I must confess I’m finding the second season of Yufukashi no Uta a little less compelling than the first. Equally interesting from an intellectual standpoint, but less emotionally engaging. The arc of the story means there’s less focus on the protagonists living in the moment, and as such it’s all a little more detached. Less  “human” if you like – which squares with the fact that the humans in the story (even Kou) have been a lot less relevant this season. The past being explored is certainly interesting, but for me less so than the present.

Be that as it may the past is certainly relevant. And it got a lot more directly so this week. The notion that Nazuna went to a human high school is sort of curious in its own right. It squares with the idea that boredom is a vampire’s greatest enemy, but one might also speculate that Naz has inclinations different than most vampires. She has a “human side” to get in touch with which they don’t – maybe this reflected some sort of desire to do just that. The fact that Niko is a teacher there is less surprising the more you think about it – it seems like vampires are actually pretty integrated into society in some ways.

This school is – not surprisingly – one that operates mostly in the evenings. A vocational school, and Nazuna and Kou initially sneak in but soon enough reveal themselves to Niko. She lets them sit in on her class and even give self-introductions. Hers is kind of a disaster (and almost a bigger one when she starts to reveal her identity). His is a big hit – an eloquent middle-schooler is quite a novelty for the other students (many of whom are adults). This irks Nazuna to a surprising degree, but she’ll get her own back in the jealousy department before long, and in more substantive terms.

Since Naz bails while Kou is being squeed over by the other students, he winds up walking the hallways alone. In what turns out to be the literature club room he finds a journal sitting on the table (quite a coincidence) by someone named Mejiro. And soon after finds Nazuna’s name popping up in it. It doesn’t take much more reading to realize that Mejiro had a thing for Nazuna, and Niko explains that Mejiro was Nazuna’s very first human friend. This, more than any possible romantic entanglements, has Kou-kun feeling the pangs of jealousy (which I think is quite revealing).

To cut to the chase, Mejiro is Anko, as we discover as soon as Naz starts relating the story. I don’t know that this is supposed to be any sort of secret but Sawashiro Miyuki does nothing to try and disguise her voice. Both these girls were social outcasts in their own very different ways, and it didn’t take long for Mejiro to start feeling something. Nazuna shares that Mejiro’s parents were killed “right in front” of her by a vampire, which certainly seems to explain why she holds a death grudge against them now. But how that came down we haven’t gotten to yet – for now it’s just the two girls playing detective (Mejiro loves mystery novels), and investigating whether her father is cheating on her mother.

What’s obvious is that a lot of what Mejiro was justifying her disdain for her father on was her own teenage angst being projected outward. He seems to have loved her (her birthday was his password – never do that, Kids), so whenever the bad thing goes down she’ll have ample reason to feel bad about it (especially if she never got the chance to repair their relationship). I suppose there’s just the tiniest outside chance that when Nazuna said “killed by a vampire right in front of her” the vampire she was referring to was herself – I don’t think that’s likely, but it sure would be a hell of a twist.