Another

Another is a twelve-episode Japanese horror mystery produced by P.A. Works and directed by Tsutomu Mizushima, broadcast from 10 January to 27 March 2012 and adapted from Yukito Ayatsuji's 2009 novel of the same name. Set in 1998 in the provincial town of Yomiyama, it follows Kōichi Sakakibara, a boy who transfers into Yomiyama North Middle School's class 3-3 and immediately senses that something in the room is wrong: his classmates are watchful, their teacher evasive, and a quiet girl with an eyepatch named Mei Misaki seems to be treated as though she simply is not there.

What Kōichi slowly pieces together is a piece of local folklore that his classmates treat as operational fact. Since 1972 — when a popular student called Misaki died partway through the school year and the grieving class went on behaving as if nothing had happened, leaving an inexplicable extra presence in the graduation photograph — class 3-3 has been visited in certain years by a phenomenon that kills a student or someone related to them, roughly one a month, until graduation. The class has built rituals and countermeasures to survive it, and those rituals demand a cruelty that no one is willing to name aloud.

From there the series works as a closed-circle mystery wearing horror's clothes. Deaths arrive as grotesque accidents rather than the work of a monster; suspicion, rumour and denial corrode the group faster than the curse itself; and the central puzzle is not who is killing us but who among us should not be here. As a single self-contained season, the show's arc runs from unease to investigation to collapse, tightening steadily toward a climax in which the class's own logic turns on it.

At its heart Another is about the price of a lie that a community agrees to keep telling. The phenomenon begins not with malice but with love badly handled: a class that could not accept a death chose to pretend it away, and that refusal to let go tore a hole in reality that outlives everyone who made it. The horror, then, is inherited denial — a debt passed down through classrooms of children who never chose it and who can only survive by repeating a smaller version of the same crime.

The countermeasure that structures the story is the series' moral core: to live, the class must decide that one of its own does not exist. Ayatsuji's premise takes the ordinary machinery of Japanese school life — group harmony, unspoken rules, the terror of standing out — and reveals it as something already lethal, needing only a supernatural nudge. The series suggests that the difference between a survival ritual and organised bullying is mostly a matter of what a group tells itself it is doing.

Against that, the show places one small counter-argument: Kōichi speaks to the girl no one will see. His transgression breaks the rules and arguably makes everything worse, yet the series treats acknowledgement — the simple act of seeing another person — as the only thing in Yomiyama that is not a lie. That is the message the whole run carries: denial is contagious and it kills, and the courage to name what is actually in the room is both dangerous and necessary.

The supernatural reading. Taken at face value, the phenomenon is real: the 1972 class's refusal to accept a death opened a rupture through which the dead return, and the countermeasures are genuine folk technology, imperfectly understood by the children who inherit them. On this reading the series is a straightforward ghost story about grief that will not stay buried.

Another arrived in the winter 2012 season and was quickly treated as one of that year's standouts, credited with reviving television horror as a serious register for anime rather than a comic or supernatural-action mode. It came from an unlikely source — P.A. Works, a studio better known for luminous slice-of-life work — and from Tsutomu Mizushima, a director whose credits run to comedy and industry drama, and the mismatch is part of the show's texture: the deaths land inside a warmly lit, ordinary school world.

Its literary pedigree matters. Yukito Ayatsuji is a mystery novelist, and the 2009 source novel applies the closed-circle detective structure — a sealed community, a fixed set of suspects, a rule-bound puzzle — to supernatural horror. That hybrid is the series' real contribution: the phenomenon obeys laws, the characters research and test them, and the climax is a deduction rather than an exorcism. The influence shows in the wave of school-set mystery-horror that followed, and in how routinely Another is now cited as an entry point for viewers who assume anime horror means gore or comedy.

Culturally, the show reads as a commentary on Japanese school life, where the countermeasure of declaring a student 'non-existent' is only a degree removed from real practices of collective exclusion — a resonance domestic viewers registered immediately. Its imagery, particularly the eyepatched Mei and the doll motifs, became durable shorthand in fan art and cosplay, and ALI PROJECT's 'Kyōmu Densen' remains one of the more recognisable horror openings of the era. Ayatsuji has continued the world in prose, with the sequel compilation Another 2001 scheduled for September 2020, keeping the franchise alive well over a decade after the broadcast.

Overall. As a single twelve-episode season, Another was well received on broadcast and has held a solid reputation since, sitting at a 7.5 user rating on IMDb. Contemporary reviews called it one of the highlights of 2012, praising suspenseful storytelling that maintained a stoic, uncanny atmosphere from beginning to end, and noting approvingly that the narrative rarely went where viewers expected it to.

What audiences praised. The mood is the near-universal point of agreement: the sound design, the unhurried menace of ordinary school corridors, and the willingness to stage deaths as banal accidents rather than monster attacks. Mei Misaki became an instant icon of the era. Viewers also credited the show for treating its premise as a puzzle with rules, giving the horror an investigative spine that rewarded attentive watching, and for pacing the reveals so that each episode adjusted the picture rather than merely delaying it.

Where opinion split. The finale is the fault line. A substantial share of viewers found the climax cathartic and the payoff earned; others considered the identification of the dead person hastily assembled, and specifically objected that crucial information — what Mei had witnessed — was withheld until the very end, which felt to them like the story hiding evidence rather than planting clues. CBR's much-circulated framing, that the show would have been the best horror anime ever if not for its ending, captures the majority version of the complaint: enormous goodwill, spent unevenly in the last stretch. A secondary strand of criticism targets the death set-pieces, which some found so elaborate as to tip from dread into unintentional comedy, and the thinness of the supporting class, many of whom exist mainly to be counted.

Evolution of opinion. Over the years the show has settled into the role of a gateway horror anime — the one recommended first to viewers who think the genre has nothing to offer them. Retrospective discussion has grown more interested in its social reading (the countermeasure as institutionalised bullying) and less exercised about the plot mechanics of the finale. Verdict: an exceptionally atmospheric, tightly premised horror mystery whose reputation rests on the eleven episodes of accumulating dread more than on how it chooses to discharge them.