Nazuna Nanakusa's character and role in Call of the Night isn't just important, it is the entire reason anyone remembers this anime. You can have all the pretty purple cityscapes and Creepy Nuts tracks you want, but without this specific vampire girl acting like a lazy, beer-drinking disaster who happens to have superpowers, the show would be another boring insomnia metaphor with a self-insert protagonist.
She shows up in episode one and immediately hijacks the entire premise. Kou Yamori is just some depressed middle schooler who can't sleep, but Nazuna is a centuries-old predator with the emotional maturity of a teenager and the lifestyle of a NEET. That combo shouldn't work, yet it absolutely does. She is the deuteragonist technically, but let's be real, she is the main attraction.
She Is a Born Vampire Which Changes Everything
Most vampire stories go the easy route. Human gets bitten, human turns, human complains about immortality. Nazuna Nanakusa never went through that. She was born this way, a rare full-blood vampire who came from a vampire mother named Haru and a human father. This isn't just trivia, it fundamentally changes how her powers work and why she acts so detached from human society.
Because she didn't lose her humanity, she never really had it to begin with. Other vampires in the series remember being human, so they still act like people trying to play monster. Nazuna just is the monster, which makes her weirdly innocent and weirdly terrifying at the same time. She can rip someone's arm off without trying, casually break concrete walls, and leap across buildings like she is flying, but she will also spend six hours playing video games in her underwear while drinking cheap beer.
Her regeneration is ridiculous too. Gunshots don't matter. Losing limbs is an inconvenience. She can phase through solid objects if she concentrates hard enough, which makes her basically untouchable when she bothers to try. But here is the thing, she rarely bothers. She has this immense power set that includes memory manipulation through blood drinking and supernatural charm effects, yet she uses it mostly to mess with Kou or make her job at the snooze shop easier.
The Weird Deal With Kou Yamori
The central hook of Call of the Night depends entirely on Nazuna's specific dietary preferences and the weird transaction she sets up with Kou. He wants to become a vampire because he thinks normal life is boring and depressing. She thinks his blood tastes incredible, like top-shelf wine compared to the cheap stuff she usually gets from sleeping drunkards. So they make a deal where she drinks his blood regularly and in exchange she will eventually turn him into a vampire.
Except there is a catch she doesn't tell him about immediately. To become a vampire, Kou has to fall in love with her first. Not just like her, not just be friends, actual romantic love. This creates this messed up pressure cooker situation where Kou is basically trying to force himself to fall for this girl so he can stop being human, while Nazuna is drinking his blood which is portrayed with heavy sexual undertones every single time.
The blood drinking scenes are where the anime gets most of its tension and comedy. Kou gets embarrassed constantly because having your neck bitten by a short girl who makes dirty jokes immediately after is a weird experience for a fourteen-year-old. Nazuna treats it casually, like having a snack, but then she will say something suggestive and watch him turn red because she finds it funny. It is a strange power dynamic because she holds all the cards physically and socially, but she is also weirdly dependent on him for quality blood and company.
Why She Acts Like a Messy Adult
Nazuna Nanakusa looks like she is maybe sixteen or seventeen, but she is estimated to be in her thirties or forties. She lives alone in a barely furnished apartment that has basically nothing in it except gaming consoles and beer. She works at a snooze shop where she helps insomniacs sleep so she can feed on them, and later picks up a job at a maid cafe called Vamp because the salary is good and they let her drink after work.
This is not the gothic vampire castle lifestyle. She isn't brooding in a mansion writing poetry about lost love. She is a wage worker who complains about bills and makes dirty jokes constantly. She is very open about sexual topics, talking about porn and masturbation and whatever else comes to mind, which makes Kou uncomfortable but also fascinates him because she treats these taboo subjects like weather talk.
But here is the weird contradiction that makes her character interesting. She is totally comfortable with physical intimacy and sexual humor, yet she panics and gets genuinely embarrassed when actual romantic love comes up. The word love makes her shut down. She doesn't know how to handle genuine emotional attachment because her entire existence has been about surface-level connections and feeding. So you have this ancient being who can talk about the mechanics of sex without blinking but runs away if someone suggests they care about her romantically.
Her Powers Are Broken But She Is Lazy
In terms of raw power levels, Nazuna is apparently at building destruction level, meaning she could level a house if she wanted to. She has superhuman strength that lets her casually destroy concrete, speed that makes her invisible to human eyes, and durability that makes conventional weapons useless. She also has pseudo-flight through extreme leaping, which the anime shows off in gorgeous nighttime sequences where she carries Kou across the city skyline.
She should be unstoppable, and technically she is one of the most powerful vampires in the setting because born vampires have higher potential than turned ones. But she is lazy. She doesn't train. She doesn't study her abilities. She barely uses her phasing power because it requires concentration and she would rather just punch through a wall. Other vampires who have been turned and actually worked at their skills can sometimes get the drop on her because she relies too much on raw talent.
This laziness extends to her social life too. She keeps Kou around because he is convenient and tastes good, but she doesn't want to do the emotional labor of actually being his girlfriend or his maker in a meaningful way. She is content to just exist in this liminal space where they hang out at night, she drinks his blood, and nothing really changes. The immortality has made her stagnant, which is a different kind of vampire curse than the usual angst about watching humans die.
The Romance Problem Nobody Talks About
People get weird about the age gap in Call of the Night, and yeah, on paper a forty-year-old vampire hanging out with a middle schooler looks bad. But the show handles it in a specific way that makes it less about predation and more about arrested development. Nazuna might be old in years but she stopped maturing socially a long time ago. She hangs out with Kou because he is the first person who actually wanted to stay up with her, who wasn't just food or a stranger at a bar.
The rule about needing love to turn into a vampire creates this messed up situation where Nazuna is basically trying to teach Kou about romance so he can fall for her, but she is terrible at it because she is romance-illiterate herself. She tries to set up dates and teach him about attraction but she is working from a place of total ignorance about healthy relationships. It is like the blind leading the blind, except one of them has fangs and the other is desperate to stop being human.
There is also the fact that Nazuna is canonically bisexual, having shown romantic interest in both Kou and Anko Uguisu, the detective character. This isn't played for cheap fanservice or harem antics, it is just part of her character that she is attracted to people regardless of gender. It adds another layer to her character that most vampire shows wouldn't bother with, making her feel more like a real person with preferences rather than just a fantasy object.
How She Subverts Vampire Cliches
Nazuna Nanakusa takes every vampire trope and either ignores it or twists it into something weird. She doesn't burn in sunlight, she just gets sleepy and weak during the day, which is why she works night jobs and games during daylight hours. She doesn't need an invitation to enter homes, she just walks in. She doesn't have a tragic backstory about lost love or vampire hunters killing her family, she just has a mom who disappeared and a foster vampire caretaker who is barely mentioned.
She drinks blood not to survive in some dramatic eternal hunger way, but because it tastes good and she is lazy about cooking. She has anemia despite being a vampire, which is medically ridiculous but funny. Her name refers to shepherd's purse, a spring herb, which connects to themes of transience and night-blooming rather than the usual death and winter imagery associated with vampires.
Even her appearance subverts expectations. She has these distinctive twin braids tied into rings that make her look like a weird mix of traditional Japanese aesthetic and modern punk fashion. She wears revealing clothes, not because she is trying to seduce victims like a femme fatale, but because she finds them comfortable and doesn't care about human modesty standards. She looks like she should be a seductress, but she acts like a slob, and that gap between expectation and reality is what makes her memorable.
Why Fans Care More About Her Than Kou
Look at any discussion thread or merchandise lineup for Call of the Night. Nazuna dominates. She has the best lines, the most interesting visual design, and the actual character arc. Kou is fine as a protagonist, he is relatable in his depression and his desire for freedom, but he is basically a vehicle for the audience to meet Nazuna. She is the one with the mystery, the power, the weird lifestyle that viewers actually want to learn about.
Part of it is the wish fulfillment she represents, but not the kind people usually think of. It isn't about dating a vampire girl, it is about the freedom she represents. She lives outside society completely, no day job, no school, no responsibilities except paying rent and buying beer. She stays up all night doing whatever she wants. For a generation of viewers who feel trapped by capitalism and social expectations, Nazuna looks like an ideal, someone who escaped the grind entirely.
But the show doesn't let her off the hook completely. Her freedom is lonely. She has no friends her own age, no real connections beyond transactional feeding, until Kou shows up. So she becomes this weird mix of aspirational and pitiable, someone who has all the power and none of the warmth, until slowly through her interactions with Kou and his human friends, she starts remembering what it was like to care about people.
The Specifics of Her Weaknesses
For all her power, Nazuna has specific vulnerabilities that keep her from being completely OP. She has a preserved umbilical cord somewhere that could be used against her, which is gross and weird and exactly the kind of specific vampire lore that makes the world feel thought out. She can also be hurt by weapons that connect to a vampire's human past, though since she was born a vampire, this works differently for her than for turned vampires.
Her biggest weakness is probably her anemia, which is ironic given she drinks blood for a living. She gets dizzy easily if she hasn't fed, and she is small and light enough that she can be physically moved around by humans if they catch her off guard. She also has terrible social skills when dealing with other vampires, often saying the wrong thing or starting fights because she doesn't understand vampire politics or hierarchy.
The memory manipulation thing is a double-edged sword too. She can make humans forget she bit them, which helps keep the vampire world secret, but if she drinks too much from someone she can mess up their head permanently. She tries to be careful about this with Kou, only taking what she needs, but the temptation is always there because his blood is apparently absurdly delicious compared to normal humans.
Nazuna Nanakusa's character and role in Call of the Night works because she refuses to be categorized. She isn't the manic pixie dream girl who fixes the sad boy, she isn't the dangerous predator who seduces victims, she isn't the wise immortal mentor. She is a messy, lazy, powerful weirdo who plays video games and makes dick jokes and occasionally saves Kou from other vampires when she feels like it. That specificity is rare in anime characters, who usually fit cleanly into archetypes, and it is why she has become one of the most memorable vampire girls in recent years.
The show works best when it stops trying to have a plot and just lets her exist in the nighttime world, drinking beer on rooftops and explaining why the night is better than the day. She carries the atmosphere, the comedy, and the emotional weight whenever the story remembers to give her feelings. Without her, Call of the Night would be a pretty slideshow with a soundtrack. With her, it is a character study about someone who has too much power and not enough purpose, slowly learning that connection might be worth the hassle after all.