Call of The Night

No zodiacs or almanacs, just insomniacs in polyester slacks.

Alright, listen. I'm not kidding or exaggerating when I say that Call of The Night (ok fine, "Yofukashi no Uta" if you're a fuckin' weeb) is easily one of my new Top Ten Anime of ALL TIME.

Given that I've been seriously watching anime for nigh on 20 years now and have seen hundreds of shows across multiple genres - beloved, hated, popular and obscure - those may come across like fighting words, but you have to understand. Call of The Night isn't just a good anime. It's a good anime that GETS ME.

Look before you leap, but don't spend so much time looking that you never actually leap.

Some time early on in my never-ending quest to watch every show that ever sounded interesting to me at any time in my life, I started using this catch phrase: "Boy I sure know how to pick 'em!". I say this because the vast majority of my Watch List is fully self-curated. I personally hand-pick what shows I want to watch, with little to no influence whatsoever. I don't do Patreon polls, I don't ask for community suggestions, I never read Tier Lists, and I don't worry about FOMO or peer pressure.

Call of The Night was an anime I noticed while browsing the Summer 2022 seasonal lineup, and I chose to watch it out of sheer curiosity. "A vampire romance anime set in present-day, in 2022? What, like a more modernized Karin or something? That's super unusual, I gotta check this out."

And boy, I sure know how to pick 'em!

People like to argue about what makes vampires so compelling, but it's the deliberate combination of fear and sensuality that does it for me.

Here's the story setup: a young boy by the name of Ko, a bit of a goody-two-shoes but awkward and sheltered, realizes he isn't satisfied with how his days are going, and it's keeping him up at night. Unable to sleep, he finally works up the courage to sneak out and experience what life is like at night. And from the moment he steps outside, the world is suddenly a new and magical place. I don't mean a literal new world, there's no isekai bullshit going on here, I mean the world is exactly the same, but AT NIGHT, and the entire vibe is completely altered.

The night is its own character in this anime, and honestly it steals the show sometimes.

Where most stories seek to portray the night as a scary place full of danger and criminals and knives, in this world, the night is BEAUTIFUL. The sky becomes a gorgeous multicolored starscape. The streets become empty, but lit up by neon lights. There are virtually no people out, no schedule to adhere to, no watchful eyes to scrutinize his every move. Under the moonlit sky, Ko is allowed to simply Be.

Then he crosses paths with a vampire.

Then again, scary can be beautiful, too.

Now, I know what you're thinking. A 14-year-old boy and a mysterious 20-something dressed like a prostitute hang out all night, then she invites him back to her place so she can give him a "good night's rest", and ends up biting his neck and sucking his blood? Yeah, I know it reads like either horny teenager or pedo shit if you read it at face value. But ogling the hot vampire clearly isn't the show's main goal here - even with all the lingering shots - and this is no more a pedo anime than FLCL is, and the dynamic between Ko and his new vampire friend feels pretty similar to Naota and Haruko.

Fooling around with someone older who's actually super chill is like every young teen's dream.

In a sea of anime with blank slate perverts for protagonists, Ko is delightfully different. He easily reads like someone on the spectrum in the way he struggles to understand social cues and overthinks virtually every interaction he has with others. He can recognize flirtatious or lewd behavior, and experiences some lust, but has difficulty processing romance. He answers questions bluntly but honestly, and always makes an effort to parse what he's feeling, both to himself and to others. He's growing up and unsure how to do it. It's only under the newfound freedom of the night life, and his new manic pixie vampire girl(friend) Nazuna, that he's going to be able to figure it out.

Even with all of Ko's internal dialogue, this show knows how to say a lot with silence.

Nazuna on the other hand, is a creature of the night. She's a longtime regular around this town. She high fives the local drunks, casually flirts with strangers, runs a professional cuddling business, and makes little effort to hide the fact that she's a vampire. She enjoys telling dirty jokes and getting Ko flustered, but when it comes to talking about actual romance, SHE'S the one who gets flustered. Naturally, Ko often can't tell if or when she's being serious about anything. The only sure fact is that Nazuna is a bloodsucker, and Ko's blood is delicious.

Some of the best moments in life come from standing still and just letting them happen to you.

Functionally, vampires work a bit differently in this world. Having your blood sucked doesn't immediately turn you into a thrall or fledgling vampire yourself. As Nazuna points out, it would be pretty annoying to produce a new offspring every time you had a meal. No, in order to become a proper nightstalker, you have to have your blood sucked AND fall in love with the bloodsucker in question. Typical anime rules, seems easy enough to avoid.

But the kicker here is that after experiencing the unparalleled freedom of living life at night, the idea of going back to the daytime grind - school work, teen peers, worrying about a career - sounds like a death sentence to Ko. Thus, he decides, the solution is obvious. His best option is to give up on Normal Life entirely and to do whatever it takes to become a vampire himself.

Call it teenager logic if you must, but you have to admit, the idea does seem pretty appealing when you put it that way.

Of course, due to Ko's ongoing struggle with emotions, that's going to be harder than it sounds. What does falling in love even mean, for a repressed kid who doesn't really "get" romance? How do you know you're feeling those feelings if you don't know what they're supposed to feel like? What's the series of steps you need to take to make it happen? What are the "rules"?

And THAT'S where the magic of this show begins to truly shine through. Call of The Night is a very rare breed of series that invites us to ponder these questions about romance and feelings and love, especially for those of us who really struggled with understanding this stuff in our teenage years. It isn't just about sexual repression, it's about everything that comes before and everything that comes after, too. It's a show that doesn't punish or chastise people for not intrinsically knowing all this shit.

Who among us doesn't love a little wish fulfillment fantasy once in a while?

And the fact that Ko is only 14 years old is INTEGRAL to this. He's already fighting against teenagerdom, struggling to understand how these nascent emotions work, and grappling with the horrifying reality of being forced into a deeply unsatisfying life of drudgery and busywork ahead of him. And now he's up against such foreign and arcane concepts as what to do on a date, how to tell friends you're dating an older vampire, differentiating between love and lust.

As an awkward homeschooled shut-in who moved a lot as a kid and often wasn't allowed to have non-family company over, I personally identified A LOT with Ko's struggles, and found myself deeply immersed in the conversations this show wanted to have.

I mean, the gorgeous scenes of flying through the star-speckled cityscapes helped too.

Finally, the way the show uses The Nighttime as a vehicle for these conversations is incredible. I'm mostly a night owl myself (currently, more as a matter of circumstance than anything), and I too often find that the allure of nighttime is far more compelling than the doldroms of the day. The night feels like a time when no one is watching, so you can turn off all your inhibitions and be allowed to fully indulge in your truest self. Maybe I was always meant to be a vampire...? I wouldn't even be surprised.

I can't even decide whether I want to be Ko or Nazuna in this situation.

Anyway, if you're interested in plot or narrative, this isn't really the anime for you. There are some interesting developments in the second half of the series involving a mysterious vampire hunter, Nazuna's "clan" telling us more about vampire love, and Ko reconciling with his human friends about why he stopped coming to school, but this isn't a show about delivering a story. It's a show built almost entirely on vibes. There are a lot of slow, atmospheric shots of Ko and Nazuna just walking or flying down the street as chill hip-hop plays in the background. I'm told the creator of the series was in fact directly inspired by a certain J-rap song - which not-so-coincidentally became the end credits theme - about staying up all night, so that shouldn't come as a surprise.

Even if we never see the light of a second season (god I hope we do), the show we got is well worth the price of the story we didn't get. Between the immaculate art, the excellent character writing, the very laidback voice acting (both the original Japanese and English dub are quite good in my opinion), and the spacey chilled-out soundtrack, that's more than enough to EASILY warrant Call of The Night being in my Top Ten anime of all time.

Good anime is always being made. You just have to be willing to look for it.