“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
There’s a lot of stuff crammed in here. Overall, this is a great second episode for what is quietly shaping up to be one of the best anime in a very strong season.
I love Makio’s blonde friend Daigo Nana [Matsui Eriko], who we meet for the first time here. Asa seeing her and Makio interact gets us a lot of interesting thoughts from Asa herself, who finds the two’s interaction decidedly un-adult-like. There’s a particularly funny moment where, via smash cut, Asa compares Nana’s cackling laugh to the trumpeting of an elephant, just one of a number of really good scenes from Asa’s imagination throughout the episode. Nana’s whole bit of sharing a gyoza recipe with Asa is great too, and in general I hope to see a lot more of the character. Asa’s reaction to the meal itself is interesting as well, and points to the continued major role of food as an element of the series. She tries to remember her mom’s home cooking, but while she recalls liking it at the time, she can’t remember what she was actually served in them anymore. Pointing at, perhaps, more distance between Asa and her late mother than might have previously been safe to assume.
Then there’s Makio’s meetup with her ex, a man named Kasamachi Shingo [Suwabe Junichi doing his “hi, I’m Suwabe Junichi” voice]. I am trying quite hard to fight off my ambient misandry and not just assume the worst of Kasamachi right off the bat, but his conversation with Makio here doesn’t especially endear me to him. He feels the need to tell Makio that he was “hurt” by her decision to adopt Asa, which sure seems like making it about himself. (Him being a dedicated reader of Makio’s books also feels a little…I don’t know, off somehow. Not that I have a right to criticize as a 30-some woman who still watches shonen anime.)
Still, there’s a difference between a bad person and someone who’s just a bit thoughtless, and he strikes me more as the latter. He offers advice for getting Asa set up with insurance and such. I admit I was still a touch on-edge throughout that entire scene, though. Probably more to do with my own biases than anything else.
The best bit in the episode, however, comes in between these two major segments, and is actually probably this, a conversation between Asa and Makio where they try to be a bit more open with each other, right until the subject of Asa’s mom comes up. It’s a very impressive trick to get your audience this mad at a woman who’s literally dead with only a couple of lines, but Ikoku Nikki pulled it off.
When I was young, the stock line I always got hit with when I failed to do something my mother just assumed I’d be able to do easily was “I know you’re smart” said in a vaguely disapproving tone. I guess for Asa and, hell, Makio as well, it was that instead. Maybe that’s oversharing, but I find fiction like this to be good for helping to process complicated emotions that are difficult to speak about directly. For that, it’s one of my favorites so far of the young year.
Programming Note: I think posting episode writeups individually is the way I’ll be handling this going forward, even for shows like this one where I don’t actively plan to write about every single episode. These will be filed under the same archive as the “Let’s Watch” columns even though they’re a slightly different thing. I can’t imagine the subtle distinction matters to anyone but myself 😛
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