Anime, like video games, offers a unique way of providing guidance when life feels particularly aimless. For kids my age, that wisdom was kept secret. Anime wasn’t mainstream at school or welcomed at home, so the lessons I learned about facing life's hardships felt like smuggling contraband with existential subtext from the odd books I’d beg my mom to buy every Sunday at church. Still, I had a Goldilocks problem: the anime I found didn’t match my in-between space of adolescence and adulthood; it was either too salacious or too focused on spectacle, losing the nuance. I yearned for something honest and reflective, without having to dig through its mass appeal to find something truly meaningful—something that sparked wonder or didn’t leave me emotionally drained. Nothing ever seemed like the perfect analogy for my teenage-to-adult years, which were neither purely sensible nor purely salacious.
Ahead of its second season debut on HIDIVE, I finally watched an anime called Call Of The Night, and discovered it’s the kind of coming-of-age supernatural story I wish I had growing up.
On the surface, Call Of The Night, created by Kotoyama and animated by Liden Films, plays with familiar genre conventions where a budding romance develops between a human and a vampire. However, it’s how the show explores insomnia, intimacy, and late-night wanderlust in its tepid romance that drew me in. The series centers on Ko Yamori, a middle school student who struggles with going to school, falling asleep, and understanding love. To cope with his first problem, he starts skipping school and breaking curfew to roam around town at night, experiencing that euphoric feeling of being alive while the rest of the city sleeps or buzzes with nighttime energy.
So light spoilers for that.
One night, he meets a girl named Nazuna Nanakusa, who tells him she believes that people who can’t sleep like him do so because they aren’t satisfied with how they spent their day and can’t find rest until they let go of their inhibitions. After pretending to sleep when she offers to help him by inviting him to her place and sleeping on her futon, he discovers she’s a vampire. Mind you, he doesn’t figure out her vampiric nature through clues or detective work, but because she bites his neck and begins feeding on him. When he asks why he didn’t turn into a vampire, she reveals that the show’s take on vampirism isn’t that simple.
In this universe, for a human to become a vampire, they have to be bitten by a vampire they genuinely love. Instead of running away after learning too much about vampires to keep himself safe, Ko channels Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows, seeing it as a perfect chance to solve all three of his problems at once. His new goal is to fall in love with Nazuna and become a vampire.
Call Of The Night isn’t my first rodeo with vampiric romance anime. I’ve served my time with formative manga like Rosario + Vampire, which the Call Of The Night’s premiere hews close enough to with its protag inexplicably having the tastiest blood, making its resident vampire go steady with him on that principle alone before it drifts into ecchi harem territory with an encyclopedia of equally down-bad heroines.
What made Call Of The Night engaging for me was its genuine portrayal of how there’s no magical age when you fully understand everything as a teenager (or as an immortal vampire). Throughout the show, Ko's rebellious rejection of societal norms in his quest to become an adult ultimately leads him to face the same limitations that trap the adults who have surrendered to a structured life. For starters, falling in love isn’t easy even when you truly want to.
Each episode of Call Of The Night unfolds like a slice of nocturnal life. Ko and Nazuna drift through late-night dates that feel both normal and electric. One scene where Ko encourages Nazuna to feed off him humorously illustrates the long road ahead. Hoping to get turned early in season one after feeling a tug on his heartstrings, Ko realizes nothing has changed. It turns out that her feeding connects Nazuna to Ko’s emotional state, leading her to reveal that his newfound attraction isn’t love; it’s just lust.
From there, Call Of The Night takes the time to actually interrogate what it means to be young and in love. Nazuna is an abrasive, guarded tsundere, and while Ko meets other vampires that are easier to get close to, he still wants Nazuna. Their romance is a slow-burning tug of war. While Nazuna doesn’t necessarily fall first, she’s fallen harder for Ko. Instead of leaning into it, she masks her feelings behind teasing and dirty jokes to get a rise out of Ko or ducking behind videogames whenever things get too tender.
Beneath it all, Nazuna is not just scared of vulnerability, but of being responsible for Ko losing the spark that drew him to the night in the first place. Throughout the series, Nazuna plays up the façade that her nocturnal life is endlessly freeing, even as it threatens to calcify into something depressive and hollow. The show later reveals that she fears that Ko will see through the mysticism of vampirism and will regret his decision to become one, and also for falling for her.
After finishing Season One, Call Of The Night didn’t just become an anime I wish I had watched growing up; it earned its place among the essential shows I recommend to others right now. For better or worse, my coming-of-age anime diet mainly consisted of Neon Genesis Evangelion and FLCL. Both are brilliant in their own fractured ways, but neither really provided a blueprint for growing up in a healthy environment beyond horny teenage angst and manic pixie dream girls, all tailored to the protagonist’s psychological projections (and mommy issues), whether they piloted mecha or drove a Vespa. Still, they are both shows that portrayed the pursuit of getting laid as a fundamental part of growing up, with little scrutiny into that idea. Call Of The Night, by contrast, leans into the complicated emotions you first start to discover as a teenager, when pursuing romance and sex is all brand new.
As a coming-of-age anime, Call Of The Night stands out as a quietly introspective, emotionally sincere, and unapologetically strange series that doesn’t try to shout for attention to seem deep. It offers plenty of space to breathe, wonder, and maybe even heal—and that’s true for its vampire ensemble as well—and I find that outstanding.
