I speculated a couple of chapters back that a logical way for Mori Kaoru to wrap up Otoyomegatari would be for Mr. Smith to visit all of the regulars on a sort of farewell tour, before sailing back to Blighty.  I’m not prepared yet to say that’s what’s happening (who knows if she’s even close to ending the series at all), but there’s certainly nothing so far to make me think otherwise.  Last time around it was Anis and her extended family, and now it’s the twins and their poor little husbands.  And they’re getting on just about as you probably expected.

We haven’t seen Laila, Leyli, Saam and Sami for quite a while, so their return is very welcome.  They’re married now and of course sharing a house (awkward) though there’s no sign of children on the way as yet.  These two boys haven’t drawn an easy straw, that’s for sure – the girls don’t seem to have settled down even as they’ve theoretically settled down.  But married though they may be, these are still children – and that charming aspect of their story is very much the focus of this chapter.

With Henry and his entourage blowing through town on a necessarily short visit, thr twins impulsively (shocking, I know) invite them to their house for dinner.  It’s a chance to show off their full-fledged status as adults, but clearly they’re nowhere near ready for this.  And their mother is aghast at the notion of what will happen if the planning for the night’s festivities is left unsupervised.  So naturally, she supervises – and of course, in a hurry or not, in this part of the world this is not an invitation Mr. Smith can possibly say no to.

After the main couple, this quartet is probably my favorite pairing in Otoyomegatari.  They probably represent a fairly typical scenario in this setting – married in their early teens, playing house for real, figuring out how to be functioning adults on the fly.  The lengthy adolescent stage in the modern industrial world is a luxury humans couldn’t afford through most of their history, and still can’t in many parts of the world.  There aren’t too may characters in this cast that I could see as protagonists in their own series, but these four could definitely pull it off.  Whether the party is something they can pull off, however, remains very much to be seen.