Why understanding someone else's feelings is often impossible
In short: In the manga Journal with Witch, a reclusive novelist takes in her orphaned niece. Instead of a typical bonding story, it explores a harder truth: you can never truly understand another person's internal world. It focuses on the radical act of accepting feelings without needing to solve them.
The narrative centers on Makio Kōdai, a 35-year-old novelist who avoids social contact, and her 15-year-old niece, Asa, who is navigating the aftermath of her parents' death. While the two live together, the story deliberately avoids the 'melodrama' of easy breakthroughs. Instead, critics highlight how the work respects the characters' mutual differences, refusing to depict them as easily adapting to one another. It emphasizes respecting boundaries and refusing to impose values on others.
A core theme identified by author Tomoko Yamashita is that people can never truly understand each other. This is reinforced by critics who note that Makio’s role is not to comprehend Asa’s emotions, but to acknowledge their independence. For example, the story affirms Asa’s right to feel as she does, even when those emotions conflict with societal norms. Rather than prioritising 'narrative convenience', this method portrays human intimacy realistically, highlighting how both Asa and Makio are isolated from the public—the former by fate and the latter voluntarily.
The series is particularly noted for its nuanced treatment of grief. Rather than a simple arc of sadness, Asa’s initial reaction to her parents' death is anger. The story explores the difficulty of processing contradictory or unfamiliar feelings, capturing what critics call the 'murky, clumsy self-realization' of loss. By sidestepping superficiality, the work serves as a 'quiet emotional intelligence' that explores the human condition through the lens of ordinary life and the importance of emotional bonds between women.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Journal with Witch
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