Horimiya: Piece – 09 – Let Them Eat Cake

This week focuses more on the faculty of Horimiya, primarily Yasuda-sensei. This is unfortunate, since Yasuda-sensei’s whole deal is he harbors an inappropriate love of high school girls, and this is always played for comedy. While the age of the source material is partly to blame (2011, when most people still used flip phones) and I’m a big fan of Tsuda Kenjirou, this never doesn’t feel gross and wrong.

Fortunately, he gets some degree of comeuppance throughout the episode as his authority is undermined and he is mocked by students and chastened by his fellow teacher, the long-suffering Terashima-sensei. When he’s sleeping in the lounge, two third years give him little pigtails, which cause his class to roar with laughter once one of them (a tardy Yuki) points them out.

The skeevy Yasuda is contrasted with the more harmless Nakamine-sensei, whose only crime is being forgetful when it comes to keys (along with names and faces). Yuki decides to help him out by sewing the hole in his lab coat pocket. Why they do this in a dark classroom, I don’t know, but both Yasuda and Tooru are outraged.

When Tooru sees Yuki about to take Nakamine-sensei’s hand in hers, he can’t help but bang on the glass, alerting them to his presence. He later learns she was reading his palm, and proceeds to read his as well. Tooru is happy Yuki is holding his hands, but isn’t aware that the whole reason she keeps a sewing kit on her is that he loses so many buttons.

Izumi, Tooru, and Shuu meet up for special “guy’s time” and start describing what sounds like a dirty magazine, but turns out to be a giant cake when Yasuda tries to catch them red-handed. The prospect of them scarfing down a cake in a dark classroom is hilarious, because it underscores what innocent dorks they all are.

But this still lands them in trouble as a big cake somehow isn’t allowed. Yasuda gets more than he bargains for when the three team up to pepper him with questions about his living situation and love life. He tells them he won’t let them visit him unless they bring the girls, which, again, isn’t really funny.

Sengoku is in a spot when he ends up locked in the StuCo room with a “slumbering demon”, i.e. Kyouko. When she wakes up she’s cross, but calls the number on the student handbook and they’re let out by Yasuda. After they both use the restroom, he asks if they were up to anything unsavory, and suggests they strip in order to prove they weren’t.

Fortunately for Kyouko and Sengoku, Terashima-sensei is still there, and lets them go while she deals with the pervert. The next day Yasuda has been reformed to the point of brainwashing, but the episode declares that he’ll be back to normal tomorrow. I’d prefer if he lost his job for his inappropriate comments, but hopefully the remaining eps of Piece contain as little of him as possible.

My Happy Marriage – 02 – No Apologies

Miyo’s first encounter with her enigmatic fiancé Kudou Kiyoka is a chilly one, in which he lays out his primary directive: obey him no matter what. And while I just met him too, I could tell he was taken a little aback by just how submissive, even downtrodden Miyo seemed.

After years of sparse accommodations and sparser affection, Miyo feels unworthy of  her new spacious room and luxuriously vast bed. Her subconscious reinforces that feeling, and she dreams of when she learned that unlike every other member of her family, including Kaya, she did not possess supernatural gifts.

It fell to a servant to give Miyo emotional support. Miyo wakes up from those bad memories and consoles herself with the fact she’ll never again wake up in that place again. She also surprises Yurie by getting up before her and making Lord Kudou breakfast. Yurie admits she’s getting on in years and will never turn down help.

But disaster strikes when Kiyoka decides to institute a hard line when it comes to breakfast. As soon as he hears Yurie didn’t make it, and Kiyo hesitates to take a bite, he assumes the food was poisoned, and leaves without eating it. Miyo is devastated; she tried to be useful, in part so she wouldn’t be thrown out on the street, only for it to end in failure. The anguish in Ueda Reina’s vocal performance is palpable.

When we’re with Kudou Kiyoka on his own, we learn why he’s so strict and curt: he’s the commander of an “anti-grotesqueries” squad of gifted soldiers who protect society from ghosts and demons. After training his far more laid-back adjutant makes a glib joke about his boss’s string of fiancées, but Kiyoka isn’t in the mood.

Meanwhile, Kouji is treated not so differently than the help by his fiancée Kaya (Sakura Ayane really chews the scenery with Kaya’s stark villainy). Kouji is still sore about how things went with Miyo, and decides that he’ll do whatever is necessary to help her if she ends up on the street, no matter the consequences.

Miyo greets Kiyoka with a full bow of contrition, and he clarifies that he wasn’t actually suspicious of him poisoning him; he simply didn’t want to eat the food of someone he didn’t know. She accompanies him to a dinner made by Yurie, but there’s no food for her, because she wasn’t hungry. He also wishes she wouldn’t apologize so much.

When he goes to heat water for his bath with his pyrokinesis, it’s another sign to Miyo that she’s as useless here as she was at her previous home. But then Kiyoka returns, apologizes for refusing her breakfast, and asks her to please make it for her next time.

He offers her the use of the bath as the water is still warm, and as she bathes, Miyo’s mood improves, remembering Yurie saying that Kiyoka actually has a kind heart and sweet temperament. Clearly, he’s quite skilled at hiding it behind a curtain of steel and ice!

The comfort Miyo gets from her soothing bath is all but undone by another dream of her past, when all of her mother’s mementos were tossed out by her evil stepmother. When she confronts her stepmother, she’s physically assaulted then locked in a storage shed to “reflect on her actions.”

Miyo’s father stands by and does nothing, it’s again a servant who tries to stop this heinous treatment of an innocent little girl. The stepmother, drunk with power, declares she can do whatever she wants, and the servant is fired. When she wakes up, Miyo feels grateful to that servant, whose name was Hana, and hopes that wherever she is, she’s happy.

Breakfast Round Two goes much better. Yurie wakes up earlier than expected, but can tell Miyo wants to make breakfast for Kiyoka, so she merely assists. Kiyoka takes a sip of Miyo’s miso and is approving of its novel flavor. It’s the first time Miyo has been complimented in years, so of course she’d get teary-eyed.

While being dressed by Yurie, Kiyoka decides he’ll investigate the Saimori family while asking Yurie to keep a close but discrete eye on Miyo. He cannot fathom how a thin, sickly girl with a tattered kimono and the rough hands of a servant came from a predigious family. If she did, her day-to-day life was clearly substandard in some way.

He doesn’t know the half of it, but I hope he finds out and exacts punishment on those who wronged Miyo. But trouble is on the horizon as Miyo’s father gets an angry phone call from Kouji’s father about whom Miyo should be marrying.

It’s not hard to fathom Kiyoka’s previous fiancées running to the hills due to his not-so-winning personality. But Miyo has already endured far worse personalities, so he actually comes off as warm and kind by comparison. As talented a magic user as he may be, he has a lot to learn about expressing his emotions, just as Miyo has a lot to learn about valuing herself. They seem well-suited to learn from one another.