A fall festival gives the show a venue where the characters and the audience can get back together and do some catching up.
What They Say
Tanuma finds out Nyanko-Sensei is a spirit. Tanuma and Natsume enjoy the autumn festival and previous acquaintances are seen again.
The Review!
The curtains close on part one of a show that I've grown very fond of. Natsume Yujincho has reached the end of its first season, and an excellent first season it's been. The final episode could have been an instance of saving the best for last: one final knockout story to top all the others. The show could have done that and done it well, I have no doubt. But how much better for it to do what it has done. How much better to tell a story, not to go beyond the other tales, but to sum them up and gather them into a whole. In that form they cohere, and it becomes possible to see their true value now that they're together.
Everything in the episode has a special quality of remembrance. Even the setting of the show compels looking back the way things were before. The episode plays out against the background of autumn, the most nostalgic time of year. We see the leaves of red and gold and think back to the times when they were green; and as the leaves have changed, so have many other things. That is one of the things the fall season means. Another thing it means is abundance. Autumn is the time of harvest, the time of plenty; a time for celebrations. And a celebration is, I think, what the episode truly turns out to be. It is at any rate what the episode is built around.
There are two sides to Natsume Yujincho: the human world and the youkai world. So it's fitting that the local festival should be a gathering of the inhabitants of each world. The episode is good at bringing both of those worlds together, and many familiar characters besides. If the episode has anything, it has a great sense of completeness. It's concerned less with narrative than with bringing the series to a satisfying finish - it plays out as a series of sub-episodes or vignettes. Natsume, of course, is the focus. In his encounters with friends made in school and among the youkai he reveals just how far he's come since the Yujincho came into his possession. He has friends; he has people who depend on him; he has a family. He has helped others and been helped himself.
Summary:
This episode feels at least as much like an epilogue as it does a story. It has a curtain call for some of the better remembered characters; or at any rate some of the better characters that are still around to make appearances. Instead of plunging forward into new territory it steps back and looks at where the show has come since it started. There have been a lot of good stories, a few great ones, and no bad ones. I could probably say the same about the characters, human and inhuman, who have crossed our path in the course of the series. One stands from the others; at the same time he links them together. He is the character who has profited most by his experiences, and everyone who has met him has turned out the better for it. He is, deservingly, the main character in the show: the boy who made a tool of tyranny into a book of friends.
Features
Japanese 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
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