Episode eight did a wonderful job of wrapping up the cliffhangers left from episode seven and Episode nine was a beautiful piece about the relationship between a Grandmother and their Grandchild that should resonate with almost anyone who watches it. Or, I suppose with a good relationship with their grandparents.
Let’s start with episode eight.
Shoutaro offers to take the personal effects of the passed away teacher to his family. He also manages at last to get in contact with Sakurako and asks for her assistance in dropping the things off. As they reach his sister, we notice a number of things. First off, she was born without the use of her legs and has been wheel chair bound her entire life.
The second thing, the unusual shape of her foot, a trait that showed up often in her family. They go through the things and she asks if there was anything else found…like the bones of a baby.
The baby of her caretaker that had been stillborn and buried shortly after it was born.
So while they found nothing of the sort at the school, they do have a lead on where to look. So they go and dig it up, the music box that contained the bones but along with it they unearth something else. The truth, the truth that the baby wasn’t the caretakers at all but in fact the sisters.
Overall this is a sweet episode that ends with Shoutaro realizing that Sakurako was a student at his school previously. That she studied under Sasaki-sensei and that the cat bones that she took were the partner bones to the cat that she’d previously owned. Wanting to reunite them, since they were barely ever apart in life.
They were both mysteriously poisoned and she brought them to her teacher to see what had killed them when she was young.
I could fly off the handle here about poisoning animals, as a cat owner myself I want to find whoever would do that to two sweet cats and make them offer the pain of a thousand suns! I feel like it’s the series main antagonist…who has yet to show up again, but with the end of episode nine I feel like that won’t be long.
On that note, let’s move to episode nine!
This episode was just sad if you had a loving relationship with your grandparents. The episode was split up into two days, and two stories. Shoutaro’s classmate, Yuriko and the ‘mystery’ of what painting that her grandmother wanted to give her when she got married.
The second half of the episode was about Shoutaro and his own grandmother. How she would always have him get pudding from the same shop when he came to visit her in the hospital after she was diagnosed with cancer.
It was a sentimental and quiet episode with a lot of time given to reflect on the relationship that each character had with their grandmother. As they go through the paintings and what they mean, and say at last that in all honesty. It’s a mystery that is beyond anyone but Yuriko to solve. As it was a promise between Grandparent and Grandchild, only she could know the real answer.
Sakurako says that she can not see the pointlessness of sentimental value in things, and Shoutaro says “Some things have value because they are pointless.”
In the second half of the episode, when Shoutaro is crying. Saying that his visits to his grandmother only contained ‘pointless’ small talk. Sakurako quotes that back at him and my heart almost shattered. As he realizes that his grandmother got the pudding so she could take some medicine as not to appear in pain for him, as she had him get it so she could see the smile it brought him as his favorite.
This episode as I said, is one that strikes home for anyone close to their grandparents and has lost one or more of them.
Then there was the ending credits, OH the ending credits. A character we don’t know, in a broken sounding home. Saying she’s going out to walk the dog, as she goes. She says something about flying away to you, ‘sensei’ and butterfly wings appear on her back.
HNNNNGGG, SO UH, YEAH, GUESS THE PLOT IS GONNA RUN UP AND GUT PUNCH US NEXT EPISODE.
Overall what I can say about these episodes was that eight was nice, and nine was emotional and fantastic. Probably one of the most impactful episodes of the series so far.
~Midnight