Character · Natsume's Book of Friends
Takashi Natsume
A teenager inherits a notebook full of names, and every spirit in the country wants it back.
In Otakana the clue reads: Boy who inherits a book of spirit names
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Natsume's Book of Friends
- Letters
- 7 · Hard
Natsume sees things nobody else does and has been passed between reluctant relatives his whole life for saying so. Then he inherits his grandmother Reiko's belongings, including the Book of Friends: a bound collection of names taken from every spirit she beat in a fight, each one a binding contract. Whoever holds the book commands them. Reiko collected the names because she was lonely and it was the only way she could make anything stay.
Her grandson spends the series giving them back, one name at a time, which requires meeting each spirit and hearing what it wanted. That structure gives the show its shape: mostly self-contained, mostly quiet, more interested in a small grief than a large threat. His bodyguard is a powerful yokai stuck in the body of a lucky cat ornament, called Madara and known to everyone as Nyanko-sensei, who wants the book for himself and keeps agreeing to wait.
Yuki Midorikawa began the manga in the shojo magazine LaLa DX in 2005. The anime has run for seven seasons since 2008, unusual longevity for a series with no fights worth the name and no ongoing villain. What holds it together instead is a boy slowly acquiring people who believe him, human and otherwise.
Spelling NATSUME
NATSUME is seven letters and the TSU is the reason. That is one character in Japanese, つ, and it costs three letters in English, which is where the count goes wrong for people spelling from the sound. The game wants the family name here, not Takashi. Natsume is also an ordinary word for the jujube fruit and for the lacquered caddy used in tea ceremony.