Hanayamata – 11

In the end, the dream of the five-girl yosakoi club with Hana N. Fontainestand at it’s core performing at Hanairo wasn’t undone by poor planning, or infighting, or stage fright, but a simple but devastating case of horrendous timing on the part of Hana’s mom, who has come to take Hana with her back to the states so they can be a family again. Mind you, that’s another dream of Hana’s, one she’d had before she even met Naru and the others, and strong enough that it wins out.

For the record, I can’t fault Hana for her choice, but I can fault her mom; it simply isn’t fair to abandon your kid due to work, then change your mind just when she’s already found a new form of happiness with her friends in the yosakoi club. Her mom assumes the only thing in the world that matter to Hana is being together with her mom and dad. It’s a classic case of a parent who simply isn’t there a lot assuming time has stood still in her absence, when that’s far from the case.

That doesn’t mean Hana is totally absolved of all blame for her predicament, since she never breathes a word about her friends, the club, or how important the festival means to her to her folks. She simply goes along with the plans that are made for her without speaking up until it’s far too late, when she shows up at Naru’s window regretting not saying anything. Perhaps she was worried she’d come off as ungrateful of her mom returning, and that that might even lead to her mom leaving again.

Both are understandable emotions for a child who yearns for her family to be whole again. Even if she’s hardly been there; even if she chose her job before her family once before, her mom is still her mom. I just wish she’d said something, anything; she may have been able to delay things at least so that she could participate in the festival, and it’s disappointing that she didn’t even try.

But hey, that’s life, and in the end, she sticks with her choice and is indeed out of there. After leaving a tear-jerking letter for her friends, Yaya (ever the tsundere) leads them on a desperate rush to Narita to see her off, and they’re just able to give her a proper farewell.

Thus, even with everything almost to the point as we’ve seen it each week in the OP (they wrote and recorded the lyrics), Hanayamata will be missing their integral “Ha”, the one who brought everyone else together, on the eve of their biggest triumph.