Is There Freedom in the Dark?
How does a drive late at night make you feel? Do you enjoy it? Do you roll down the window and feel the breeze through your hair? Do you crank up the music and sing like no one’s there? Do you take the alone time to contemplate? What does the night taste like, to you?
As I’ve gotten older I think I’ve started to value experiences more than events. Like, I love going somewhere to do a thing, but I’d rather said thing be something that means a lot to me, or is something that I do with people who are meaningful to me, rather than trying to do something for the sake of it. I guess that’s why I’ve never been a big partier. I want to be a deep pond, rather than a shallow ocean, if you will. So reading manga has become part of those deeper little obsessive experiences for me. I love me a good story. Even more so if it manages to surprise me.
Now, when it comes to stories, a genre I’ve never really tried has been that of vampire stories. I lied, it isn’t as if I haven’t tried them, but I haven’t been able to take them seriously. Twilight joke goes here, roll credits, there’s the opinion. Even anime doesn’t seem to have many compelling vampire stories. I go out of my way to laugh at Vampire Knight and Rosario + Vampire. I cannot look at a cover for Dance in the Vampire Bund without cringing. Seraph of the End came out right as I was getting more into anime, but just looked too generic for me to look into seriously. It’s seemed like a dead genre, at least for a while.
Then I started reading Shuzo Oshimi. Happiness might be the best story I’ve read that contains vampires living among human society and the ramificatons of that. While I would love to do a deep dive into that series, today I’m here to discuss another vampire series that managed to sink it’s teeth* into my heart: Call of the Night.
I really don’t know what I was expecting when it came to this manga. Like, I always tend to trust my intuition when it comes to buying manga from bookstores. Said intuition is how I found my favorite romance of all time, after all. Yet every so often I teeter a little bit too much on the safe side. So by the time I actually put money into the first volume of Call of the Night, I’d passed it by like five times, read a synopsis, and talked about it on Discord. Needless to say, I definitely feel like my investment paid off.
This is the part where the anime blogger usually goes into the main plot and the characters and why they’re good and all, but I think my experience with Call of the Night hinges a ton more on how I’ve felt moving through the pages. “Atmospheric” is one of those words video essayists toss around to vaguely refer to a work of art giving you good visual vibes, but I want to use it as a broader structure to dive into the details of what the manga feels like to me. And what better way to do that than to just show you?
A lot of mangaka do this choppy paneling to help slow down your perception of time passing, but look at what’s in focus here. The slow creak of the door opening, quietly putting on familiar shoes, that last-second hesitation because all the sounds feel so much louder in the silence of the night. Ko isn’t someone who’s reckless: you can feel his apprehension but also this sense that he has to do it. He needs to go outside. There’s a curiosity and a longing there, the kind of soft but firm pull that late night walks and 3AM Taco Bell runs are made of.
He’s broken the invisible barrier between the door and the outside world here, and he’s free. No longer confined. I love these lingering shots because they really pull you into the feel of the moment. I’m imagining cool night air, a gentle breeze pulling on my jacket, and a sense of quiet anticipation. Not knowing what to expect but excited to get started. Looking for peace in the only place that might have any.
Silence is made for thinking, or at least that’s how I’ve always approached it. My thoughts always feel so much louder when it’s quiet, even more when I’m by myself. It’s a beautiful thing, the quiet isolation of a walk at dusk or a drive at midnight. It sings of problems slowly melting away, or at least losing their hold on you. Something Ko is desperately hoping to find out here.
Even looking forward a little in the story, as Ko meets Nazuna, there’s still this feeling of quiet energy in the air. Potential energy unleashed, but not all at once. Keeping pace, ebbing and flowing, there’s a pulse that this story feels like it taps into with its’ pacing. One that invites both freedom and mystery, the illicitness of sneaking out alongside the peace of isolation. It’s a small joy, but a joy nonetheless, and one punctuated by the excitement of deep conversation at a time when most minds are at rest.
I don’t want to get lost in the sauce of waxing philosophic, but I hope I’m getting my point across. Call of the Night delivers on this meandering feeling of wandering around in the dark, slowly uncovering mysteries at an unhurried pace that I really love. It takes the fantastic elements of vampires of brings it all home in a way that feels grounded, unconcerned with being anything other than what it is. It has an identity and it is content in it, and the air of mystery that nighttime invites is only an opportunity for further self-realization.
Stories have always helped me to figure out who I am. Yet I feel like Call of the Night is one of the few in this journey that has helped me to be content with where I’m at. I always want to improve. I’m always telling myself to do more or to be changing or to figure something new out. My brain get impatient when life isn’t moving as fast-paced as it thinks it should be. But life can’t always be moving at 75 mph. Not as a person, not as a believer, not even as a hobbyist. Oftentimes life takes steps in ways and at paces that I wouldn’t have set, but are more than good enough for me. God knows what He’s doing, and I guess what I need to do is slow down. Inhale. Exhale. And enjoy the night. There’s too much out there to explore to waste my life worrying about doing stuff.
