I’m beginning to wonder if Inuyashiki isn’t a case of false main character syndrome playing out.  If indeed it is, this series is taking it pretty seriously by actually naming itself after the F.M.C., but more and more (and we inly have four episodes left after this week) it’s looking as if Hiro-kun is the true protagonist of Inuyashiki.  He’s certainly the more dynamic of the two leads – Inuyashiki’s personal drama was intense in the premiere, but he’s basically been the same guy ever since.  Hiro has been through a lot of changes by comparison, and he’s also been the one almost entirely driving the plot.

Now, that said, has Hiro himself changed?  That, I think, is not an easy question to answer.  We’ve seen him go from psychopath to loving son to bigger psychopath and now to savior, each shift seemingly in the blink of an eye.  And of course Shishigami is still a kid, so he’s going to be subject to changes of all sorts happening a lot faster than they would with Inuyashiki-san.  Even so, one could get whiplash trying to keep up with this boy – but the funny thing is, I would argue all the sides of him we’ve seen so far are basically reconcilable with each other.

Without a question, the catalyst for this latest shift is Watanabe Shion (Morohoshi Sumire, who’s packed an amazing amount of work onto her resume for someone so young).  Her grandma may or may not have any idea who the boy she’s harboring is, but Shion certainly knows.  Even as she denies that he’s actually the killer, I think she’s only doing so to try and fool herself – she knows.  So why does she apologize for Hiro, lie to herself for him, beg him to stay with her even after he forces her to accept the truth by taking her on a harrowing pre-dawn flight and threatening to drop her?  Maybe she’s in love with him, plain and simple.  Maybe she’s just incredibly lonely, and needs to feel that someone depends on her.

Whatever Shion’s reasons, she certainly makes an impact on Hiro, who promises to stay with her “forever”.  His reasons must be examined too, of course – is he in love?  Eager for a substitute for his mother?  Touched by Shion’s loyalty?  Maybe there’s a little of all that, but what really happens here is that Shion has moved from Hiro’s outside circle to his inside circle.  And as we know, with Hiro that means everything.  But what I don’t think it means is that Hiro feels any genuine remorse for having killed all those people – even the innocent ones he killed “to feel like a human being”.  In his tortured mind I still don’t think he understands why what he did was wrong – he just understands that it made things bad for his inside people, and it must be time to try something else.

Hiro is broken, make no mistake about it.  Seeing that jumper kill himself in the station didn’t break him – it just connected him to the broken soul inside him.  If Hiro has decided to save people now instead of kill them, great – but to him, this is just arithmetic and practicality.  And it makes him feel like a human being, just as killing those families did.  But he’s incredibly naive to think that just because he’s changed his tune, the rest of the world is going to let him go about his business as if he weren’t a mass murderer – even for someone his age, Hiro is disconnected from reality in a very real sense.  If indeed what happened to his mother drove Hiro to declare that he would kill everyone in Japan before Shion persuaded him otherwise, what will seeing Shion killed drive him to?  This little interlude in Hiro’s life was a brief respite, but reality was always going to come crashing back in, hard.  And I don’t envy the rest of the human race when it does.