Nabari No Ou took me about three episodes to really get into, but once I was there, I was totally hooked. In this modern-day setting, ninjas still secretly exist throughout Japan in an underworld. Although he’d like nothing more than to help his grandmother run a family restaurant, our protagonist, Miharu, has a secret art within him (which manifests as words crawling creepily over his skin) that all the other clans are desperate to get their hands on. So, rather against his will, Miharu attracts a little band of three protectors who vow to not let the secret art fall into evil hands, and they travel around trying to solve the dilemma of getting the art out without killing the vessel in the process. Sounds kind of dumb, but it’s oddly fascinating, and the world-building is believable.
I liked almost every character I encountered—especially the bad guys, one of whom, the ever-sickly Yoite, really steals the show with his partner Yukimi—which is rather unusual. Characters who at first seem one-dimensional are revealed to have hidden depths and secret pasts. The main obstacle to it being one of my favorites is that Miharu’s character kind of requires him to be uninvolved and apathetic in the beginning. Which, yeah, kind of sucks when the whole series is riding on the protagonist. But as the series goes on, you realize that Miharu’s characterization is a deliberate choice that ends up working very nicely.
