Hyakkano – 09 – Rentarou Family Values

This week begins with a distressing sight: Hakari being told something by her mother…something clearly not good. Thing brighten up considerably at the Lovezono flower part where Rentarou is on a date with everyone. There’s also an annual bouquet toss, and the winner gets to pose with their sweetheart in wedding attire.

This one of Hakari’s childhood dreams, but ever the schemer, she’s got a plan. First, she ensures her fellow girlfriends aren’t in direct competition for the bouquet. They’ll work together to beat the others, then draw lots afterwards. Everyone agrees, Kusuri scales up, and Shizuka serves as cheerleader.

The bouquet toss is serious business. The one who throws it, the Vice Principal, is a champion shot putter, while the leader of bike gang Gorilla Syndicate uses her soldiers as projectiles.

After valiantly shielding Hakari from one of them, Karane demonstrates how easily she can slip into a Yankee persona and grapples with the gang leader, buying everyone time and making them swoon.

One of the gang’s tactics is to use their flags to create a mini-hurricane, which ends up launching poor Shizuka into the sky. Fortunately, that puts her in perfect position to catch the bouquet. Unfortunately, she lets go of the towel sail keeping her in the sky.

Hakari, Nano, and Kusuri try to catch her, but she bounces off their chests, and Rentarou has to save her with a basebal slide. Victory is theres, and so now comes the drawing of the lots … and Hakari knows which one is the red-tipped one.

Hakari’s grand scheme backfires when Nano says they should all draw at once, but luck is on her side, as she ends up the winner anyway. When Kusuri sobs and protests, Hakari’s expression suddenly falls, and she decides to give her turn up. Kusuri thanks her with a hug, but then rejects Hakari’s offer. She loves Kusuri too and wants her to wear the wedding garb.

She does, and she looks glorious, and even sweeter, all six take the photo together, and look every bit like a “Rentarou Family.” Then as the others go ahead, Hakari thanks Rentarou for making her dream to catch the bouquet come true. She only asks him for one more thing … to break up with her.

To quote Anya from Spy x Family: SHOCK! Well, not entirely. That opening scene that played out in the dark and had Hakari looking distraught did not bode well, and I had me presuming Hakari would ask to be broken up with. I’m not even surprised Hyakkano is suddenly taking a darker turn, since it’s already proven adept at balancing zany comedy and genuine heartfelt drama.

Thanks to Hakari mailing him a sexy photoshoot, Rentarou knows her address, and learns she lives in a palatial estate. He spots Hakari in the window and shouts out, only to barely miss being caught by a security guard. Hakari calls him on the house landline, and tells him it’s over; she “fell out of love” with him, and he should forget about her.

We know full well even if Rentarou wanted to, he can’t; he must make all his soulmates happy. He also doesn’t buy her lie. He wants the truth, so Hakari gives it to him: her overbearing, controlling, ruinously wealthy and powerful mother found out she was in a polycule, rejected it, and is pulling Hakari out.

Her mom interrupts the phone call and cuts it short, warning Rentarou to stay away from her daughter, since she can squash a teenage bug like him anytime. When he protests, the security guard carries him away, telling him there are things in the world he can’t change.

When Hakari’s mother (voiced by Uesaka Sumire) threatens to punish Rentarou by senting him somewhere far, far, away where no one will ever see him—knowing full well he’ll be torn from all who love him and not caring—Hakari prostrates herself, begging her mom for mercy.

Rentarou walks home feeling powerless, useless, and awful. But when he looks down and spots a four-leaf clover, all the good times with Hakari come rushing back, and he realizes he’s giving up way too easily. He may not be able to change anything in the world, but he can change this.

That night he meets with Karane, Shizuka, Nano, and Kusuri, and declares his intention to break into Hakari’s palace, rescue her, and go into hiding. All he can tell them is that someday they’ll come back to the rest of them. Karane calls this what it is: some bullshit.

This isn’t just Rentarou’s fight. They all love Hakari, and she belongs to all of them. Her mother is hurting them too. They all agree that they’ll be accompanying Rentarou to Hakari’s house. No doubt Karane will provide muscle, Shizuka literary persuasion and cuteness, Nano an efficient, logical strategy, and Kusuri All the Drugs.

The ending postcard memory says it all: this family is on a mission to retrieve one of their cherished members, without whom they are not whole. Hakari may believe she and everyone else are powerless against her mom’s whims and yen. But I will never bet against this group when they’re at their best. Money can’t buy you love—the most powerful weapon in the world!

Wave, Listen to Me! – 09 – The Ecstasy and Agony of the Man-Child

When Minare gets a friendly text from Mitsuo after her bear attack broadcast, her first instinct is to borrow Mizuho’s laptop so she can Google “how to buy a gun” (much tougher in Japan than the U.S.) with which to shoot him, as she promised herself she’d do.

Mizuho calls for calm, and Minare downgrades her intentions to murdering him socially, via doxxing. When Matou and Mizuho both pooh-pooh that idea, Minare agrees to a date at Mt. Moiwa…with no apparent plan in place. Her only prep involves an “aggressive” outfit and dark red lips, knowing he prefers light pink. It’s the little things!

No doubt Minare’s first question going into the date is What gives with the sudden contact after months of nothing? In that regard, it’s fitting that her outfit includes a sleuth’s fedora. It should be noted that Minare has possibly never looked hotter than she does here, and that’s definitely intentional. It’s provocative, yet also self-conscious.

When they first meet up, she can’t help but blush while thinking how he hasn’t changed a bit. It hasn’t been that long, Minare! He then proceeds to throw her off-balance, first by paying for his own cable car ticket (¥1700 per person—not cheap!), then offering up her favorite torimon, and then handing her a brown envelope containing ¥250,000, half of what he owes her. What gives, indeed!

While pondering the possibility of becoming ensnared in an eternal limbo of debt repayment, Minare’s first word in edgewise is an accusation of infidelity by Mitsuo (she heard from a friend he was walking with another girl). That’s when Mitsuo owns up to the fact he indeed befriended a girl, but totally glosses over the particulars of that relationship and goes straight to the story of her trying to stab him.

Mitsuo is hungry and wants curry, and lets it be known by a kind of specific man-child whine that has an almost Pavlovian effect on Minare. However shlumpy this guy looks and how possibly insincere he’s acting, it’s obvious Minare had legitimate feelings for this guy, and there are parts of him that are still thoroughly disarming.

Here’s someone who planned to kill him when he became an abstract bogeyman, but now, in the reality of their reunion and his M.C.T. (Man Child Terror) field, her homicidal designs all but evaporate. Still, once she hears the details of Mitsuo’s brush with death, it doesn’t take long for Detective Koda Minare to forge a theory about the other woman’s motive: she must have also lent Mitsuo money.

There’s a constant push-and-pull going on throughout Minare and Mitsuo’s date that is both all-too-realistic and extremely fascinating. The pain of his past betrayal and her suspicion over his present motives is always on one end of the scale, rising and falling from prominence as Mitsuo works his practiced Suga charm.

Minare is happy and excited to just be on another date again, after much drinking alone, self-commiserating, and the breaking-and-entering of Oki’s place. She even considers the possibility that even a creature like Mitsuo could change for the better after nearly being offed by the latest victim of his adorkably breezy treachery.

For all his faults, Mitsuo is Minare’s type, whether he’s being “cute”, commenting on her lip color, suggesting they do one activity after the other, demonstrating growth by paying his fair share, or telling her the words “there’s no one better than you.” It must feel so good for her hear words like that from someone with whom she’s shared so much history, both good and bad.

Minare is sufficiently hungry for domestic affection that she slips easily back into the comfort and familiarity of Mitsuo’s place, even reflexively making coffee when they’ve already had a ton of it throughout the day. She also takes comfort in his very specific preferences, like what drink goes best with what food.

But when Mitsuo toasts their reunion and “reconciliation”, Minare’s dormant rage re-surfaces, vowing to keep her heart shut tight until the full amount is paid back. He assures her he borrowed it to be a co-signer for a friend’s debt and always meant to pay her back.

Having presented himself as a Good Guy who helps people in need, Mitsuo’s head finds Minare’s thighs, which he admits he’s missed dearly. Minare, in turn, fishes out the ear pick she left there which is so beloved she gave it a name—Onikirimaru!—and proceeds to clean Mitsuo’s ears “for her own sake and pleasure!”

Since it’s been a while since they’ve done this, she’s elated to find a “gold rush” in there. How adorably disgusting! Not to mention intimate. And despite having planned to kill him only yesterday, she still falls for his upside-down face as he once again points out his preference in lip color, and Minare removes the deep red with a tissue.

It is here, where Minare realizes how Mitsuo’s Man-Child nature seemingly encourages her to take the lead while in reality making her the subservient one. It’s a shtick he probably does without even thinking. But the spell is immediately broken when she spots a strange bit of trash when tossing her tissue.

After a sip of coffee, Mitsuo references the “coffee kiss” they’d often do—another beautiful detail that speaks to the deeply specific intimacy of two former lovers. Minare leans down for a kiss, but stops mere inches from his lips. Suddenly, she’s Detective Koda again, she has Mitsuo in “the box”, and he’s not getting out until she’s heard the unvarnished truth from his un-coffee-kissed lips.

He admits he lost the ¥500,000 at the tracks, but came into the ¥250,000 after helping out the relative of a rich oil executive (again implying his charitable good-guy nature). Minare admonishes him for his get-rich-quick nature, urging him to live more frugally by, for instance, learning to cook.

It’s a lure the Man-Child can’t resist; he assures her everything will be fine; why should he cook when there’s so many good, cheap restaurants? Quite literally taking matters into her own thighs, Detective Koda locks Mitsuo’s face in a leg-lock and shows him the suspicious piece of trash: a free magazine full of recipes with a single dried bell pepper seed stuck to the cover.

It’s evidence not just that someone interested in cooking was in the room, but made Mitsuo’s favorite stir-fry recipe, indicating an intimacy with the other woman he had been concealing from her. No need for a judge or jury; in Minare’s eyes, Mr. Suga is guilty. His sentence is what must be some kind of professional wrestling throw that drives his head hard into the floor.

No longer under the influence of Mitsuo’s smile after seeing him lie once more while wearing it, Detective Koda puts her fedora back on and tells him she’ll forgive the remaining half of the money she lent him. It’s preferable to letting him to betray yet another woman to pay him back.

While she harbored abstract (and ultimately impossible) murderous designs prior to their reunion, this Minare is wiser and more level-headed in her condemnation and handing down of punishment. Mitsuo may be glad to be off the hook for the ¥250,000, but if he was being honest when he said there’s “no one better” than Minare, her refusing to take him back is harsh punishment indeed.

This episode was a thrilling, layered, ultimately bittersweet tour-de-force depicting the games played, battles fought, and lies told behind easy smiles and flirtations of two people. You really get the feeling Minare would prefer being in a happy loving relationship with Mitsuo, but she just can’t trust the bastard, and there’s no indication he’ll ever stop fucking up and lying about it.

As Minare enjoys a decisive moral and tactical victory, the episode doesn’t overlook the bitter tragedy of that. If she’s the hard-boiled private dick in an old noir crime novel, Mitsuo is the “homme fatale”. In the end, her loyalty to the truth and her solidarity with women prevailed.

If nothing else, it should make for a hell of a broadcast…

Wave, Listen to Me! – 08 – The Culture is Maturing

In a heartwarming cold open, Minare rants about how, like mankind throughout history with nature, she’s “lived her life selfishly without thinking about the suffering of others”, with Mizuho being her latest victim (along with a Coelocanth Nakahara and a Dodo Takarada).

But Mizuho speaks up, refusing to be the victim. She’s been told all her life what a nice, helpful, proper girl she is, but it’s not all she is, and it can blind those who think that’s all she is to her actual weaknesses. To Mizuho, Minare isn’t a burden, but a very necessary inspiration.

The two women complement each other almost perfectly, leading me to wish Minare was less jokey about her romantic designs toward her. While Mizuho’s disinterest in one man shouldn’t be seen as a disinterest in all men, so far I don’t see a life partner better for Minare than Mizuho, and vice versa!

And now, back to the studio. We’re back on the night the show opened with: the bear attack segment. Earlier that night, with no ideas of her own Minare is saddled with a “phone conversation with a family member” segment, something which she’s not particularly motivated to do.

The resulting call, however, is hilarious, with her jokester of a dad coming up with increasingly ridiculous origins of her unusual name “Minare”—first because it jumped out at him on the cover of a dirty mag, and second because he combined the first syllable of the names of the three women he was fooling around with before she was born.

When Takarada unexpectedly shows up at Voyager with Makie’s psycho controlling brother, things look primed to turn very unfunny indeed. But when the brother starts ordering Makie around, she manages to stand up to him, and Nakahara even backs her up…though a bit too forcefully, leading to him getting lifted up by his throat and nearly strangled!

We later learn that the brother has a condition in which he enters a kind of ultraviolent fugue state when he senses his sister is in danger. This certainly makes him more of a sympathetic figure but Nakahara is clearly right that he really should seek professional help for it. It’s a miracle he’s never killed anyone during these “fits”!

The bro’s mind is set at ease (or at least his anxiety de-escalated) after a chat on the phone with Nakahara’s sister Maiko about how much help Makie’s been with the baby. Makie returns home to the Nakaharas and I earnestly hope she’s out of danger and the brother gets help soon, but who knows.

Makie may be more naive than the average person due to her extended isolation, but she still knows what she wants, and it doesn’t involve becoming a housewife or jumping between safe houses. It’s even hinted at that her plans for her life may be more ambitious than her hosts. The fact she’s never been assertive enough with her brother doesn’t preclude the fact that she could be if she tried, and when it counts.

Later that night, Minare performs the Bear Attack show, reading at least in part from a hastily but well-written script from Kureko that made it easier for her to do what she does best in the broadcast booth. After the broadcast she makes sure to thank Kureko, who surprises her by saying it’s a “parting gift”; he’s moving on to other things.

Matou hints that those other things involve something called the “Ranzo Arakawa Prize” before we slip into a sepia-toned flashback of a much younger Matou (note the eyebrows) meeting his comedy idol, Sissel Komei. Only Sissels speaks, in what I’m assuming is the Ainu language.

Matou sits all but entranced as she talks about how the Ainu were great tellers of dirty jokes (owing to all the time they had sheltering from the cold)  and the Monty Python style of comedy that’s more about embarrassing yourself than putting others down. She then tells him the name she’d use if she had a child: Mina re, which means “to make laugh”.

Could it be that Matou’s new talent has the same name as his idol’s potential child? If that’s the case, I can understand how he’d feel like finding her in that bar was akin to an act of providence and destiny. Not that I believe Minare and Sissel are biologically related; only in spirit.

We’re also reminded that Minare ended her bear show by promising to murder Mitsuo…who texts her later that night asking if she wants to meet up. All I know about Mitsuo is that Minare claims he stole her money, and that he found another woman after Minare relatively quickly. Suffice it to say I’m eager to learn more about him!

On the whole, this episode not quite as compelling as other recent outings, due in large part to bouncing awkwardly between the A-(Minare) and B-(Makie) plots, not to mention the fast-forwarding of the bear attack, which while practically necessary undermined the episode’s natural pace. Still, it was great to see Makie stand up to her crazy bro, and finally “meeting” Sissel was uniquely captivating. So an “8” it is!