Wait a sec, how’d I miss this episode? x.x It slipped past my torrent radar. Oh well, catch up time: Things are going full-circle now, with the happiness appearing short-lived and characters’ problems and complications coming back. Can Hayami and Takuma make their way out by overcoming even greater challenges? Or is the village doomed to internal conflict?

Status of soul: recalculating

Synopsis

Hayami gets beaten up by Yui’s boys .. and later by Takuma strangely enough. She evoked more guilt upon her family’s name, though, which triggers the whole incident. The next morning, Takuma has lost his eyesight again, only to be told he never had it in the first place. This bothers him excessively … to the point of insanity, it seems. The Kagura elder is his usual self and urges Hayami to leave the village, which ends up being a secret plan to kill her. But Takuma miraculously makes his way to the scene to rescue Hayami.

Impressions

…Huh. Well Takuma never being able to see in the first place explains a little bit why nobody in the village reacted strangely when we thought he could see, although we accepted the village’s low IQ anyway when people hardly questioned the Hinata-Hotaru identity recovery, which is still left unexplained.

However, the villagers still should have noticed Takuma without his white cane … able to walk straight and navigate everywhere with ease for those weeks. Unless all that was part of Takuma’s illusion (and Otoha’s miracle), or we’ll go back to the ignorant-villagers theory.

WAIT. Since when was reverting to Hotaru totally okay with him?! So now it’s Hotaru’s job to marry Takuma and have the Kagura name continue? Perhaps Hotaru’s global “I’m Hotaru now!” declaration affected even her grandfather’s brain. What happened to Hotaru being the ‘worse’ daughter or Hinata having such a legacy after her death? If the villagers can accept this so easily, why can’t they just love Hayami? x.x; =(

Otoha says Takuma keeps chasing death, and I suppose this is true. But the poor kid saw his mom get run over by a train car just a few feet in front of him. (Although the train ought to have derailed a bit, or totally cut her in half into a bloody mess. o.o) That’s rather traumatic, though I guess it’s okay if a drowned girl tells him to put it past him, because she herself is dead.

The recurring sound and sight of the railroad crossing signs makes an interesting impact on what lingers in Takuma’s subconscious. I do agree he does need to put it behind him, and it was starting to work well with his relationship with Hayami. His beating of her really surprised me; I don’t care if he was immediately guilty afterwards. And he realizes he’s blind again the day after. What’s the lesson in that? What is Otoha trying to teach him now? Did Otoha even foresee this even? …Either way, Takuma seems to be the only person still who is able to fix things. He just has a greater challenge now.

What? No cliffhanger? I was so expecting the credits to start after that gunshot, but we get a few more seconds! So Takuma did make his way to Hayami miraculously. He seems to be driven by something else now rather than false eyesight. We’ll let that go for now; the episode ends with him saying he’ll protect his mother. Now Hayami can’t be his mother, although with how twisted this series has become, I’ll believe it if they do say it’s true. The other vague possibility is that Takuma is also a Kohinata, and he’s protecting Hayami at the site of the destroyed Kohinata home, claiming everything is for his mother? ….Nah, he’s probably just gone crazy.

So I still think a character’s death is likely in the final episode, but perhaps not. Takuma would have to sacrifice himself somehow. Hayami’s been in enough danger already just to die next episode. Everybody else is pretty innocent. And I don’t find the elder getting killed either; his chance was right at the end of this episode with the misdirected gunshot. I figured somebody grabbed the second gun to do it, but oh well.

On a separate note, I’ve been liking Yui. She, unaffected by most of the village’s drama, gets to come off as the most level-headed character in the series, even if she’s arrogant and clumsy sometimes. She rescues Hayami at the start of the episode, takes initiative in informing people about her friends’ conditions, and then even thinks to give Takuma a pumpkin later on. She’s weird, I know, but has a good heart.

Hotaru meanwhile rushes to Takuma, saying he’s the only one who can help Hayami. He says he can’t get to her because he can’t see. So instead of her helping him search for Hayami, she slaps him and runs away. Great. The slap was perhaps warranted, but running away wasn’t. All she did was drive him further insane … but I guess it also got him to leave the house and stop the gunshot? Pretty sure that wasn’t in Hotaru’s gameplan, though.

Well just one more left! Can the series have a truly soul-rocking ending? Or will it be so Diet-Pepsi-Twisty (copyright: a classmate of mine) that we’ll be rocking out of utter confusion and disbelief, curled up in the fetal position like Takuma?

~Crisu

No more crying…