English Dub Review: Natsume’s Book of Friends “Natsume on the Moonlit Night/That Which Blocks The Ceremony”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Natsume on the Moonlit Night

Nishimura finds Natsume coming to visit him each night at his house, but something seems strange…

That Which Blocks The Ceremony

Natsume finds himself in a house with a strange ritual and unknown forces moving against those who would perform it.

Our Take:    

One of this week’s episodes has us seeing double, as one of Natsume’s friends encounters a particular yokai posing itself as the kindhearted protagonist.  The reason?  It’s eager about the doll finger that Nishimura Satoru took after seeing Natsume talk to a crow, leading to it visiting him every night underneath the full blue moon.  This resulted in Natsume and Madara assisting Nishimura to solve the doppelgänger dilemma, leading them to an abandoned house where the haunted doll resides.  This is another episode that focuses more on the show’s supporting human characters and the yokai scenarios through their perspectives, with Nishimura being no different.  While Natsume’s yokai dilemmas are fun in their own right, the episodes involving the supporting characters are refreshing enough to shed more light on the show’s depth and help me see Natsume’s world through different viewpoints. 

The second episode then has Natsume and Natori in a pickle with the Matoba clan as they come across an abandoned mansion that once belonged to the extinct Miharu clan.  Natsume and Natori wound up helping Matoba perform a specific ceremony in which one of the three particular yokai, known as “the Three Pillars,” visited the house for a few decades.  However, someone, or in this case, some yokai, is doing whatever possible to disrupt the ceremony and annihilate the Miharu clan.  This resulted in Matoba and Natori becoming trapped in a room together while Natsume and Madara confront the one-eyed yokai themselves.  While the first episode is another harmless filler misadventure involving one of Natsume’s friends, “That Which Blocks The Ceremony” puts the protagonist in an exorcist-related scenario that’ll take more than one episode to complete.  Regarding the direction they took in their plots, both of these episodes effectively reinvigorated my interest in the season’s storylines and characters as we’re nearing the end of its seventh season.