It certainly wouldn’t be news to say that anime really needs more jousei adaptations. They dance to their own tune, and nothing else scratches the same itch. It’s one of many reasons why the demise of NoitaminA (it still exists but in zombified form) is such a blow to the medium. It wasn’t anime’s only venue for jousei but its most reliable one, both in terms of quality and quantity. Production committees just aren’t much interested in it – they don’t see vast riches dancing in front of their eyes at the prospect of bringing jousei to the screen. When they get adaptations these days, they’re almost always live-action.

The striking feature of Ikoku Nikki so far is its aversion to histrionics (call it the anti-shoujo if you like). We finally did get an emotional breakthrough for Asa this week, but it didn’t come from the source you might expect. Asa has proven to be a remarkably closed-off person so far. Not even going to her old home managed to put a crack in her facade. Even as stoic Makio was waxing poetical about going through a dead couple’s things, Asa was blithely sorting out favorite tableware and exclaiming over a jar of pickles found in the fridge. Makio may profess to have hated her sister, but the cleaning session brought a more overt reaction out of her than Asa.

One thing that stands out is how unsettled Makio was at finding Minori’s old school uniform or a frumpy shirt in her closet. There are evidence that she didn’t know the woman as thoroughly as she was convinced she did. That Minori would be capable of surprising her cuts against a core belief of Makio. And one senses that her burning resentment of her sister has been a major driving force in her life, an eternal flame burning inside her. She’s taken Minori’s daughter in and clearly finds her to be a worthwhile person, but so far has not reconciled this disconnect in her  mind.

Asa, meanwhile, is a sphinx. She accidentally refers to her mother in the present tense and where in the typical drama that would have been the thing to start the waterworks, in Ikoku Nikki it launches into a grammar lesson (that observation about Present Perfect Continuous being a sort of eternal plane of existence was rather profound) from Makio. She keeps telling Asa that her feelings are her business and no one else’s, but Makio clearly understands that the girl’s total lack of emotional response to her parents’ death is probably far from healthy.

What finally breaks Asa down is not grief over her parents’ fate, but her best friend Emiri (Morohoshi Sumire) telling her mother about it. Emiri’s mom tells the school, and their homeroom teacher tells everyone. This shatters the bubble Asa has built around herself at school, where she can pretend everything is normal. She allows herself to feel grief and anger over the destruction of her social status and the loss of her safety zone. And naturally she takes this out on Emiri, who’s beside herself with guilt over what’s happened. Asa storms out of her graduation and finds herself unable to remember the way back to  Makio’s apartment.

In the first place, adults – teachers included – can be incredibly insensitive to the emotional needs of kids. Emiri screwed up but it was a good faith lapse in judgement – the mother and the teachers should have known better. Makio has to come rescue Asa from somewhere around Nakano (I have no idea how far afield she actually was). She brings Asa home and prescribes a foot bath. At this point Makio has to slip into a very unfamiliar and uncomfortable role for her. She knows Asa is in a vulnerable state, and she has strong ideas about her not doing anything in the heat of the moment that she’ll regret for the rest of her life. But she’s also a devoutly hands-off guardian and hard-core introvert who doesn’t want to dictate to Asa how she should act or feel.

I’ll say this much – Makio does extremely well under the circumstances (perhaps unrealistically so, but it’s organic enough to the moment). Here’s the thing – unless you’re one too,  you can’t understand how hard it is for someone most comfortable in their own company to let someone else into their space. When Makio moans “Mendo!” at having to be a parent she’s not just whistling dixie – she’s expressing her deepest feelings. She’s not joking when she says “that was a full day’s worth of talking”. Asa can’t possibly know what a selfless and existentially disquieting thing Makio is doing by inviting her into her life. One day she probably will, and she’ll be incredibly grateful for it. But that’s a path for Asa to walk on her own, not at the end of Makio’s leash.