Season aired: Winter 2026
Number of episodes: 13
Watched on: Crunchyroll
Translated by: ?
Genres: Slice-of-life, Drama
Thoughts: For all of the people’s complaints about analyzing anime for political and societal commentary, Journal With Witch comes swinging in with both. It’s also a coming-of-age anime about grief and one of the best-directed shows of Winter 2026 despite an already stacked season of wonderfully produced and directed anime.
Makio is an author. She’d describe herself as a loner, hunched over her computer and tapping away every day until one day, she gets a call she never thought she’d get in her early thirties. Her older sister has died, leaving behind a tween girl. Despite how estranged Makio had become from her older sister, Makio extends an empathetic hand to her niece, Asa, offering the girl to live with her. Despite how opposite their personalities are from each other, Asa and Makio slowly settle into a new routine — one filled with navigating grief, life, and difficult relationships.
I am vehemently against the idea that anime or any entertainment is devoid of political or societal commentary, for the simple reason that every story created is within a society. A society’s difficulties, biases, and beliefs inevitably trickle into the story. One of the easiest examples I can give is how a reader can always distinguish fanfiction written by Americans from that of other cultures: because only in American fanfiction will the idea of worrying about hospital costs and healthcare come up as much as it does. Journal With Witch, however, is different from most anime because of its full intention in the breadth of topics it covers, wrapping it into the story through layers of characters and dialogue. Every episode is like taking a slice of Japanese life and discovering what regular people there go through.
Purposeful discussion of societal politics
It’s incredible when looking back at how seamlessly these talking points tie together in a story about grief and healing. In one episode, it could focus on both the real-life incident of Japanese medical schools purposefully lowering women applicants’ grades so that they could submit more men and the more contained fight Asa has with Makio over Makio’s inability to perform “simple tasks” that are common amongst neurodivergent people. Yet, that is what makes the show feel so real. Because that is real life. Large societal issues are happening in tandem with your personal lives and the struggles that only impact you.
Stories like these sometimes feel like they fit prose better than the animation medium, especially when so much dialogue is used to explain such complex feelings on different matters. That is why this anime is proof of how exceptional the production team is. Despite all the conversations, there’s a clear lack of inner monologue as the anime relies on visual, metaphorical scenes to convey the knots of feelings each character goes through. The desert is the most consistent, a dry and vast landscape where you easily find yourself alone in the same way that Asa is struggling through a life without parents in a world where many didn’t understand the pain of losing parents at such a young age.
Even the most minor of characters show complex personalities, just as everyone alive is their own unique person. A boy who’s good friends with a straight-A girl is oblivious to the sexism rife in a society that tends to favor him, and he’s allowed a small mini-arc of discovering and self-educating himself on the matter after his friend loses faith and hope in her future to become a doctor. A minor character whose name I can’t even remember is given scenes intercut throughout Asa’s schooldays of getting bullied by his upperclassmen and eventually quitting baseball, despite how much he loves the sport. Asa’s best friend is a closeted lesbian, and short scenes are dedicated to her crying over a lesbian movie, sneaking around with her girlfriend, and having to dance around people’s questions of why she wasn’t dating boys.
Emi the closeted lesbian
Yet the anime never forgets the heart of this story: grief. Both Makio and Asa are grieving, but due to their relationships with the deceased party, their reactions are wildly different. Asa’s mom died before she ever reconciled with Makio, so Makio spends most of the show denying feeling sad about her sister’s death, only to sit somberly in her sister’s childhood room, reminiscing about the past. Meanwhile, Asa almost seems confused about what actually happened to her, and it becomes this slow buildup to the sudden realization that, in a matter of minutes, this young girl had lost two parents who loved her.
They clean up Asa’s old apartment. She moves to high school. She lives in an apartment with an aunt she has never really spoken to. The friends Makio has are wildly different from her mom’s. Even the way Makio communicates is completely foreign to her. Bit by bit, as the viewer watches aunt and niece find their rhythm, the encroaching question of when that grief will overwhelm lies heavier overhead — especially as Asa gets angrier and starts to rebel.
Eight episodes to build up grief
It takes eight episodes, and every single episode was necessary for the heartbreaking scene where Asa sobs into the night as she finally understands she has lost her parents. It’s incredible pacing that maintains and tightens tension in what I find to be risky if not for the finesse the direction, script writer, and animation team had over the series.
The voice acting is just incredible. Fuko Mori, a relatively new voice actress, shines as Asa. Her sobs made me cry; her spunky teenage rebellion shines through, but nothing could prepare me for the finale when Asa sings. Because the singing isn’t perfect. There are some pitchy moments; she doesn’t follow the beat at times, and it’s perfect because of its imperfection. This moment is Asa’s first time singing in front of a crowd — not even professional singers can sing so perfectly on stage, much less a nervous yet passionate girl. It would’ve been too easy for Fuko Mori to sound melodic with Asa’s singing, but the roughness makes that scene all the more impactful.
Miyuki Sawashiro feels alive as Makio. Like Asa, there’s something so raw about Makio’s character when Miyuki Sawashiro’s allowed to use her more natural, lower register voice to the point it makes me believe Makio was written for a voice like Miyuki Sawashiro. I also have to call out Junichi Suwabe for his famous low guttural voice coming off so gentle and kind for the character of Kasumichi. The entire voice cast seems to be aware of how human their characters are, regardless of how important they are to the narrative, and with that, they lend something more human than they have in other voice-acting roles.
Makio urging Asa and the audience to not turn away and think
Truthfully, I didn’t know what I was getting into when watching Journal With Witch. From the premise, it sounded like a coming-of-age story about two wildly different people who end up loving each other and coming to terms with their newfound life. It is, but it’s also so much more. There’s a mini-arc in the last two episodes where Makio points out to Asa that there’s not a single thing in the world that happens that doesn’t impact her. Even greater events that don’t seem to involve her, Makio states, will eventually ripple an effect and come into her life. To me, that encapsulates what this anime is about. It’s life — the big and the small — and we should pay more attention to them and the people sharing those lives with us. We can all start by watching this anime.
Rating
Plot: 9.5 (Multiplier 3)
Characters: 9.5 (Multiplier 3)
Art/Animation: 9 (Multiplier 2)
Voice acting: 10
Soundtrack: 9
FINAL SCORE: 94
