Part 1 | Part 2

< Continued from Part 1

Maybe Ko is being ridiculous, being a vampire a dumb pipe dream. But it’s just as he rebukes; anyone who’d call someone to work at two in the god damn morning is even more so. I mean, is that not patently absurd? Why not interrogate that? Capitalism is so entrenched in our way of lives and understanding of the world that we tend to take it for granted, but it doesn’t take a lot to take a step back and realize that the things it demands from us are ludicrous. Two in the fucking morning. Imagine. Even between them and the person who wants to be a vampire, who is the truly crazy one is clear. Fuck, just hearing that be said out loud and with such conviction is so righteous.

Ko invites Kiyosumi to stand together on the open road, looking upwards at the expansive night sky; barefoot, that which they stand on connected directly to the ground beneath them; sharing in this moment of absolute freedom of space and being. Another example of a utilitarian structure of mass transit and business, reclaimed as a space to simply… be.

The absolute kindness and sympathy Ko shows Kiyosumi in this entire sequence of events, from the massage to the street, extended basically unconditionally given he’s known for such a short time, is so admirable. He sees someone suffering under pressure and his first instinct is to stringently refuse to let it go unabated, which is so good-hearted it makes me feel like I could melt.

Even when Kiyosumi makes the final decision to return to work, it’s forlorn, tinged with sadness; she lets slip in a whisper that she wishes she could join Ko. But she’s genuinely happy for him, thankful that at least someone out there gets to live the free life she had once dreamed of, and that someone actually gets it and showed empathy for her suffering, and she wishes him success, in becoming a vampire, and in finding his happiness. Thanks to him, she got to experience the feeling of having her life back for herself, if only just for a little bit. Ko promises her he’ll honor her by doing his best, and that hey, he’ll even turn her into a vampire too if he gets that chance.

“If something’s so bad you cry, you shouldn’t have to do it”, so Ko says. After all, why should we give our lives, our capacities for joy and living itself, to the companies we work for in the way that we do? Why should we feel obligated so? Is there not a better way to be found in taking our lives in our own hands, for the direct experiences of our very selves?

We’re alive, after all. We’re here. We’re breathing. We’re desiring.

Might as well have fun.

The episode’s second half, though wholly separate from Kiyosumi’s story, nevertheless just feels like a perfect coda to it all.

We get a cute little vignette where, in pursuit of something fun to do, Ko and Nazuna visit a poppin’ pool party, a strobingly vibrant scene saturated in sumptuous hot pink and pumping EDM (Ko may not wind up enjoying it but this looks like an absolute blast to me, damn). After the outing unfortunately goes less than swimmingly (just gonna force you to hold on that one for a sec here), Ko finding himself uneasy and jealous seeing Nazuna in a place so rife with flirting, Nazuna sees fit to loosen Ko back up some, seeking to repair the vibes they’d had going before.

In comes my favorite use of the already-consistently-perfectly-used insert song again by Creepy Nuts, Loss Time; it’s so ethereal and soothing, showing the flipside of all this from the energy put forth in the OP and ED, that afterglow of bliss and starry-eyed contentment in finding this sort of bond and this sort of play amongst a world of serenity and calm. Nothing emphasizes that feeling quite like Nazuna grabbing Ko and flying up into the night air at high speed, surprise-dunking him and herself into the pool of Ko’s former school, an act of for-the-hell-of-it spontaneity and reclamation in the name thereof which bursts Nazuna into laughter and leaves Ko breathless, flustered, and a bit horny, laying bare how much these shenanigans mean to them, and drawing the two together for a deeply sensuous blood-sucking. The feelings I get from this image. Following that spontaneous blast of thrill, trespassing in the forbidden location of Ko’s former school, the water’s reflection emphasizing the presence of skin and tinging the act with ever-further eros. This sequence is a perfect reminder of all this series is, and an exquisite capper to one of my new all-time favorite episodes of anime.

Episode 6 basically serves as the climax and finale to Call of the Night’s first “arc”, and it’s from here that things start to get a little more complicated, as now we finally meet more vampires, and the picture that’s painted of them is very different and a whole lot less fun from the one Ko had envisioned thanks to Nazuna.

No; as we come to understand over the next few episodes as more enter the fray, contrary to Nazuna, vampires as a society are driven by two goals; make offspring and stay secret, and they’re ruthless, not above tricking, betraying, and killing to reach those ends.

As it turns out, just like Ko, Nazuna is also trying to escape the restrictive expectations her species places on her. Nazuna wants to find more to life than just the ceaseless creation of vampire offspring, by way of tricking and fooling others, threatening them with death.

As Nazuna’s relationship with Ko shows, being a vampire doesn’t have to be like this, one’s relationship to a human as a vampire doesn’t have to be so adversarial, so manipulative, so rooted as it is in fear. This whole system the vampires have built, the swearing of secrecy that requires the killing of humans who learn about them without turning to maintain… it’s all made-up arbitrary bullshit, the same way our rigid school-into-work-into-death pipeline and prescribed, defanged, restrictive and normative methods of expressing love are made-up arbitrary bullshit. A system of nothing other than the feeding of a cycle of ceaseless preservation of the status quo. It only closes doors and builds barriers, makes life more miserable and antisocial and hollow for everyone under it. Nazuna opted out of that system and insists on continuing to do so, much as Ko did his. She’s not just a punky, free-spirited outsider delinquent by our eyes; she’s that in the eyes of other vampires as well.

Recall how in Episode 6, Kiyosumi was made explicitly aware of the existence of vampires. Ko tells her that Nazuna is a vampire, and about his dream. And yet… Nazuna makes no attempt to stop him, she raises no issue on this being a breach of the vampire code, she makes no attempt to stop Kiyosumi from leaving with this information or to swear her to silence or secrecy about it, and she sure as shit doesn’t report there being another knower out there to the other vampires. Because she doesn’t care. She knows it’s stupid and cruel to keep vampires a secret at threat of death. Nazuna cares about Kiyosumi in much the same ways that Ko does, and that she cares about Ko, and she would never want to put her life in danger this way over something she doesn’t believe in, just as she actively and physically protects Ko it doesn’t even cross her mind for a second to snitch on Kiyosumi.

Maybe that’s part of why Nazuna is so uneasy around talk of romance. Because her view of romance is so colored by what her society sees it as being for, and that’s not what Nazuna wants out of a relation with somebody else. Nazuna doesn’t want to suck Ko’s blood for the utilitarian purpose of spawning offspring and perpetuating the cycle, upholding the social order. She wants to do it because it’s pleasurable, and because it’s Ko she wants to do it with, plain and simple and nothing more.

Nazuna ultimately wants the same thing as Ko; she wants to live for herself. She wants agency. Both find their bliss in rejecting their respective species’ societies’ rules and roadmaps and arbitrary cruelties, reaching instead for a life of openness and freedom and youthful tomfoolery. If Ko and Nazuna could just wander the night and play games and crack jokes together, if only, if only.

Of course, it’s not just Nazuna; Seri might put on an air of being enthusiastic about tricking and luring in men, about being so popular and successful in her role as a vampire, but we see how it’s not exactly the most fulfilling for her either. She wants a true friend like Nazuna found, but the vampire way of thinking is so ingrained in her the thought of another kind of relationship is alien, and her mind lashes out against it when she’s experienced it. This whole thing has ruined her. Other vampires aren’t gonna hear her out and accept her feelings. That’s the problem with a system like this; deep down, many vampires are likely to feel this way, but the invisible social contract that mandates these feelings forbidden means none of them can talk about it to each other, on the chance that they might judge you at best or punish you at worst for it. It’s a self-sustaining system of fear. It’s obviously not a direct allegory, but we humans have something similar in our own poisonous social systems in the form of toxic masculinity, how men feel unable and afraid to express weakness or emotional vulnerability, even though deep down so many of them feel such, which leads to atomization and a mass profound loneliness. The vampires’ system of secrecy and deception is just a way a very similar effect might manifest within that species.

Nazuna fending off Seri from attacking Ko, protecting him even if it means violating the vampire code and letting a knowing human live? That’s care. Seri is trying to kill her friend Akkun and will gladly go through Ko to do it, just to uphold her standing to herself as a follower of the vampire way of doing things, who, she tells herself, would never find herself harboring real affection and care for a human. But Nazuna’s care for Ko, the very bond they’ve built simply by living free and having fun together, is inherently something so much stronger than that desire to stay conformed to an established system.

There’s an intentional contrast when Seri tells Akkun how a human-vampire friendship “just won’t work” and how Ko and Nazuna are an “exception”, with the montage of Seri and Akkun being friends that plays over that very dialogue, highlighted by the sentimental music. It goes to show that what Seri is saying right now is kind of bullshit, and how human-vampire friendships could work if not for their systems. These feelings ring unignorable in Seri’s head and, before she can break things off for good, she collapses into tears, the unfairness of it all catching up to her, as she sobs and wheezes for not wanted to let this person whose company she loves go.

In truth, Ko and Nazuna are no exception; they’re proof that it doesn’t have to be this way. Seri just hasn’t seen that light all the way, the way Nazuna has, at least not yet.

Ultimately, Seri does turn Akkun, but that’s only one happy ending for this one case; the emotion Seri felt in that moment where she thought they would never see eachother again was still real. This outcome is more the exception than anything; not a lot of people are gonna be as OK with being turned in order to keep their bonds as Akkun was in this moment. The individual problem has been solved, but the systemic one that created the problem in the first place hasn’t.

The true cure to the woes that arise between humans and vampires, from sadnesses like Seri’s to the most dire situations like we will soon see, would be for an environment to be fostered such that vampires could create intimate, trustful bonds with humans, with honesty, such that sucking blood isn’t something that needs to be obtained through violence, violation, or deception. Not for vampires to hide themselves away and rely on trickery, nor for humans to treat them like subhuman monsters empty of humanity. It’s relationships like Nazuna and Ko’s.

From here, things only take a further turn for the worse. Ko and his old school friends, Akira and Mahiro, set about fucking around at their school at night, and for a good while, what we get is this incredibly wholesome teenage romp, of these friends reuniting and making their own fun throughout the resting school, hopping over the fence, making up ghost stories and searching for spooky phenomena, taking pictures and making their own silly memories and laughing like young people ought to. It’s incredibly sweet, these people from Ko’s past joining him in his newfound passion in the present. For a while there, it feels so nice and dear and fulfilling.

But there’s a vampire lurking these halls, one of the school’s legends of old. And this one doesn’t have a mind to talk; he’s hungry. Repressed. Starving. Dying. He attacks Akira, and with the amount of drool pouring from his mouth and the hunger of a decade weighing on his body, there’s little doubt he intends to suck her dry.

Enter the previously-foreshadowed Anko Uguiso; sultry, surly, perpetually smoking detective and, as it turns out, professional vampire hunter. Her resting voice has a rough, jaded, cigarette-worn yet subtly cocky tenor to it, but she’s obsessive, at times seeming perhaps a little bit unstable and off her rocker in her own right, seeming to take borderline sadistic glee in beating Ko’s vampire dream into the dirt. In total, she fucking hates vampires. Miyuki Sawashiro gives a career all-timer performance as Anko, giving such immense weight to her whiplashes into dead-fucking-seriousness and unhinged, uncomfortable instability alike, the scariness of both her conviction and her obsession, in fashion that is alternately smoldering, demanding, or explosive however the moment calls for.

Anko gives the starved old vampire a merciful death, letting the sunrise take him as she comforts him, assuring him he’ll keep his humanity in his end. It’s a harrowingly breathtaking scene on its own, utterly tragic yet so, so tender, but in all this it also leaves a very disquieting question. Where exactly do we go from here?

Anko is fucking terrifying, it’s true, but the scariest part of her is how, in this moment… it seems she just might be right. What we just saw is dangerous fucking shit, and Ko has been playing with fire being so fast and loose about chilling with actual, literal vampires, let alone jumping headlong into trying to become one himself, which as we just saw, is a transformation of one’s self not to be taken so lightly.

But where the cracks in Anko’s hardline stance on keeping humans away from vampires start to show, to me, is how Anko is so insistent on referring to vampires as “monsters”, ones who’ve drank blood as having effectively forfeited their humanity. A small moment it’s easy to let by is how she refers to the teacher as an “it”. Ko has seen vampires exhibit humanity, obviously through Nazuna but also through Seri, but the example of what vampirism can become that Ko just witnessed is so stark that even that’s thrown into question. Even that which he’s experienced himself, the humanity to be found in a trusting blood-sucking relationship between a vampire and a human, is difficult to reconcile with the display of violence and terror that he just saw result from that very same urge. Is Anko right? Are vampires just parasites, victimization at the hands of their hungers inevitable, repression and death the only cure?

Ko lays in this bed, facing the wall with bleary eyes, distraught. If anything, I think the fact that he’s so torn up about having all this upended is in itself proof that it genuinely meant something real to him. He can’t forget the incident and just push on doing as he was doing before like nothing ever happened, but he can’t go back to his life before all this either, not with how profoundly it’s impacted his view of the world and how close a bond he’s built with Nazuna, the genuine magic he felt in his life for the first time… fuck, ever. He’s been trapped, at the nexus of genuine passion and its challenging, thrown into an existential tailspin, can’t stop that night in the school from replaying ad infinitum in his head. He can barely move, paralyzed. What do I do now?

His fears seem to be confirmed when he goes to talk to Nazuna about it, and she’s hungry, panting, blushing, thirsting for his blood in a way that seems not dissimilar from what Ko had just seen in the teacher. But that feeling is flipped back into an inkling of the familiar comfort we know when Ko, understandably in this context, pushes Nazuna off of him, and Nazuna doesn’t react in turn with indignation or anger; rather, her immediate reaction is to insist Ko talk to her about what’s going on, to be honest with her, just the same as she’s always wanted with him.

The score turns calm and soothing again for the first time since the incident as the two discuss things frankly. Nazuna remains Ko’s pillar of comfort; she’s there, she listens to him and his concerns. She’s a little irreverent about it, mocking him for taking so long to catch on, but she is honest in return, consoling in her own unique Nazuna-flavored way. Brutally honest, in some cases.

Nazuna wasn’t all she cracked herself up to be. She was lonely, and bored. Cut off from other vampires due to her hatred of how they do things, all she had was lonely walks and video games, night in and night out. She had nothing to do, and more importantly, no one to do it with. As she sees it, she was totally posing as a sage of nocturnal fun and freedom to seem cool to Ko; perhaps she was also trying to manifest that within herself. But the thing is… she kind of succeeded. She opened Ko’s eyes. Maybe she knew more about the spirit of having fun at night than she gives herself credit for. Maybe someone like Ko was exactly who she needed, someone she could explore the night and freedom itself with, see what it had to offer, together.

Ko meets up with Anko to try to get more information out of her, and Anko takes the opportunity to try to beat Ko’s dream out of him ever further, and insists that she intends to kill all vampires, every last one of them, him included if it comes to that. Anko shows just how dirty she’s willing to play; she up and calls the cops on Ko, willing to take away the one thing Ko loves most, his night walks themselves, and even rubbing it in his face some, if that’s what it takes to deter him from continuing to mingle with all this vampire business. This moment is fucking terrifying, to both Ko and the viewer, watching Ko tremble and his eyes dilate as he, without warning and basically in an instant, seems to lose everything he’s built over the course of all this, all at the whim of this woman who does what she does with no hesitation and no bullshit. She seems so satisfied with herself to have done it, too.

This point in the show is kind of a total downer in the moment, it’s true, but it’s ultimately for the best that Ko has to question these things, interrogate the logic and necessity of his vampire dream. Ko didn’t know anything about vampires, he assumed it was so easygoing and simple all on his own. His limited perspective is challenged, and it’s something he has to seriously grapple with, think and take into account before he can make the educated decision to keep doing this and pursue what he’s pursuing further. It’s a learning experience; harsh, maybe a bit disillusioning, but necessary for him to think about and understand. It doesn’t mean he has to turn back, abandon everything he’s found in this life and everything he’s built with Nazuna. But certain illusions and assumptions about vampirism need to be shattered, and whether such a fundamental transformation of his self is necessary for Ko to find fulfillment in this life needs to be called into question.

Ko was naïve, he was young, and he made a snap decision from jumping to conclusions; but that doesn’t mean his feelings were invalid, or his actions springing from them were wrong. How could they be, with how much more fun and lively his very existence has been, how much better he understands himself and what he wants out of life? It’s a two-sided coin; finding more to life is the process of progressing and thus growing up, and growing up and thus maturing means friction and facing challenges and tough questions you never previously thought of. What’s most important is knowing what you value, holding on to that with conviction, and never letting yourself be beaten down to giving in to the whims of a system that sees you as just another object on a conveyor belt, to be delivered to a singular, cold, inevitable destination; to have the courage to stand strong and face the future, the future you want. To make sure it is, at the end of that day and come whatever may, your life you’re living.

Was it all as straightforward and easy as Ko made it out to be at the start? No. But was it still worth it? The show’s answer to that is yes. A definitive yes. Over the course of his experience we see first-hand how living free about the night, his relationship with Nazuna, and even his disenchanting experiences with other vampires, have made him more emotionally open and empathetic, more honest with himself and others, more socially skilled and capable, braver, worldlier, more fulfilled in his moment-to-moment existence. And hell, even if it is scary and risky sometimes… I think the prospect of wasting one’s adolescence, letting every day of your youth be the same until you’re old enough to look back and realize the time and youth you lost, never having once acted out on your own accord, is far, far more mortifying in the big picture than blood-suckers could ever be.

There’s one last piece of the puzzle at the very end of the show that puts everything into place, a fine bow to wrap all of this up in. In the final episode of Call of the Night, Ko meets one last vampire, one Hatsuka Suzushiro, a vampire who wears women’s clothing and presents effeminately whilst continuing to identify as male. Ko asks him, “why do you wear women’s clothing?” And Hatsuka simply responds, “because it looks good”. Put in other words… because he just likes it. This is the perfect exchange to have in the final episode, because it’s the thematic de nou mat of everything this series is about. The freedom of expression Hatsuka’s gender-shirking fashion sense represents is the very same freedom the night has represented all along. It’s there. It would be fun. It would feel good. It would make me feel good about myself. Why not? Do it because you want to. Be free. Might as well have fun.

Seeing the light and that purple color return to the night as Ko finds himself coming through the other side of this period of fear and existential doubt, more self-assured in wanting to continue this life with Nazuna than ever, as he runs to find her as fast as he can, just… god, I can think of few visual flips in anime that emotionally hit me that immediately. It is that he cares enough about Nazuna to run for his life for her, in concern for her safety and for their bond, that definitively proves without a shadow of a doubt that all this meant something. The moon, the night’s beacon, glows brighter in the sky than ever before, as for the first time since that night in the school, Ko experiences complete clear-headedness and self-assurance in that which he wants.

I love the flip of their first meeting from Episode 1 at the vending machine, as though to put a definitive period on their relationship being reciprocal, how Ko is now doing for Nazuna exactly what Nazuna had done for him at the start of all this, rescuing her from her boredom.

Ko acknowledges that he doesn’t know everything. He only truly knows his own feelings and experiences. And that which he knows for certain tells him, unignorably and in no uncertain terms, that he wants to continue having fun with Nazuna. He doesn’t want her to be bored. He wants to continue being the cure to her boredom. Because he cares about her, and it makes him happy. That’s all there is to it, and all there needs to be.

That’s the plain and simple truth, at the core of it all, that neither Ko nor Nazuna could deny if they are to be emotionally honest with themselves. They had fun together. And there’s no reason to stop.

Heck… there’s no reason not to take it a step further.

Call of the Night the story of a human and a vampire both escaping the arbitrary, cruel, boring prescriptions of their respective species’ societies in order to fulfill our root desires; be it the most base as represented via blood sucking, personal autonomy and a sense of freedom in one’s own body and existence, or a deep bond with someone else, whether it ultimately turns out romantic or not, and whether such a bond is “supposed” to exist between humans and vampires or not.

The two find the key to their respective agency not only in the very lifestyle of nocturnalism, but in one another, in doing it together, with someone who gets them. They implicitly understand one another’s disillusionment, one another’s boredom, because disillusionment and boredom was the state both of them were in before they found one another, and it is through that mutual if subconscious understanding that their presence in one another’s life and in one another’s adventures in this freed space can serve as one another’s remedy to it. What’s worth doing at all if it’s not with someone whose presence you love, after all? That’s the true romance at the core of Call of the Night; being the cure to one another’s boredom and the key to unearthing one another’s agency, the truest self to act upon one’s truest desires, with nocturnalism acting as the gateway, the context wherein all that is possible in the first place.

Call of the Night shows us that there is more to life on this Earth than the mundane daily grind you’ve fallen into, that there’s another way to see the world and your life. If there is desire within you, it is desire this story urges you to act upon. It might encourage one to go out of their normal bounds, find new spaces and have new experiences, in a world unbound and unshackled by the grindstone of the day.

It might encourage you to maybe… go out one night. Explore your environment in a way you’d never normally think to. Find things you’d never considered could be there. Maybe even… meet someone? High-five them, or maybe even go so far as to fall in love, real love, with them. Pet a kitty, play a lost game from your childhood, stand in the street, dance in a parking garage. Breathe the crisp air, bathe in the sublime sight of the sky, of the shimmering stars and glowing, beaconing moon over that rich velvet backdrop of outer space. Exist, in a time when the marrs of our conformist, uniform, clock-based capitalist civilization are mostly turned off. It might do something good for you, to see the world outside of that way.

Who knows, you just might uncover something within yourself you’d been neglecting; I know that seeing this anime did exactly that for me, awakened a love of the night that had laid dormant within me for years. It’s inspired me to walk out at night more often, to breathe it in, take a good jog, explore, just… savor the peace, the darkness, the free range of existence, the calm. Just try it. For the sake of just… trying something new. For the sake of discovery, of the environment and the self. Heed the call, for the call of the night is the call of self-liberation. Even now, only the day may truly be completely fallen to the clutches of the arbitrary and the boring.

Because the night belongs to lovers.

Because the night belongs to us.