Higehiro

Episode 7

Hoo boy. Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I said that it was pretty darned impressive how Higehiro was able to create compelling and well-written drama out of simple conversation scenes? Well, Higehiro is trying out the same trick with “Yearning”, except the action is almost entirely centered on Suzuha's perspective, as she goes all-in on confronting both Airi and Yoshida about their feelings for each other, Yoshida's feelings for Sayu, and her feelings for Yoshida. The results are…well, there's a lot to break down.

In the melodramatic game of love that Airi and Suzuha (and Sayu) are playing, Suzuha is at the clearest disadvantage. With Airi's case, Yoshida has been obviously and openly infatuated with her from the start, and she has technically reciprocated those feelings with him, though she won't act on them and become a part of an Official Couple™ with Yoshida for…reasons. She and Suzuha discuss the volatile variable that is Sayu, but she put off committing to Yoshida before Sayu was ever a thing, so it's not a very good excuse.

So far as Sayu is concerned, though Yoshida insists he doesn't want to sleep with and/or date her, their bond is still taking the shape of a kind of familial/platonic love…albeit one where Yoshida gets a cute live-in maid/sister-wife out of the arrangement. (We've already spent enough time interrogating the extremely fraught tight-rope that Yoshida is walking by letting this arrangement go on, so I won't belabor the point anymore… for now). Point being, Sayu loves Yoshida like a sexy surrogate father-boyfriend, and Yoshida loves Sayu like a cute and emotionally damaged little-sister substitute. It's complicated, legally dubious, and almost certain to implode in Yoshida's face at some point, but it's a kind of love, and one that he is consciously building on.

Then there's Suzuha. As far as anime harem archetypes go, she's more or less fulfilling the role of The Childhood Friend Who Pines for the Man Who Only Ever Sees Her as a Real Good Pal. Their dynamic is a bit more complicated by the fact that Yoshida is her supervisor at work, and that they're both working twentysomethings instead of doe-eyed teenagers, but the gist of Suzuha and Yoshida's back and forth is familiar to anyone that has played a visual novel or watched a high school rom-com anime made in the past thirty years. Except – and here's what makes “Yearning” so hard to sit through compared to previous episodes of Higehiro – Yoshida really doesn't seem that interested in Suzuha. Like, at all.

In most cliché comedies, even when you know for a fact that the childhood friend type of character is going to lose out to the main heroine in the romantic war for MC-kun's affections, you can at least envision the alternate ending where the friend and the main dude end up together. Hell, it might even be the most popular sub-route in the original visual novel, or whatever! In Higehiro, though, Suzuha's feelings for Yoshida come across as so incredibly one-sided that it actually becomes a little sad to see the girl trying so hard…until that sympathy gives way to irritation when Suzuha starts trying to drop emotionally-charged truth bombs on Airi and Yoshida about life, love, and everything in between.

The whole reason it's taken me hundreds of words to get to the plot recap is that there isn't any plot to recap. In the first scene of the episode, Suzuha takes Airi out to lunch and then proceeds to literally yell at her in public about not having the lady-stones to just ask Yoshida to be her boyfriend already. When Airi tries to explain that it's more complicated than that for her, Suzuha just yells some more about how Airi is stupid for not being threatened by Sayu's presence in Yoshida's life, and so on. Then, when she pesters Yoshida for his contact information, and he basically tells her that he doesn't really know why he'd go out of his way to text her outside of work, she takes that as an opportunity to condescendingly psychoanalyze how his self-esteem issues cause him to be disingenuously nice to people, or what have you.

And look, I get that the show is probably being sincere when Suzuha breaks down Yoshida's personal flaws, and that it is meant to show that she might understand him better than either Airi or Sayu does…but honestly? It's hard for me to read the scene as anything other than Yoshida trying to tell Suzuha that he just doesn't want to hang out with her that much. Our girl straight-up confesses that she's in love with Yoshida, and the best he can do in response is to say, “Oh. Really?” Like, at what point does Suzuha need to shoulder some of the responsibility in recognizing that she's not even the Other Woman in a romantic love triangle, but a fourth wheel that is meddling in the personal affairs of people who never asked for her input, and all in the pursuit of a guy who has probably got too much shit going on in his life to be a great boyfriend either way?

It's messy, but in a way that is more frustrating to watch than entertaining, or romantic. Maybe there's some upcoming development for Suzuha's character that will prove her to be the definitive endgame love interest, or something like that, but it's hard for me to picture after this episode. Truth be told, I'd be perfectly fine if the story ended with nobody falling in love or getting married, since every one of Higehiro's characters would likely be better off taking some time and focus on themselves. At the very least, they could all use a sit-down to hash out some freakin' boundaries.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• I completely forgot to mention that there's a whole bit where Sayu pines for Yoshida some more, accidentally falls on top of him to create some forced awkwardness, and then digs through his old high-school yearbook to learn about his ex-girlfriend. The one thing we learn is that she was also older than him, which I really hope is a sign that Yoshida will continue to not be interested in Sayu, and not some sort of weird confirmation that what he really needs is a younger gal (Ugh).

• Also, Sayu has a super-rich big brother, and he's come to look for his wayward little sister! In what might either be a case of truly horrifying subtext, or simply a bad character design, the guy looks kind of like a cross between Yoshida and Rapey McFuckFace from the convenience store. His name is Kazuto Ogiwara, and his arrival means we might finally learn what drove Sayu from home in the first place.

Higehiro is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.