天下制覇

Watanuki hits all the high points!

Impressions:

An alright episode I suppose. It was marred by the fact that Kohane’s mother’s mouth is apparently filled with gigantic teeth so whenever she yells, you just get to see a wall of white. Seriously… is she a whale? Does she strain food through those things? Did they forget that people have pink mouths… not white? Does she bleach the inside of her mouth? These are important questions! 

I also kind of hate Kohane’s VA. Her voice is entirely too nasally and whiny. Kohane is a confident and highly mature character. Instead, she sounds like… well… someone broke a straw off in her nose. Not too much to talk about in the episode though as it was mostly the introduction to Kohane and her crazy mother. The hints about Himawari’s EVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVIL SECRET were already pretty strong in the manga, but they’re adding even more stuff to drive it home like a sledgehammer, which is amusing because they basically ignored all of it in the first season since they probably thought they wouldn’t make it this far. OOPS!

I’m not certain what to think of next week’s preview either. All it showed was the mah jong game that Yuuko, Doumeki, Watanuki and Mokona play to ease the ghost’s passage on from the world of the living. As I recall, that’s just a very short chapter and doesn’t contain anything particularly interesting in the grand scheme of things outside of a couple Akagi jokes. Oh well, the time of reckoning fast approaches for Watanuki’s crush on Himawari.

What? No recap? BLASPHEMY! FREAKING BLASPHEMY!

Doumeki walks as the sakura petals fall. Watanuki was waiting for him. 4/1 arrogantly greets him, saying that he knows Doumeki’s dark dark secret. Doumeki frankly admits it. They used to dress boys as girls to make them stronger, duh. Watanuki gets cranky from being cockblocked in his emasculation attempt.

At lunch with Himawari, she thinks that he might have been cute. Doumeki is still shameless. Doumeki’s family is amazing, right?! Himawari thinks that the dream about Doumeki’s grandfather was pretty amazing. He tells them that people say he looks a lot like his grandfather did when he was young.

A sakura petal falls on Himawari’s lunch and the image of her grandmother suddenly jumps to her mind. Watanuki jolts her out of her distraction for strawberry tarts.

Flashback to cleanup at the store. Yuuko thinks it strange that he’d buy a nightmare, but since it’s Himawari, he’d do anything for her. Yuuko asks what it is about Himawari that he likes. She’s cute, and kind and… EVERYTHING. Yeah, I’m sure the rack never occurred to you. Yuuko wonders aloud about Himawari.

Back in the present, Himawari tells 4/1 that it’s really delicious. Doumeki demands more. Himawari, ever the child of modern culture, changes the subject to a TV show that she saw about a medium. An elementary school girl who can communicate with the dead. Watanuki protests that Yuuko says they’re mostly tricksters, but Himawari thinks there may be something more to it. She’s supposedly going to do something with a woman trapped in a sakura tree on the next episode.

4/1 thinks that such scary stories don’t suit Himawari, but in a SPARKLING DISPLAY OF JOY, she loves them! But… if you could see such things, you’d be really troubled. Doumeki steals more food in the distraction.

Later, Himawari and 4/1 walk home together. He complains. She says that Doumeki must just love his food. They come upon a giant sakura tree shedding petals. There’s a girl standing beneath it, looking up. Watanuki looks at her in shock. She turns to Watanuki as he walks up.

At the last second, a woman puts herself between them and yells at him to stay away. He recognizes her from the TV, right? Stay away or he’ll corrupt her.

The girl tries to talk to her mother, but she doesn’t listen. The girl reaches for her, but her hand gets slapped away. Her mother asks what it is. She tells the girl it’s time to go home, and starts to put her arm around her, but the girl steps forward away from her. As the girl passes, she tells Watanuki that he’s someone that understands.

Himawari runs up to act as the mistress of exposition, explaining that it’s the girl she saw on the TV.

Watanuki later tells Yuuko about the girl that he met.

She just repeats what the girl said and asks Watanuki what he’ll do. He says that he doesn’t know, but he feels like they’re the same and that he’ll meet her again. Yuuko admits that the girl really does have power, and wonders what her interest is in Watanuki.

Rains falls. Doumeki reads on the steps. Watanuki begrudgingly shares the lunch with him since Himawari’s busy… but he’s already eating.

Doumeki tells 4/1 that he saw the girl under the sakura tree through his right eye. Watanuki spazzes out about his privacy, but Doumeki says that he can’t see everything.

They go over various things, and figure out that only things that Watanuki thinks are important, or that impact him greatly, are what Doumeki can see.

Watanuki walks home in the rain. He passes by the sakura tree again, and the girl is standing beneath it, staring up. He trots over and shelters her under his umbrella. She notices him finally and says that he’s the same. She felt that she’d meet him again here. The sakura petals swirl around her.

She wonders what to do about that woman… a ghost inhabiting the cherry tree. She’s not harming anybody, but if she forces it to leave the sakura tree it loves, it’ll be sad. On the other hand, it’s what the television people want. It never did anything to anybody, just made the sakura petals bloom. But now, because she came, everything is going to be ruined.

Watanuki says that if there’s anything you can do for anybody, that you should. He invites her to walk with him.

As they walk, he holds the umbrella over her, letting himself get drenched. They come to Doumeki’s shrine. She looks around it in surprise. It’s nice. They look at a huge cherry blossom tree blooming there. In a gust of wind, the ghost appears and finds its new home.

The girl says that she has to go or her mother will worry. Watanuki apologizes for forcing her to wait for him in the rain. He gives her his umbrella, telling her she can return it when they meet again. She thanks him. As she walks off, he calls to her, asking her name. Introduce yourself first, you pedophile. She’s Tsuyuri Kohane. He introduces himself as well, finally and they exchange naming nomenclature. HOW ROMANTIC. "Kohane-chan" sounds so… nostalgic to her.

They wave goodbye again and Watanuki stands in the rain like a dunce. Doumeki appears behind him, wondering if idiots will catch colds… even twits like Watanuki. He puts the umbrella over the twit.

Inside the house, Watanuki slips into Doumeki’s clothes and has tea with him. SEXY SLASH FANFICTION TIME! Nah, more eye talk. Doumeki can see the ghost through his eye. Watanuki asks what his parents called him… "Shizuka" and Watanuki says the same… but Kohane’s mother didn’t call her anything.

Kohane makes it home. Her mother yells at her, what would happen if she had caught a cold or lost her powers? Kohane just looks up silently… and then says that she went to the sakura tree. Kohane ignores her mother and keeps walking. The phone rings, distracting her. As she argues on the phone, Kohane looks through the house, at the carefully prepared food, and the expensive things in her mother’s room. She closes the door to her own room and hugs the wet umbrella close. "Watanuki Kimihiro…"

Watanuki watches the rain from Doumeki’s house.

Preview:

RON!