Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m willing to wager that my heart is prepared for another expert pummeling, and am thus ready to check out a fresh episode of Journal With Witch. Our first episode introduced us to Makio Kōdai and her niece Asa Takumi, two near-strangers who were brought together by the sudden death of Asa’s parents. Though Makio had a painful relationship with Asa’s mother, her sympathy for Asa led her to offer her own home to the teenage orphan. Thus we find ourselves with two near-opposites cohabiting, colliding, and collectively attempting to navigate this strange and sorrowful life.

Journal With Witch’s first episode did a masterful job of conveying Makio’s emotional experience, gracefully articulating the shadows and ghosts that populate her lonely world. As a shut-in author who never really learned to get along with others, her daily rituals and hesitant stabs at connection felt painfully well-observed, realized through a combination of precise boarding, understated sound design, and hard-won scraps of personal wisdom. As a character study, the show already feels brutally relatable; as a reflection on life, love, and loss, it’s shaping up to be a poignant and quietly life-affirming journey. Let’s see how our lonely souls are faring as we return to the show!

Episode 2

We open with the incidental ephemera of Makio’s life: notebooks and markers, drafts peppered with sticky notes, a forgotten mug of tea. Makio lives in clutter, making a protective nest of all the incidental tools of her work. Such disorder can be comforting in its own way, like a reminder or affirmation of your identity. We are the places we return to, and Makio’s home is a defiant declaration of her nature

Yet she is no longer safely cocooned here. She actually jumps in her seat when Asa speaks, suddenly reminded there’s another person here – and in fact, that other person wants to actively clean up her nest, and order the details of her carefully disordered hovel

“You don’t have to…” A clear note of hesitance. Stasis is comforting, and Asa’s rejection of it feels a touch like a reprimand, like her sister’s voice speaking through her niece

“Wrap”

We open post-OP on a memory of Makio and her sister, as she is mocked for her ambitions of writing a novel. Her sister appears nearly saturated by the window’s orange light, evoking both the ambiguity of a fading memory and her sister’s alignment with the brightly lit, ostensibly “correct” path through life, in contrast with Makio’s journey through the lonely shadows

Makio’s in a very relatable point of stasis, writing and then discarding the same paragraph over and over. Sometimes you just can’t find the right passage – and “passage” is really the word, the correct assortment of words that will serve as a bridge between your thoughts

She notes that Asa is good at singing. Considering the OP, it seems like Asa will eventually find her own creative voice through music

Asa’s latest journal entry is a drawing of her in the desert. Whatever works!

Asa receives a check-in text from someone named Emiri

“Could you be more discreet?” A testament to Makio’s private nature that she feels guilty and awkward even just accidentally glancing at Asa’s journal

“The routine around here is hot pot, hot pot, rice bowl, rice bowl, ginger pork, ginger pork, then sashimi.” Is it just generally true of writers and shut-ins that we develop such repetitive life rituals? There is a comfort in familiarity, and frankly a relief in not having to actively think about what you’ll eat for dinner. When your concerns rest entirely on the page, anything that minimizes the distractions of reality is a welcome gift

“Plus udon for lunch.” “What day?” “Every day.” Once again feeling embarrassingly seen by this production. If I could just take a pill that would fill my stomach and then get back to work, I’d probably do that more meals than not

It’s also just a habit of introverts more generally; the world and other people are chaotic, while routines offer a sense of control

“I got a message like that too.” “How did you reply?” “Oh, I haven’t yet.” Yep, that’s how it goes

And of course, the message Makio hasn’t responded to is itself a repeated message complaining that she hasn’t responded in a week

Thus we meet Makio’s friend Nana Daigo

“You’re fifteen? That’s crazy.” “I don’t get it. What’s crazy?” Asa can’t appreciate that lurch in perspective, as adults who don’t really consider themselves “old” suddenly realize a teenager is like a newborn baby to them

“I’ve just never seen two adults act like friends, so…” And in the opposite direction, Asa only has experience with adults as parents or mentors, not just fellow human beings who hang out and shoot the shit together

“I think she means she’s never seen such lousy grown-ups.” Makio once again sees her sister’s rebuke in Asa’s eyes. Her inability to perform that perfect, polished adulthood is obviously a personal failure

Nana is actually impressed with Makio’s meal schedule. Cooking is hard!

Nice visual flourish as Asa’s bewilderment at this not-quite-adult language sees her lost at some distant bazaar

Makio makes a halfhearted attempt at vaguely guardian-like behavior by protesting that Asa shouldn’t be forced to cook, but it seems Asa is already drunk on the thrill of being treated as a fellow human being rather than a dependent

Nana’s also got an excellent, distinctive visual design, defined by her strong jawline and thick eyebrows. Once again, this show is way ahead of the curve in terms of defining its female characters through distinct physical attributes, not just how stereotypically “feminine” they look

Nana recognizes some similarities between the two – they’re both observers, both somewhat reserved, both prone to analyzing the contours of their fellow human beings

“What did I grow up eating? All those homemade meals. I used to think they were good… but now… I can’t remember.” Asa is being forced to learn earlier than most about the fragility of memory, and how we essentially experience a sequence of wholly distinct lives across one larger lifetime. Her mother’s food was previously an assumed variable of her world, a point so stable it didn’t even require active inquiry or awareness. But now that this door has permanently shut behind her, she realizes she was never really actively attentive to her previous life. If you let an assumption about your life become an unconsidered “default,” it is all the easier to forget it when it’s gone

It takes Nana’s suggestion to make them share LINE IDs. She once again bridges the generational gap between them, inviting Asa to their shared world

Damnit, now I want gyoza

“It probably didn’t sit right to sound overly worried or too casual. It feels like she tried to convey those complicated thoughts with her question: ‘how are things going?’” The odd contradiction of the introverted novelist – digging deeply into the psychological motivations of others, yet still having tremendous trouble simply speaking with them casually. People are easier to deal with on the page

Before leaving, Nana suggests Makio reach out to a “Kasamachi-kun” about money

“Your whole life’s about to change. I’m impressed.” Makio just sort of ass-backwards stumbling into a new phase of maturity

With the distance closing between them, Asa is finally able to thank Makio for validating her feelings the day after the accident, and telling her she can be sad when and if she chooses

“Let’s work together from now on.” The first time an adult has actually seemed like someone she can relate to, not just a caretaker or instructor. There’s no test to pass with Makio, they’re just both struggling through life side by side

Asa lightly reflects on her mother’s tendency to say things like “you can’t even do this much?” Makio must have some mixed feelings about Asa’s ability to deal with her sister more healthily and patiently than she herself was able

The next day, Makio actually dresses up to go meet Kasamachi-kun

“Did Ruby actually die at the end?” “I’ll write more about Ruby if a sequel gets picked up.” The belief in the internal solidity of a fictional universe of a fan, contrasted against the pragmatic, fluid conception of that universe held by the author

“The series isn’t selling well. I feel sorry for them. The characters, I mean. Here they are, yet I can’t tell their story.” It is a somber thing to say goodbye to a universe you brought to life because you can’t afford to keep exploring it. I once had trilogy plans for my first novel, but at this point its leads feel like old friends I haven’t been keeping up with

“First off, I’m not hoping to get back together.”

She loudly expressed how she didn’t want kids when they were together, and now this. His sense of slight betrayal is understandable, but life throws strange curveballs at us all the time

Makio reveals she actually bought her apartment six years ago. Stability, routine – when she finds something that works, she clings to it

“You’re terrible about sharing important stuff, you know that?” Well, it’s a hassle! Feels weird to be applying my usual methods to this show, it’s like I’m interrogating myself

“I never thought my work would sell so well. It felt like I’d awaken from the dream if I told anyone.” Creative labor is so devalued in modern society that this is a natural inclination – if you find any success in an artistic field, you feel it must be a fluke, or like you’re getting away with something. Of course, capitalism is happy to exploit this, and thus creative fields are by and large wildly underfunded, with employers viciously abusing the passion of their employees by paying them a fraction of what they’d receive in other industries

“I’m glad to see you doing you.” Anyone who got this close to her would necessarily have to appreciate her eccentricities

Makio reveals she’s here for more than financial advice, confessing her concerns regarding how much Asa sleeps

“You view most human interactions as scary by default. I bet you were nervous reaching out to me too.” It never gets easier, and in fact adulthood can make it even harder, as we are given the opportunity to isolate ourselves through professional choices rather than accept the inescapable socialization of education

“At her tender age, the smallest remark might change the course of her life.” Makio’s fears regarding Asa reveal her sense of fatalism regarding her own life, her assumption that she cannot be similarly changed

“You may not like hearing this, but your remark changed my life too, you know?” And Kasamuchi pushes back, emphasizing that adults are still capable of wholesale personal reinvention

Kasamuchi recalls a passage from her new novel, wherein the heroine Ruby reflects on how her late-journey steps feel just like her first step, and all of them were ultimately leading her home. Wherever our adventures take us, we are always seeking home

But of course, Makio doesn’t really have a home. Her sister’s specter haunts the path forward, daring her to find solace in childhood. She bought this apartment in part to affirm it as a place she belonged, not just a room she was renting. But metaphors tend to have more impact in prose; in real life, the lesson never really stuck

And Done

Thus Makio continues to do her best navigating both Asa’s adolescence and her own adulthood, forced by this new dependent to reassess all the ways she’s attempted to become comfortable with herself. With Asa there to provide a counterpoint, and her own acquaintances readily poking at her stasis-minded lifestyle choices, it’s clearly becoming harder for her to find peace with the unchallenging routines she has come to define as “home.” Attempting to draw Asa forward and out of the desert is only making it apparent how accustomed she herself has become to living among the dunes – but in our processions of rambling days, can anyone say they’ve found a truly lasting answer? Is there a home awaiting us, or is this journey seeking it all there is?

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