It was a sleeper going into Fall, but Kekkon suru tte, Hontou desu ka remains the season’s biggest one. It’s going up against a bunch of flashier and more expensive shows, and naturally not getting much attention. But it’s low-key one of the best of the season. The paucity of good anime about marriage is enough of a thing that I did a bespoke article about it, but it would be ironic if the two best examples of the modern era were both directed by the same guy (Ikehata Hiroshi). Kekkon sure tte is obviously very different from Tonikaku Cawaii – this is more about the idea of marriage, and that one about the couple itself. But they share a lot under the hood.

I would say last week’s ep was probably the weakest so far, but still very good. This was another banger, right up there with Episode 2. It put me in mind of Kore-eda Hirokazu – specifically Still Walking. And believe me, for me praise doesn’t get much more elevated. Kore-eda is certainly much darker in tone, but why this put me in mind of him was the extremely naturalistic view of Japanese family life. You feel as if you’re covertly observing these people, and that’s a credit both to the writing and the direction.

For Takuya this trip home is obviously a stress bomb. He has to put Kama in the “hotel” at the vet’s (a kennel, if we’re honest) and both cats and their humans get extremely stressed-out over that. Then there’s the idea of seeing his family (I empathize about the two “scary” older sisters, Takuya-kun), which you sense he’d be stressing hard over even without the whole marriage fiction. His going to Tokyo clearly was a controversial move in the family – everyone else seems to have stayed behind. And it seems as if the men in his clan carry the social awkwardness gene with the women are the brash extroverts. I feel your pain.

As far as what’s going on with the office and that mysterious caller, the jury is still out. How indeed does Gonda know about the trip to Aso? I don’t believe he’s the caller but it almost surely has to be someone at the office. And this call – to Rika this time – was curious. Why blackmail them into going down to Aso together? Is this harasser actually trying to be a wingman? I’m not making any assumptions at this point, and truthfully I think the series could get along fine without this somewhat conspicuous break from realism. But we’ll see where it goes.

The trip itself is pure brilliance, start to finish. Beginning with the plane ride, where Rika opens up about her family. Ostensibly this is for practical reasons, but there’s obviously a much deeper element here. I find the idea that Rika fell in love with maps because she was tracking her mother all over the country as she left her daughter home alone really powerful. It explains a lot about Rika too – why she’s a loner more than a true introvert like Takuya. She may actually be a fairly gregarious person who was conditioned to be shy by her enforced isolation. And a childhood of loneliness deprived her of the practice in social interaction that a more conventional upbringing would have provided.

Then we have Takuya’s family. His paternal grandmother (Arai Satomi) happens to be at the airport delivering melons from the family farm, and gives the couple a ride back. Stopping at her house at the farm, she immediately puts the pair of them to work as Grandpa (Kumamoto native Tajiri Hiroaki, whose only line is “It hurts!”) is laid up with a bad back (again, total empathy on my part). Grandma knows about the supposed engagement, which forces Rika to come clean. Grandma doesn’t force the issue but eventually comes to the conclusion that the two of them actually are getting married (which pretty much cinches that as a future development).

I could have watched hours of this, honestly. Takuya’s “conversation” with Grandpa, Grandma and Rika snipping melons, the pano shots of the Mt. Aso caldera, verdant and green as only volcanic soil seems to make possible. It’s easy, charming, and – again – natural. But there is a reckoning coming, and soon enough Kouichi shows up to help Grandma with shipping (which of course Takuya has already been doing). The family dynamics are a complicated situation to be sure. What’s to happen with the farm? It seems Kouichi is working in the corporate world – perhaps he wanted Takuya to take over?

That’s yet another element I love about this premise. It takes a very non-histrionic view of a huge Japanese societal problem, the flight of the young to the big cities. Grandma talks about the decline of local farming, but not with anger or bitterness. The thing is, Takuya was not wrong to chase his future in Tokyo, but if everyone does what he did what becomes of Aso and all its counterparts across Japan? Families are complicated – we can’t escape them, they’re a part of us literally at the genetic level. We have to figure out how to deal with that as adults, and it’s rarely easy. Kore-eda understands this, and I think Kekkon suru tte, Hontou desu ka does as well.