Journal With Witch Ep. 10 “Bind”: Words Of Feminist Struggles And Yuri [Review]

Journal with Witch has young Asa struggling to find the right words for an original song for her band in Ep. 10 “Bind”. Even with Makio’s help, she still struggles to find the words for it throughout the entire episode, but she is making progress…of sorts. All while in the background, we see issues of women’s rights being raised, alongside the blossoming of a beautiful yuri relationship.

Journal with Witch Ep. 10 “Bind”: Details in Brief

Journal with Witch Ep. 10 “Bind” is the tenth episode (you can read my reviews of Ep. 1, Ep. 2, Ep. 3, Ep. 4, Ep. 5, Ep. 6, Ep. 7, Ep. 8, and Ep. 9 here) of this slice of life comedy-drama anime series. Said anime is the anime adaptation of the manga of the same name by Tomoko Yamashita.

Shuka (Durarara!!x2 Shō, 91 Days, Natsume’s Book of Friends: Fifth Season) is the animation studio behind this anime. Miyuki Oshiro is the director of this anime, with Kōhei Kiyasu as the writer, and Kensuke Ushio as the composer for the music.

Speaking of the music: the opening theme song for Journal with Witch is “Sonare” (ソナーレ) by Tomoo. Meanwhile, “Kotozute” (言伝; lit. ’Hearsay’) by Bialystocks is the ending theme song.

Synopsis

Alas, Journal with Witch is still an ongoing anime series. In fact, Ep. 10 “Bind” only just made its debut on March 8, 2026 exclusively on Crunchyroll. Thus, for those of you wishing to avoid spoilers, here’s the synopsis for this week’s episode from Crunchyroll below:

“Asa continues working on original lyrics while her classmates face struggles of their own at school.”

Journal with Witch Ep. 10 “Bind”: The Good

Ep. 10 “Bind” is where the story of Journal with Witch really gets complex. This entire episode has Asa Asa (voiced by Fuko Mori (JP)) collect apparently random words from people in her surroundings in her diary, trying to cobble them together into a song. A lot of those words just happen to come from her aunt Makio (voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro (JP)), but a lot also come from her classmates. Not only that, but in the course of forming her song, Asa is also forming a clearer view of her life’s goals.

All with her best friend Emiri (voiced by Sumire Morohoshi) effectively being the deuteragonist of this episode by telling her story concurrently alongside Asa. We even see both of them start to form political opinions about feminism, and how the patriarchal society of Japan has an alarming tendency to shove women down. Even just a simple thing as Emiri witnessing the hypocrisy of her mother telling her that she should be an adult and bring her own plate to the table only to see her mother bring a plate to her father (as if he isn’t an adult?!) is enough to fan the flames of feminism in her.

Heck, this episode even references a real life political scandal reported by NPR in which Tokyo Medical University admitted to arbitrarily lowering the entrance exam scores of scores of female applicants, while simultaneously inflating the scores of male applicants. All to just-as-arbitrarily reduce the number of female doctors in Japan out of fears that many of them will marry and quit their jobs. I don’t know about you, but a scandal like that breaking the news is sure to fire up political passions given the magnitude of that injustice.

Fortunately, not all is doom and gloom in this episode. It’s this episode where we see that Emiri has finally blossomed into the path of yuri. It’s both subtle and blatantly obvious that the girl Emiri is hanging out with in her cram school is her girlfriend. The intertwining fingers gives that away long before that unnamed girl literally drops a casual confession to Emiri, which Emiri takes in stride because the two have apparently been dating for a while now. It will certainly be very interesting to see how Asa reacts to learning about that, if she ever does so. Especially since Emiri seems to imply that she feels trapped by her friendship with Asa. We’ll just have to see in the future if that friendship survives the test of time.

Journal with Witch Ep. 10 “Bind”: The Bad

Alas, the amazingly complex story is still held back by the merely average animation quality. Again, Shuka’s animation team have done wonders with the existing animation through gorgeous art, high-quality reflections, and smooth movements of things even as simple as Emiri extending and retracting her mechanical pencil, and seeing waves wash up to her feet in her imagination. However, the overall animation quality is still less than that of the typical high-budget isekai anime. It’s a shame here, because this episode could’ve been so much better with higher-quality animation, but alas, the budget had to go somewhere.

Aside from that, this isn’t an action-packed episode. Journal with Witch is a slice-of-life comedy-drama anime, now with political commentary and LGBTQ+ themes. It’s definitely not your typical shonen action adventure anime. If you want that, then you will need to look elsewhere.

Anime Recommendations

If you do long for action and adventure, often with bloody violence, then you might want to watch out Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Kaiju No. 8, DDDD, DAN DA DAN, Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online II, Zenshu, Blue Box, Solo Leveling, Black Butler, Nyaight of the Living Cat, May I Ask for One Final Thing?, and/or TRIGUN STARGAZE. However, if you want more quiet anime like this one, then you might also want to watch Spy x Family, Senpai is an Otokonoko, Apocalypse Hotel, Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf, The Ancient Magus’ Bride, My Dress-Up Darling, This Monster Wants to Eat Me, and/or Hana-Kimi.

What did you think of this week’s episode of Journal with Witch? Tell us your musically feminist thoughts in the comment section below.

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