Journal with Witch allows Emiri space to vent her darkest and most resentful thoughts. Any other version of this story would have had Emiri work through an unrequited crush on Asa. This option is far more interesting for the deeper and more independent interiority it allows Emiri. She's an adolescent who has been dealing with a needy and traumatized best friend, figuring out her sexuality, and keeping tabs on the typical high school student obligations. That's not easy! There's little surprise she would consider some what-ifs that might have freed up precious mental real estate. That doesn't make her a bad person. It makes her human.

Thankfully, Emiri's partner recognizes that. I wish we had gotten a name for her (because that would make writing this paragraph a little easier), but they seem good for each other. She's an anthropomorphization of Emiri's meditative space, with the waves lapping at her feet mirrored by the gentle tapping of her partner's shoe, and the softness of the sea breeze winding between their gingerly intertwined fingers. It isn't lost on me how an episode that confronts misogyny directly should find respite in the love between two women.

Asa isn't immune to the challenges of being a woman either. The comments about Tamashiro prove the double-bind that all girls find themselves beholden to. If you're too demure, and you're a doormat to be used, but if you stick out too much, you become everybody's target. The anime follows this exchange with two guys on the baseball team proving that the opposite is true for boys; standing out is acceptable. It's good to be the star. Asa backs down from auditioning, but her journey takes her one extra step when she overhears Chiyo raging righteously about the institutional misogyny of a prestigious medical university. No matter what she does, and no matter how hard she works, the lumbering weight of societal inertia will press down on her and every other woman who wants a fair shot at life. And what response does she get? A guy in her class chuckles and calls her scary. In this moment, I think Asa finally understands what misogyny is.

This week's other throughline is how the word “curse” lodges itself into Asa's brain. It's a word her aunt uses in reference to the legacy of Kasamachi's dad, but it applies to almost all of the parent-child relationships we've seen. The fear of turning into one's parents is universal because we like to believe we are our own persons forging our own paths. Acknowledging the inevitable influence of our parents means acknowledging that we are soft, malleable, and fallible. Kasamachi is literally the nicest guy ever (and not in the pejorative “Nice Guy” sense), and even he is anxious about echoing his father's surliness. Makio and Asa, meanwhile, still let their minds drift back into their childhoods.

While Asa makes an effort to be more mindful, trying to extract the poetry from her quotidian experiences, she seems as haunted as ever, always returning to the idea of this “curse.” However, by the end of the episode, she changes. That memory she digs up doesn't look especially important. She didn't win that choir competition. Even her dad's comment about how she “stood out” could be interpreted as genuine or calculated. Regardless, it's a nice memory. There's comfort in its ordinariness, and it is evidence that Asa need not dissociate entirely from her past. There may be some curses lurking in there, but there's much more than that.

Finally, I really like the idea of “watering” one's loneliness. It's an image that contextualizes the desert Asa's been wandering through since the premiere. If that desert is indeed her loneliness—her interiority—then she certainly hasn't been taking the best care of it. If anything, she's been doing a heck of a lot to stay out of it. But as she reaches a year with Makio, her aunt's influence appears to be finding its roots. Makio, wary of familial curses, remains reluctant to compare herself to a mother, but the always-wise Juno reminds Makio that this is not up to her. She and Asa struck a pact, and that ink has already dried. Both women now have other parts of their psyche that require irrigation, and they must do so together, alone, and for the rest of their lives.

Rating:

Journal with Witch is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sylvia is on Bluesky for all of your posting needs. She is a witch-in-training. You can also catch her chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.