Natsume’s Book of Friends 1

Yuki Midorikawa – Viz – 2010 – 9+ volumes

Wow.  Honestly, even with the supernatural plot description, I was expecting this to be a lame story about a loner in high school who makes friends and enemies out of demons.  It’s… not that.  It’s not that at all.  Well, maybe it is a little bit, but it’s definitely not the upbeat, super-happy-everything’s-okay kind of series you would expect from this kind of story, or shoujo manga, or LaLa magazine.

The chapters are episodic short stories of their own, and if the series has one flaw, it is that there is no ongoing plot.  Otherwise, pretty much everything about it is making a great first impression.  The series stars a boy, unusually, and this boy cannot make friends to save his life.  He sees and can communicate with spirits, which makes him a subject of ridicule almost always.  He also lost his parents at a young age, and has to be passed around among relatives who don’t really want to take care of him.  In the first chapter, he finds himself under attack by the usually passive spirits, and eventually discovers that they’re after his grandmother, long dead and formerly a very powerful wielder of spiritual power.  His grandmother kept a “Book of Friends,” names of all the demons in the area that she could use to bind them to her service and summon them whenever she wanted.  The demons just want their names back.  Natsume wants to give them their names back.  Everyone’s happy.

The spirits are varying degrees of malevolent and friendly.  Later, the stories focus less on the names and more on Natsume’s compassion for their situations.  Natsume eventually realizes that the Book of Friends was just that: his grandmother Reiko’s way of coping with her special powers and connecting with the spiritual world.  There are some characters that reoccur between chapters, but Natsume’s helper in his quest is Nyanko-sensei, a powerful cat spirit that inhabits an adorable maneki neko and periodically turns into something that looks like it came from the game Okami.  Nyanko-sensei is only interested in eventually eating Natsume or gaining the Book of Friends.  He’s kind of a sarcastic helper, but he does help Natsume out very frequently.

I’ve got another volume here to read, but so far, I am completely enchanted by the nuanced and well-developed Natsume, the strange setup, the episodic chapters, and the way that mythology and spirituality is dealt with.  There are so many good things happening that I can only imagine that it takes off running when the plot develops.

On to volume 2!