I’ll go the mat on this: A Sign of Affection acts much more like a seinen romance than a shoujo one.  I’m not one to get too hung up on demographic labels, but there are differences in the way those two tend to approach relationship challenges.  I’ve been proven wrong on some assumptions I made about this series and where it was headed, and at one time I might have expected it to approach the events of this episode with more theatrics.  But considering the subject matter, things were pretty low-key.

Yuki has her job interview at last, and naturally she’s nervous about it – it’s her first, after all.  That leads to an amusing conversation with Itsuomi where he’s the one making her nervous with his lack of distance (though she’s not complaining).  She asks him if he’s ever nervous, and you can tell from his reaction that the idea never even occurs to him.  The answer he gives – freaking out when he thought the ship he was on was going to sink – is exactly the sort of answer someone who never gets nervous would give, because that’s what they think being nervous means.

There are also a couple of quiet asides about how situationally challenging being hearing-impaired can be.  Yuki goes to the supermarket for her mom and heads to the line where her normal signing check-out clerk is.  But another comes and grabs her basket (I have seen this happen here, as pushy as it seems).  He’s wearing a mask, which obviously makes it impossible for her to read his lips.  She freezes (in truth I would have thought she’d be used to extracting herself from that sort of situation) and Oushi – coincidentally nearby – rushes over and bails her out.  The clerk was only trying to do his job here, but not for the first time it strikes me that the pandemic has to have made things a lot harder for people in Yuki’s situation.

To give Oushi a little credit, he does seem to have taken away from his kidnapping by Itsuomi that he has to try to not be such a dick.  At some deep level there is a spring of good intentions in his attitude towards Yuki, as misguided as he is.  I’m skeptical that he can ever move past his perception of her as a helpless waif or a piece of delicate china to be protected, but this is really the first time we’ve even seen him make an effort.  Yuki’s advice?  “Be more sincere”.  Considering he’s been pining for her for like a decade and never said anything (and she’s dense enough not to know), that’s a pretty low bar.  But it’s a start.

As for Shin and Emma, he finally works up the nerve to clear the air with her.  Telling her Itsuomi has a girlfriend is the easy part (it’s not like he’s never had one before), confessing his own feelings the hard.  Again you’d have thought she would have figured this out by now, but apparently Emma took him at his word when he said she was the one person he’d never fall for (because he didn’t want to get between her and Itsuomi).  But it doesn’t get much more unambiguous than “pick me”, so even if she’s not interested that counts as progress, surely.

Finally, Itsuomi comes a-calling on Yuki (who’s already going to bed at 9:20 PM for some reason).  There was something a bit off about him to my perception here.  Why go all the way over to her house just to say “I’m heading out” when she wants to talk (because signing in bad light is really hard)?  And he seemed to be acting a bit odd, but maybe I was imagining things because they seemed fine.  He even told her to pick a spot for their first official date, and not to work too hard and leave some time for him.  I’m assuming her overprotective mom wasn’t home or her running out into the night in her pajamas would surely have raised a few questions…