She and Her Cat: Everything Flows – 04 (Fin)

You’re lonely? Get a cat. They live thirteen years, then you get another one. Then another one after that. Then you’re done. —Katherine Olson, Mad Men

The devoutly-Catholic Kathy may only be telling her daughter this in response to learning she and her boyfriend have moved in together with no promise of marriage, but there’s a grim practicality to her advice, and it’s also oddly prescient of the events that close Everything Flows.

To whit: “She”, whom we learn is called Miyu, is lonely after her friend moves out and gets married. Miyu is so lonely and uncommunicative, in fact, her mother fears the worst when she gets a hang-up phone call from her daughter, and races over, which turns out to be a false alarm.

It would seem a concerned Daru inadvertently dialed Mom’s number, but the effect of the happenstance is profound: Miyu’s mother is relieved. Miyu sees her mother for the first time in a while. They share a laugh. Daru is relieved too: Miyu is going to be alright. He was hanging onto life until he could confirm that. When he has, he passes away, quietly, in her arms.

Then, a psychic explosion destroys Tokyo and initiates World War III. Just kidding! But that’s kinda what it looked like. That would have been quite the genre shift!

Naturally, there’s a mourning period for Miyu, whose eye-bags and fetal position recalls another famous, devastating film (only without the drugs). She even feels Daru rub up against her back, the way he did countless times in his life. It’s only a phantom rub, but it doesn’t plunge Miyu into further despair. Instead, she sits up, smiles, and moves forward.

Not wanting to worry Daru any further, she cleans up her place, finds a job, and faces the world with a smile once more. Then Daru apparently reincarnates as a white abandoned cat, which Miyu finds under a bridge and takes in.

But unlike Peggy Olson in her mom’s scenario of a life with three cats to ward off lonliness, Miyu will either need more than three—to combat the formidable longevity of the Japanese—or find a human. Either way, she’ll be fine. The world still moves, and we still travel upon it.

She and Her Cat: Everything Flows – 03

Daru had a rough youth, about which he remembers only bits and pieces: he was a stray along with his mom and three siblings, but after a bird attacked, he was suddenly all alone.

And while the girl may have Daru now, Daru is getting old. Looming over this episode is the fact that one day he won’t be around, and the girl really will be alone in her apartment for two, which she’s seriously let go due to being so exhausted after work.

But more than that, Daru can only offer his particular cat breed of unconditional love and wordless support. But it doesn’t change the fact that the girl was always conflicted about moving out and leaving her mother alone, and now that Tomoka moved out to get married, she feels even more alone and lost.

She has no career, only part-time jobs; no romantic aspirations as she draws closer to the age people marry; and her cat is too old to even jump on the bed to comfort her as she stews in her depression, pleading for help, but with no one who can hear her.

Sure, it could be worse—her sociopathic crown prince brother hasn’t locked her in the palace dungeon—but she’s not doing so hot, and Daru seems like naught but a band-aid on a gaping wound.

She and Her Cat: Everything Flows – 02

This was a brief but lovely, emotionally rich, gently-told story of how the girl and Daru met. A lonely, morose girl who just transferred to school, her busy mother thought it would be a good idea for her to have a companion for all those hours home alone.

Like everything at this point in the girl’s life, she’s initially skeptical. After all, even Daru knew then she had a large hole in her heart he wasn’t sure he’d be able to fill.

Still, Daru does his best to cheer her up, in a very catlike way: presenting her with a still-alive lizard, while breaking a mug her (apparently dead) father gave her. When the girl sees the cat take up precious few moments she has with her mother, she decides it would be best if both she and the cat were alone.

She puts him in a box with some toys and leaves him by the river…only to come right back when some schoolboys spot the box; she just couldn’t go through with abandoning the poor thing. And her change of heart is rewarded when Daru becomes a conduit for her to meet her first friend in her new town, who likes her cat.

A sunset in the present day reminds both the girl and Daru of the day they met. And now, though they can’t understand each other verbally, they’ve gotten to the point they know what they’re thinking.

She and Her Cat: Everything Flows – 01

This is the first installment of a compact four-part short-form anime, and the title says it all: this is about a female junior college student and her fluffy black pet cat. Specifically, the story unfolds from Daru the cat’s perspective, and he does the narrating (In a nice bonus, Hana-Kana is the voice of the girl).

Aside from the furry narrator, the show is highly naturalistic, with both time and space flowing much as it does in our own world. But by giving Daru a human voice (which the girl doesn’t hear, by the way), we are told that his love is not unconditional: there’s actually a good reason he loves his owner.

When we first enter their lives, the girl’s roommate is moving out to be with her boyfriend, leaving her alone with an apartment she can’t afford. She also struggles to find a job to pay the bills, and doesn’t consider moving back home an option. She’s not always happy and chipper. Sometimes, she’s downright depressed.

While Daru thinks there’s nothing he can do to quell her pain, I suspect that’s not true, because pets are a great comfort to their owners. What I’m not so sure about is whether my own cat or my roommates respect or love us for working hard and standing up straight and going out to face the world everyday (more likely they love us mostly because we feed them!) However, Daru does love his owner for those very reasons.

In any case, this was a short, sweet look into the life of a girl and her cat. A heartwarming little watch if you own or like said small furry idiosyncratic carnivorous mammals. Oh, and this may interest Hannah: The girl doesn’t get eaten by monsters at the end…so there’s that!