If you liked Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

A wandering expert travels through rural Japan helping people affected by mushi, mysterious life forms closer to nature than to spirits.

Mushishi has Frieren's calm wandering, its episodic encounters with people along the road and its sense that magic is part of nature. Each episode is a complete story, often bittersweet.

Very slow and episodic, with almost no overarching plot.

A former child soldier becomes a ghostwriter, writing letters for others while trying to understand what her commander's last words meant.

Violet's story is Frieren's in another key: someone who does not understand emotions learning, one encounter at a time, what people meant to her. Kyoto Animation's art is breathtaking, and some standalone episodes are among the most moving in anime.

Its emotions are big and deliberate; it is designed to make you cry.

A lonely boy who can see spirits inherits his grandmother's book of their names and decides to return them, one by one.

Natsume shares Frieren's gentle magic and its interest in the long lives of non-humans and the short lives of the humans they love. Many of its stories are about a spirit remembering someone long gone, which is Frieren's core feeling.

Highly episodic, and the series is long. Dip in rather than binge.

Isao Takahata's retelling of a Japanese folk tale about a girl found in a bamboo stalk who grows up too fast and must eventually leave.

This Studio Ghibli film, drawn in a charcoal-and-watercolor style, is about the shortness of life and the regret of not appreciating it while you have it. It shares Frieren's melancholy and its love of simple pleasures.

It is long and slow, and its ending is very sad.

05 / Video game · 2020

Spiritfarer

Matches: Time and memory

You captain a boat for the dead, caring for spirits, building them homes and finally guiding them to the afterlife.

Spiritfarer is about saying goodbye, the theme at the heart of Frieren. You grow attached to each spirit through cooking, building and conversation, and letting them go is the emotional point of the game.

It is a management game with lots of crafting and gathering, which some find repetitive.

A gifted, arrogant boy goes to a school for wizards, unleashes a shadow and must spend years understanding what he has done.

Ursula K. Le Guin's magic, based on knowing the true names of things, has more in common with Frieren's patient study of spells than with flashy fantasy battles. Its wizards are scholars, and its hero spends the book learning to be wise.

It is short but written in a formal, fable-like style.

An aging English butler takes a road trip and slowly lets the reader see the feelings and regrets he spent his life not admitting.

It may seem an odd pick, but no novel shares Frieren's emotional core more closely: someone looking back on years spent beside a person they never fully understood, and realizing what they missed. Ishiguro won the Booker Prize for it.

It is restrained and very English, and most of what matters goes unsaid.