If you want to watch something inspiring (when it comes to the courage and determination of the main character) and a break from the usual anime you’ve watched, I suggest you watch Kami-sama no Inai Nichiyōbi or Sunday Without God. This story is about humanity, where one day, human beings lost the ability to have children and to truly die. Sounds like becoming vampires, right? But this one has an interesting story. You see, according to the story’s legend, God abandoned his creations (hence, Sunday without God), but left them one final gift in the form of “gravekeepers,” strange individuals with the ability to give rest to the living dead. The gravekeepers are the only ones who can “bury” the living dead. If a normal person buries the dead, they will just come back to life again.
The protagonist in this story is Ai Astin, a twelve-year old gravekeeper, who lives in a small village and everyone takes care of her, now that she’s an orphan. When her mother died, she replaced her mother as a gravekeeper. She never met her father but according to her mother, her father was called Hampnie Hambart. On her first days as a gravekeeper, she is dug 40 holes as graves, which is also the same number of the people in her village.
One day, she met a man named Hampnie Hambart but he said that he never had a daughter and that his name is only fictional and not really his name. After encountering her supposedly father, she learns that all the villagers in her life were actually deceased and Hampnie is there to “bury” them. As the child of a gravekeeper and a human, Ai is arguably the last child born in the world, where ordinary children stopped being conceived three years before her birth, 15 years ago. This and the fact that she has emotions (gravekeepers are supposed to be emotionless) is what make her different from the other gravekeepers. She desires to save the world God has supposedly abandoned, and leaves her village with Hampnie Hambart (against his will, though) to set out on a journey.
This is one unforgettable anime because of the theme — finding her father, finding people and place where she belongs, because she doesn’t belong with the living dead or else they will kill her if they find out that she is a gravekeeper.
Sunday without God aired on July 6, 2013 to September 21, 2013 with 12 episodes. There are lots of unanswered questions and I’m looking forward for them to release a second season.
After watching this anime, say after 2 or 3 episodes, I’m pretty sure that its ending/closing song Owaranai Melody Wo Utaidashimashita will haunt your lives forever. It’s a mix of fantasy, some comedy and drama.
