My Happy Marriage Season 2

Episode 20

Even Kiyoka knows that this episode is the calm before the storm. Much as he's clearly enjoying his New Year's with Miyo, his body language and facial expressions tell a much tenser story – the look on his face when he holds his hand out to her at the temple is tinged with desperation, while his wish, for them to be together forever, is honest, it's also a bit anxious. His wish isn't purely romantic; in light of what Naoshi Usui has been up to, it's also a fervent hope that they'll both come through this. Even his actions at the end of the episode speak to his nervousness. He hasn't just come to check on Miyo; he's come to see that she's still there and in one piece. When he pushes her (gently, because this is Kiyoka we're talking about) to tell him her feelings, he doesn't just want reciprocation. He wants tangible reassurance that they'll be okay.

That implies that whatever Prince Takaihito saw, it was bad. Kiyoka has to guard the prince because that's where the military put him, but he seems much more concerned about Miyo, and that may not be just because he loves her, but rather due to whatever the prince's vision showed. Usui may want to take Takaihito out because he stands in his political way, but he's obsessed with Miyo. He's been calling her his daughter, meaning the child he feels he should have had with Sumi, but there's no guarantee that he'll continue to see her in that light. Usui's fixation on Sumi could cause him to conflate Miyo with her mother, which would not be good, to put it mildly. Kiyoka isn't going to let that happen on his watch.

The problem is that it's not on his watch – it's on Arata's. We saw last week that Arata has a very exploitable weakness in the form of his treatment as an Usuba, something that resurfaces this week in a milder form. When Miyo is concerned that he's not enjoying his meal, he responds that he thought he was showing enjoyment, but that years of working under his alias taught him to mask his true feelings. He's very likely telling the truth, but there's more to it than that; it's years of hiding his real identity as an Usuba that taught him to hide in plain sight. Miyo pointing that out drives the fact home in a way he can't ignore, allowing the seed Usui planted to perhaps put out roots. Arata, as we saw before, has been living in the shadows with the promise of Miyo as his glimpse of light. Like Usui, he believed that he would one day be rewarded with her as his wife, and that was held up as the reason for everything he suffered. It's not identical to Usui's situation, of course – Sumi didn't want to marry Saimori, and it was an unhappy marriage, while Miyo and Kiyoka are happy together. But that may only stoke the flames of Arata's unhappiness higher because he's seeing another man receive what he thought would be his.

It's interesting that this view almost takes Miyo herself out of the equation. Arata doesn't really know her, and Usui certainly doesn't. She represents a prize for suffering rather than being a person in her own right, a characterization Miyo herself would almost certainly disagree with, albeit because she'd feel she wasn't good enough to be a reward. But it brings things back to the question of Miyo learning to find herself and discover self-determination, something only Kiyoka seems to understand. Miyo standing on her own two feet is likely the only way this story can be successfully resolved.

Rating: