It’s no exaggeration to say that I was really looking forward to this episode of Mix, because it was the chapter at the heart of it – and to a lesser extent the prior and following ones – that really closed the deal for me.  This is the passage of material where it felt like Adachi Mitsuru really found his stride, and embraced everything that makes me love him as a writer.  It’s funny – I adore baseball, but I actually love the relationship side of Adachi series even more than the baseball side.  Like I’ve always said – sports isn’t the painting itself with him, it’s just the canvas on which he creates it.

To a larger extent than he did with Cross Game and probably even Touch, Adachi-sensei focused pretty heavily on the baseball side in the early stages of Mix.  Now we see him shift onto his surest footing as the relationships come to the fore, and it’s Haruka that’s at the heart of that.  It’s pretty clear how Souichirou feels at this point, and Otomi (and her entourage of annoying – except Natsuno, who’s the only one chasing her in a non-creepy way – stalkers) – not as clear with Touma.  As for Haruka, she’s been a bit of an enigma up to know and if she doesn’t totally lift the veil here, her invitation to Touma certainly sets the fox amongst the chickens.

Adachi loves riddles, almost as much as puns, and this episode is full of them – starting with the “1-A-O” nom de plume Haruka uses on the letter she leaves in the Tachibana mailbox for Touma (who’s been getting quite a few of them).  The invitation for “just a walk” sounds exactly like a solicitation for a date – though the revelation that she met Touma when they were three years old calls her motives into some question.  She cleverly ensures a positive answer with her prescribed response – “good morning” in response to hers for yes, “anokutara sanmyaku sanbodai” (which I’ll have you know comes from the Sanskrit for “all-embracing enlightenment”, and yes – I did have to look it up) for no.

I have to admit, there’s good chemistry between Haruka and Touma, who she leads on a byzantine course of train rides and country roads to a remote waterfall – and then reveals that she met him when they were three years old.  It was at his mother’s funeral, she threw soda in his face and made him cry because he wasn’t crying, and he remembers none of it.  The sign at the falls is another riddle, as is the notice on the bus stop indicating the bus isn’t running – and let me say, I would be very effing pissed if such a notice were presented in riddle form.  Whoever the locals are, they’re messed up.

I did love the way the anime adapted these events, though not as much as I loved them in the manga – and that’s largely (the casting is part of it too) because it left out two of the funniest Adachi gags ever.  After Touma and Haruka solve the bus riddle following an extended discourse, Touma asks “Was it really all right to spend six pages on that?”  We did get the hilariously self-deprecating comment by Haruka after Touma says he doesn’t have a mobile phone – “How rare, two high school students in this day and age without cellphones.”  Nobody – nobody – does self-deprecation as well (or often) as Adachi, and this shows he reads what people say about him.  But they left out Touma’s rejoinder, which had me helpless with laughter after I read it – “I do not believe it right to be thankful of civilization while at the same time neglectful of culture”.

Once the folks at home have realized that it was Touma that Haruka disappeared for the day with, the reactions are quite telling.  Otomi asks her brother how old they were when they met Touma, Sou tells her she was five – and she responds with “I lose”.  As I said, not much doubt about how Otomi feels – or Nyan-chan for that matter, who in real life would have cut the hell out of his hand after doing what he did.  As for Sou, he plays it pretty cryptic, but he’s not nearly as good at hiding his feelings as he clearly thinks himself to be.

As for Tou and Haruka, they’re stranded in the mountains as darkness falls, with no mobile phones (heh), no konbini, not even a passing car to flag down.  Haruka’s pre-emptive apology is another moment that had me giggling, but eventually (right after her apology in fact) a bus does show up – but it’s no city bus.  Rather, it’s the team bus (and a pretty swanky one) for the Seinan High School baseball team, they of the Nishimura father-son combi.  Things are about to get even more interesting, and the fun is just getting started.