So, I will admit that this one leans a little more heavily on the divine element, what with the characters most recognizable as shrine maidens being in the friend and helper role, but when you look up shows with miko characters and Shinto vibes, Kamichu! (the title is excited) tends to come highly recommended.
So, the general pitch for Kamichu is that one day, middle school girl Yurie announces (in the most nonchalant way, I have to say) that the previous night, for unknown reasons, she seems to have become a god.
To cut to the chase, she’s not just saying that, and the show makes clear pretty quickly that we’re not doing a “maybe magic, maybe mundane” sort of thing. Yurie is a middle school girl, and also a God. She’s also got a good deal of learning to do in order to fill that role, while also trying to keep up with her mortal life. The most important elements seem to be that one of her friends, Matsuri, is the heir to a local shrine and wants to use Yurie to help promote the good word of Shinto and save her family legacy from financial ruin, and that Yurie herself has a crush on her classmate, Kenji, who is pretty darn oblivious in general.
Now, before I go on, a little programming note: depending on who you ask, Kamichu! Is either 12 or 16 episodes, evidently because four “specials” episodes were included in the DVD release, integrating into the overall run of the series. One of these episodes, either 16 or 12.5 depending on how you want to argue it, ends up being the last one, so I’ll avoid any complaints about the show going on after the climax since that wasn’t the way it was first broadcast.
As to the show itself… I’m going to cut to the chase and say that it’s mostly an “Incident of the Week” sort of affair, with limited continuity between episodes and no real overarching plot. At times it feels too involved to really be “slice of life” but frankly it does deserve the genre. That means my normal mechanism is a little lost here, outside of the beginning and end.
For the beginning, Yurie takes a few episodes to be accepted into the association of Gods. The divine entities are all pretty chill, including the poverty god who ends up sealed in Yurie’s cat (due to saving the cat’s life, and Yurie canceling out the god’s misfortune aura so he can finally stay somewhere and be wanted) and the god of Matsuri’s family shrine, Yashima (who can be seen and heard by Matsuri’s little sister, Miko. Matsuri herself seems a bit too worldly).
They, and the various spirits that inhabit the town invisibly to normals, seem to be a very friendly and colorful lot.
The first episode of the show involves an accidental manifestation of Yurie’s power calling in a typhoon, which she then has to stop in order to protect her crush. After that, she’s on the trail of a missing Yashima (who wanted to become a rock star), has her encounter with the Poverty God resulting in a new character for our cast, and is welcomed to the Association.
Then we get Yurie’s first request – a prayer brought to her by a trio of mascot assistants, that she may grant it. In this case, her first job involves negotiating with a Martian from a crashed flying saucer, resulting in some shenanigans around the Prime Minister who wants to sell out the cute pink squid alien who just came to return a probe that her people seemed to see as a lost child.
This is over the top absurd. Even the next episode makes fun of it.
And then… it’s never mentioned again. Though I stressed that this show is, in general, an incident-of-the-week and slice of life affair, often times an important character or two will show up in the background, or even get a couple lines in a later episode, making the world feel much more vibrant. This one goes all the way to the fabled “Big-Lipped Alligator Moment”.
For those unfamiliar, this refers to a scene in All Dogs Go to Heaven where an Alligator with big lips shows up, does a much more over the top number than is seen anywhere else in the movie, and once it’s done? The entire narrative is allowed to forget that such a thing happened. As a phrase for similar events, where a completely absurd non-sequitur pops up, runs its course, and is promptly cast down the memory hole… it serves its purpose. And the Martian thing is 100% that. I guess it’s established that the Prime Minister is somebody Yurie knows and that remains canon but given that the entire setting seems to take Yurie’s divinity in stride, it’s more notable that neither the Martian nor any of the other weird alien cultures mentioned briefly at the end of the episode and the start of the next ever really seem to be part of the continuity.
And from then on, the show is pretty much low-key. Sure, Yurie conjures up an impressive looking miracle or two in her time – the animation is pretty good and the animators clearly wanted to show off now and again with glimpses of either the spirit world or Yurie’s powers in action, ranging from divine parties to sending the spirit of the battleship Yamato home.
The wreck remains where it was, but the soul returns to the shipyards of Kure. The episode is mostly about a happy moment for both the ship and the elderly man who served aboard.
Throughout this, there’s sort of a stumbling forward motion when it comes to Kenji. He goes from being unable to remember Yurie’s name to actually getting it right. He doesn’t seem impressed or intimidated by her divine nature, but that might just be because he has a very thick skull. All the same, he comes up enough that we never really lose sight of the fact that this is Yurie’s big motivation.
Thus, the real climax of the show (Episode 12, or 15) is Valentine’s day, with Yurie needing help from all her friends to summon her courage and deliver a box of chocolates and a confession to Kenji. It takes a bit to get through to him, but it seems he’s as dense about himself as he seems about others (honestly, he comes off as a nice guy but sort of terminally off in his own little world) and realizes that he loves her too.
As the entire school cheers them on, spirit wind catches the massive calligraphy of love Kenji was inspired to draw, and the two of them take something like a magic carpet ride into happily ever after.
Except, of course, we get one little episode at the end to show us some of that. It’s not much, just a day cleaning at the shrine and an opportunity for a cutely romantic conversation between the new partners. There are gods and spirits everywhere, but this isn’t a powers-and-magic heavy episode. Most of the last few are like that, more focused on Yurie the girl than Yurie the god.
So, Kamichu! ended up being a bit of a weak entry for Miko May, with Matsuri acting more like a sometimes scummy manager than an intermediary and the story focused on our god girl… but it was a nice little show. I don’t have particularly strong feelings about it, but I don’t think it was really meant to evoke strong feelings. Rather, this is a show that’s looking to evoke warm comfort and pleasant vibes, where watching an episode is meant to leave you just a little happier than when you went in. And it largely hits that mark. There’s some absolute insanity scattered in there, but more blushing grade-schoolers dealing with common problems perhaps given a divine context. For my money, this earns Kamichu! a B. Check it out the next time you need a little low-stress break.