Reiko, a fighter but not a lover.
What They Say:
Episode #7: “Gomochi’s Benefactor”
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This week’s story of youkai is just a little different than usual. We so rarely hear about Reiko in this series, even though she was the catalyst for the whole premise. Her life is mostly a mystery, even to her grandson, but we get a small glimpse of it occasionally from the youkai she encountered.
All of Reiko’s past transgressions typically come back tenfold on Natsume. This time he gets a visitor late at night who doesn’t come to get his name back but to give Reiko and update. After being told Reiko was long deceased he tells Natsume a tale of how Reiko aided his forest.
Almost the entire episode is one long flashback to the recluse Reiko and her challenge to the two largest youkai in the forest. All she wanted was a nice, quiet place to take a nap. She’s pulled into a battle for supremacy and, yes, a fight over a girl. That girl happens to be a captive youkai, and the two fighting over her gave her no say about her upcoming wedding. The little forest youkai are at the mercy of the ferocious battle, which has become a stalemate.
Reiko decides she will win the youkai bride instead so she can give her the freedom she desires and Reiko can get her napping spot back. She tricks the first youkai into a race to retrieve a fruit from a tree, which Reiko wins via tricky tactics. The second youkai challenges Reiko before she can issue a challenge of her own. She’s supposed to collect a great number of chestnuts with not two nuts or four, but three in each seed pod.
If any of this sounds familiar, the foundation of the story is straight out of folktales, the motifs are common. The funny thing about folktales is that they tend to hold up relatively well throughout the ages and remain entertaining, even if there’s only so many stories to tell. This series continues to tell old stories well. Reiko wins the second challenge with the help of all the forest youkai, and together the group wins the freedom of the captive bride.
Yet Reiko never returns to the forest after the contest. Little Gomochi, who was the first to reach out to Reiko, is able to share the cute story with Natsume. Unlike so many youkai stories this one doesn’t have a bittersweet ending but ends with a marriage in one of the happier endings we’ve seen in the series.
In Summary:
We get another story of Reiko, Natsume’s mysterious grandmother and original owner of the Book of Friends. Yet this time there are no names to return and only a good, old-fashioned folktale as the legend of Reiko includes a mountain forest and the happy youkai who still live there. Reiko might be long gone, but the youkai she helped and hindered remember her. Often times this brings nothing but trouble for Natsume, but this time he catches a break and learns just a tiny bit more about how his life and his grandmother’s may not have been all that dissimilar.
Episode Grade: B +
Streamed by: Crunchyroll