Category: Anime Reviews

The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses is a harem comedy that focuses on the theme of a found family. Spoilers ahead for both the anime and manga, by the way. Hayato Kasukabe returns to Miura to close his recently deceased grandmother’s cafe, Cafe Terrace Familia. But he discovers his grandmother had taken in five women…

I enjoy a good yokai story, having studied yokai stories and even reworking versions of them for modern readers, freeing them from their late 1800s English and Latin (which were often the first time these Japanese stories were written down). If you are curious, I collected all of these into my Tales from Old Japan…

Some stories linger for years after you experience them, floating within your mind like glittering snowflakes, touching your thoughts and actions in ways you can’t quite see. And yet you sense something has tinted your life’s painting more vivid where desaturated pigments once dominated, creating a more vibrant glaze that hints at how your mind…

Anime and manga don’t shy away from gentle, charming stories. And sometimes at the end of the day, a gentle slice-of-life story about friendship and love is just what the doctor ordered. The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity is one of those stories. I will spoil the story in this article: this is one I…

Suzume released in 2022, and I only got around to watching it in 2025. You might be surprised to learn that I don’t watch cinematic, stand-alone anime films all that often. I find it hard to cordon two hours to watch a single film. I don’t watch live-action films for the same reason. I’m bad…

Monica Everett is a genius mage who delves into the mathematics that underpin magic. She even worked out how to do the impossible: Unchanted Magic. Magicians normally need to use chants to weave the underpinning physics. Monica, however, is able to instantly see the numbers behind spells. Her father, too, researched the numbers behind reality,…