Grisaia no Kajitsu – 04

This week’s Grisaia no Kajitsu didn’t quite know what to do with itself. Was it trying to parody Bakemonogatari with its stoic psychological conversations about life after death? Was it trying to lead us astray with Michiru’s surprise split personality disorder?

None of these new threads play nicely with the panty shots and harem motif that continues to fuel the show. Worse, none of it furthered Yuuji’s assassin plot or the counter assassin plots of the other girls.

Werewolf/vampire talk foreshadowing time…I guess?

While Yuuji is certainly in Episode 3, I argue that he’s just there for our point of reference and that the true central character this week is Michiru Matsushima. Michiru can be funny and her interactions with Yuuji last week (where he started yelling military commands at her and renamed pieces of her hair after military formations) were hysterical.

Not this week though. Last week’s quick and poppy and bizarre dialog was replaced by a slow and dull musing about death…

I get that Grisaia no Kajitsu is setting up a foreboding mood and that we’re supposed to worry about a Michiru possibly having a terminal illness or that someone else could be about to die, but the whole conversation feels like it’s ripping off Bakemonogatari.

And that doesn’t work with Michiru. Not when we see her wandering around in a ‘hair bleech’ haze a few scenes later. She’s too goofy to sell the introspection.

Then we get a few scenes where Michiru’s eyes turn from blue to green and she’s a totally different character and, again, we get a very Bakemonogatari-like scene. In this, the tsundere straight face asks the straight-man what a kiss is like and then they kiss.

As with the death-chat scene, it feels like Grisaia is warning us that Michiru is about to exit the show, via crazy or something else, but I couldn’t take any of it seriously. Well, not with a double personality at least. The kiss scene would have worked nicely without it honestly…

Just the girls watching shark man with a stuffed tuna

Then the black cat that’s been hanging around at the edges of the show since the first episode is run over by a car and Michiru loses her shit.

Set in the back of a taxi, Michiru tries to give the cat some of his favorite treats. He eats a little but then coughs a blood bloom and twitch-dies. It’s a horrific scene, actually.

This gag was actually funny but too complicated to explain!

So was it good? Bad? Something else?

I’m on the fence. Killing the cat was a surprise mood (for most of the episode anyway) and the death scene was handled with a brutality that makes me hopeful that, whenever the assassin stuff finally does hit the fan, it will be spectacular.

However, it was a slow, unmemorable, eye rolling episode otherwise. Introducing a split personality out of nowhere — as a minor side plot — isn’t bold, it’s not a good idea. Yeah I like Michiru but not that much. Not enough for her to get the amount of screen time needed to make such a crazy plot work.