True tears - 05

[Arika]

Summary:
The day after Jun asked him to go out with Noe, Shinichirou is looking for her at school even though he doesn’t really have much to say to her. She wants to eat lunch with him, but he says that a guy and a girl eating together is weird, so she instead asks him to walk home with her after school. Shinichirou’s excuse for why he can’t do that either is that he has dance practice for the upcoming festival, and Noe is surprisingly impressed by the fact that he’s going to be dancing. Without Shinichirou to eat lunch with, Noe ends up sitting with Hiromi and acting as her friend. After class however, Noe sees Shinichirou walking out of school with Hiromi, despite what he had told her earlier. Nobuse meanwhile goes to Aiko’s store and notices that she’s wearing a rather plain purple sweater. It leads to him saying that he’d like one hand-knit by her, and she agrees to do it. As for Hiromi and Shinichirou, they go to the waterfront on Hiromi’s suggestion, and when she notices that Shinichirou is feeling cold, she gives him her scarf to wear. She also tells him about having lunch with Noe and how they shared food like friends. That night, after she saw the two coming home together, Shinichirou’s mother privately tells Hiromi not to walk with Shinichirou outside anymore since they already live together under one roof, and Hiromi quickly understands what his mother is implying.
The next day, Noe brings a lunch consisting of octopus-shaped wieners that she cooked, but Hiromi isn’t at the usual eating spot. Instead, Hiromi is in the gym practicing her shooting skills with a basketball. Noe is later returning home by herself when she hears some music playing, and she ends up finding the place where Shinichirou practices dancing for the festival. After interrupting them, she gives Shinichirou some of the food she cooked, but she doesn’t want him eating the octopus-shaped wieners. She considers them to be fake because of their artificial coloring, and she thinks that eating such things will cause him to become a liar. When Noe starts talking about his tears again, Shinichirou questions how she plans on getting them from him. Noe claims to be still thinking about it, though she does lick his face to show him one way. At home later, Shinichirou is working on a Raigomaru picture book story when Jun shows up on his motorcycle again because he wants to know if Shinichirou has decided yet. Shinichirou half-jokingly challenges Jun to go out with Hiromi in exchange for him going out with Noe, but Jun doesn’t even know who Hiromi is until Shinichirou reminds him. Jun then comments on how she’s cute and agrees before riding off.
Frustrated by all this and unsure if Jun was serious, Shinichirou goes to Hiromi’s room to talk to her about it. After both of them make note of how this is the first time he’s been in her room, Shinichirou tells her about meeting Jun and how Jun had said that she was cute. Hiromi doesn’t look too happy about this though and says that a meddlesome guy is like a fool. She doesn’t care for the fact that he came into her room to tell her this, and she notes that it’d be bad if his mother found them together here, so Shinichirou leaves. In the hallway, he then runs into their family’s employee who’s carrying around some old picture albums. Inside, Shinichirou finds photos of his father from back when his father was young, but there’s also a picture where a woman’s face has been cut out, and the caption indicates that it’s Hiromi’s mother. The following day, Shinichirou heads to Aiko’s store after school and gets there before it opens. Aiko returns to find him waiting outside, so she lets him in through the back door. Once inside, Shinichirou notices that Aiko is sewing a sweater and guesses that it’s for Nobuse. Since Shinichirou has a similar shoulder length to his friend, Aiko claims that she wants to measure him and takes her time doing so. When Nobuse eventually comes knocking on the front door of the store, Shinichirou tries to get up to go open it, but Aiko sits him back down and asks him not to.


Preview




It was a little weird for them to repeat the same scene (of Shinichirou going to Hiromi’s room) from two different points of view without much transition in between. It certainly confused me for a moment because I thought that Shinichirou had gone back to her room or something. There weren’t even any huge revelations the second time around either, so I really don’t know why they decided to do it that way. At best, it was a lot of time spent to reinforce the fact that Hiromi wasn’t happy with what she considered to be meddling. What’s more interesting is that Shinichirou screwed up - if he had kept his mouth shut, then Jun could have continued on not knowing who Hiromi was. Shinichirou instead now has to deal with Jun going after Hiromi (and probably in a playboy way since Jun doesn’t appear truly to have feelings for her). There’s also still the nagging issue of Hiromi’s mother and Shinichirou’s mother, and this episode did little to clear that up.
Anyway, what I liked most about this episode is how it ended. I think I’ve said this before, but they’re really good at finishing with a cliffhanger moment, and this week was no different. I’d love to see how Aiko explains her way out of this. I get the feeling that she really wants to give the sweater to Shinichirou, and I can’t help but root for her even though she’s got the least chance of ending up with him. If the preview for next week is any indicator, Shinichirou will probably find out the truth about her feelings soon.