Journal with Witch Review

The premise sounds like a warm story about healing and is not one. Makio Kodai is thirty five, writes novels, cannot hold a conversation without visible effort, and disliked the older sister she has just lost. At the funeral she overhears relatives deciding where to put her fifteen year old niece, says something before she has finished thinking it, and takes Asa home. Neither of them knows what has been agreed.

What follows is a year of very small events handled with unusual care. Asa grieves unevenly, laughing one afternoon and furious the next, and the show declines to grade her for it. Makio is honest to the point of rudeness and is the only adult around who never tells Asa how she ought to feel. The best scenes are the ones where nothing resolves, and there are a great many of them.

Shuka animate it quietly: soft palettes, cluttered rooms, long holds on a face doing nothing in particular, and Kensuke Ushio's score doing the rest. The two leads are among the most precisely written characters the medium has produced in years, and the series was the strongest thing on television in the winter of 2026 with barely any argument about it.