Only two more weeks now until Adachi withdrawal officially sets in.  It’s been nearly a decade between adaptations for him, so one gets past it – but Mix has re-lit the fire for me in a big way.  It’s not flawless – and certainly not on a level with the seminal masterpiece Cross Game.  But for sure Mix is quintessentially Adachi – arguably too much so at times, but that essential familiarity both scratches the itch and makes the eventual emptiness when the series is over that much more painful.  We can dream of H2 adaptations or (in my case) Touch reboots to fill the gap, but the reality is that itch isn’t going to scratched again for quite a while.

The essence of it for me, really, is that nothing in anime satisfies in the same way an Adachi series does.  Other great shows (better than Mix, a few of them) will be out there, and sports anime are hardly extinct even if they are semi-endangered.  But this is an author who’s become his own brand in the best way possible, and you can’t find anything else like him on the shelf.  This episode was pretty straightforward, really – a tense battle sequence, a flashback, a totally random crime sequence – but the whole is somehow more than the sum of the parts.

An Adachi hero must be many things, but ultimately he must be just that – a hero.  That’s both old-fashioned and simple but I think it’s at the heart of the Adachi appeal.  Kitamura Kou is the archetype for me, but Tachibana Touma brings the requisite C.V. to the table.  He’s humble without lacking confidence, he’s at his best in big moments, and when the situation demands it he always has another gear he can shift into.  I love the way the still-green 1oth-grader goes about his matchup with Japan’s greatest high school pitcher.  In the first, he matches Mita Hiroki by striking out the side, making a statement that needs to be made – he’s not intimidated by Mita or by the mighty Toushu.

That’s a rush, but the essential Touma is the boy that we see from the second inning onwards.  Having made his point, he does what needs to be done – let’s Mita have the flash and relies on the impeccable command he can display when he doesn’t go all-out for power to keep Toushu off-balance.  Mita is certainly trolling his coach when he keeps parroting the “until we get 4 runs” line back in his face, and both know it.  But the fact is, a 10th-grader doesn’t have the sheer physical resilience of a 12th-grader, Touma has already pitched a lot more in this tournament than Mita has, and in truth even should the need arise there’s no Meisei bullpen to back Touma up.  They’ll go exactly as far in this game as he can carry them and no farther.

Touma’s ability to pitch to weak contact and mitigate his pitch count is surprising to everyone but him – even to Souichirou and Ooyama-san a little – but it doesn’t make it any easier to score off Mita.  Meisei does manage to slap out a couple of hits in the first six innings and Sou hits a deep foul to right (in the end, it’s just a strike) after playing possum in his first two at-bats.  But Meisei never really looks like scoring, and in watching Touma and Mita on the mound it really does look a man against a boy, even if the boy is matching the man zero for zero so far.

About that flashback…  They’ve actually proved some of the more emotionally potent moments in Mix, and this one was no exception.  And that random crime sequence is classic Adachi – he always manages to wedge one of those in to nudge the plot along, never mind Japan being a country with a comically low crime rate.  Tsukikage-san always seems to turn up an odd moments, and while her current business in town is a mystery, what’s abundantly clear is that she’s certainly not a baseball fan.