That was a big step forward – or backward, depending on how you look at it.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Mix has been building to this point in the story since the very beginning.  Yet I find myself at a loss about whether to even talk about it.  The train has finally switched onto that third track I talked about last week.  But at this point Mix viewers – and while there aren’t many in the West, it’s a weekly fixture in the Japanese TV ratings top ten – likely fall into two camps.  They’re the same as always – those who’ve read/seen Touch and those who haven’t – but that’s never been as important as it is right now.

While I have both read/watched Touch, my memories get a bit fuzzy.  Hell, they’re even fuzzy about Mix, since it was so long between seasons and I lost track of the manga with scanlations at a crawl.  But the extent to which this title is a cultural icon in Japan can’t be overstated.  Some young’uns don’t know it, but basically everyone of a certain age or older either knows the series by heart of heard about it from their parents utiil they feel like they do.

The identity of the “scary stranger” is the point, of course, and those people will have known for certain as soon as they heard him speak (if not sooner).  But Adachi isn’t naming names (yet), so I don’t guess I should either.  Including the seiyuu’s (though he strikes me as hard to misidentify) as that would be a dead giveaway for a lot of folks.  It begs the question of whether Adachi and the anime staff are assuming viewers are treating this as a true sequel to Touch, or writing for the benefit of new viewers as well.

The scary stranger – I’ll go with that for now – clearly has some issues.  He seems to have a flashback to a traffic accident (and Nishimura Sr. and Jr. are having nightmares about him).  This being an Adachi series these are the most dangerous roads in Japan for pedestrians, and Otomi almost gets hit by a car after Touma sends her to buy a “small” birthday cake for Koma-kun.  The scary stranger saves her, and she suffers nothing worse than a skinned knee.  S.S. is unhurt too, amazingly, but he has scars all over his body and suffers from amnesia.  Under the circumstances the Tachibanas can’t leave him to walk the streets, so he comes home with them.

Now, having fallen behind on the manga I have no idea why the scary stranger is in town, even if I know his identity.  He provides a link to the past, that will be obvious to everyone, and he has some sort of connection to Meisei High School.  He also has very good luck with at least some things, because he buys a lottery ticket and wins ¥1 million on his first try.  And he has Otomi to bail him out when he’s about to be arrested for hanging around outside the school (people are seriously busybodies in Japan, that’s 100% accurate).

This is almost surely more than a trip down memory lane – the connections to the past seem certain to come into greater focus than they ever have been.  And I’m ready for it.  The characters in Mix are certainly interesting enough to carry the story without the hook, but the hook is there and as long as we know that, it gives everything that happens before it’s acknowledged a sense of preamble.  Adachi isn’t getting any younger and neither are we, so if Mix is going to be a Touch sequel we may as well get down to brass tacks.