I have a number of thoughts buzzing through my head after this episode of Hinamatsuri, unsurprisingly.  It was a stunner – and I mean that in the literal sense.  Sometimes an episode makes you think and feel so many things that it’s hard to know where to start reflecting, but I think I want to lead with this: any show that can make me laugh as hard as this one has and then make me cry too, all within the space of half a cour, is something special.  Maybe by all rights it oughtn’t to be based on the premise, but the facts are the facts.

The second thing would probably be this, as it also ties into the idea that Hinamatsuri has really closed the deal.  I think it’s fair to say that the ability to create a really compelling ep without the presence of Hit0mi – who’s the series’ best character in my view – was an important test.  And boy, did Hinamatsuri ever pass it with flying colors.  These were two really solid chapters, yes – a bit of a reversal, with the more comic one coming first and the more serious one second.  But the B-part may have been the best work the series has done yet, which is incredibly surprising for any number of reasons.

The first chapter was interesting in that it touched on the issue of Nitta’s family – and specifically in plot terms, Nitta introducing Hina to them.  That became necessary because his mom called and Hina answered, and needless to say Hina isn’t much of an actress so this is a real problem.  Nitta’s family is a bit nuts, certainly – his kid sister Mika (Honda Nariko) most obviously, but also his mother (Nakamura Kaori).  But they’re not a “crime family” – what Nitta does for a living is the elephant in the room, and obviously not something his mother is comfortable with.

This totally works – there’s good comedy here, both through Hina’s utterly clueless attempts at subterfuge and Nitta’s increasingly frantic attempts to keep his web of lies from collapsing.  But the peculiar tension that arises from the nature of the premise – Nitta is in a business where killing people and stealing are as normal as making copies and sending emails – underlies everything that happens.  Nitta deftly spins from one fiction (that Hina is the daughter of a yakuza brother killed in a gang feud) to another (that she’s actually his daughter) but in truth, his whole life is a fiction.  He pretends to be a nice and normal person with a step-kid who isn’t playing the murder game everyday.  In a sense, Hina’s presence makes it easier for him to live the lie.

For all that, it’s the B-part that stamps this ep as one of the best of any series this year.  If I was to pick a third main point to make after those first two, it would be that I was totally wrong about Anzu.  In my defense I think that misdirect was quite intentional in the way she was introduced, but to say that she and her arc have gone in an unexpected direction is a massive understatement.  It’s not easy to mine genuine emotion from a weekly TV series – it can only be done when the bedrock of it is genuine, and there’s no attempt to pawn off bullshit as real pathos.  And that’s exactly what this chapter was.

It would be hard to overstate just how subversive – and I use that word quite intentionally, because no other will suffice – Anzu’s arc has been.  The homeless are not to be acknowledged as real and decent and important in Japan, a country where the social safety net is supposed to be free of holes and the idea of society placing itself ahead of the individual is everything.  This kind of thing almost never makes it into anime because it just isn’t acceptable – but Hinamatsuri absolutely goes there, and quite fearlessly too.  The homeless here are humanized without being romanticized or their situation sanitized.

I think the part that hit me hardest was when Anzu said she didn’t think she deserved to eat the delicious food her new guardians served her – that was so emotionally on-point it’s scary.  Anzu has learned empathy in a true and profound way, because she learned it from men who had almost nothing to give, yet gave to her continuously.  It’s wonderful that Utako stepped up and found kind people willing to take Anzu in, but the most important thing here is that her main thoughts are with her friends, because they have no one to take care of them.  We can ignore those in need, but that doesn’t mean they cease to exist – and kudos to any series that can remind us of that as eloquently and poignantly as Hinamatsuri did here.  I sincerely hope this isn’t the last we see of Yassan and the others, because I don’t want they or their importance in Anzu’s story to be forgotten.

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