Skip and Loafer

Episodes 8-9

As much as this show has been about the people you meet and keep, it's important that episode eight showed us the flip side: the people you've known and need to throw away. We've been aware that Shima's home life is more thorns than roses without actually hearing about the specifics, but that all changes here. The fact that he has a much younger brother with whom he barely interacts suggests either that he was made to feel extraneous to the family when he stopped trying to please his mother by acting, or that one of his parents remarried and had another child – a child he feels they love more than him. He's very much on the outside of his family, and he's visibly shocked when Mitsumi suggests that the mere fact of a gift from him would please his little brother, which says a lot.

Then there's Ririka, who seems like the ultimate black hole of an acquaintance. She's holding something from four years ago over his head like a blade, blaming him for ruining her reputation and making her prey to a more jaundiced public eye. She followed him to some party where alcohol was being served when they were in the sixth grade, and the mere suggestion of underage drinking haunted her career, not his. Whether that's because he'd already stopped acting or due to disgusting "boys will be boys" attitudes isn't clear, but Ririka isn't willing to let him be happy because of it. We don't know enough about her yet to fully understand her motives here, but it seems possible that she's afraid that if she stops holding this over him, she'll lose him altogether. Her snarky comments about Mitsumi could indicate jealousy – not romantic jealousy, but jealousy that he's been able to move on with his life. But the sad truth is, as we see in episode nine, he hasn't been able to move on. He's burdened by his past and Ririka's actions to the point he can't do anything he wants—even having dinner with Mukai. Mitsumi, he feels, is out of reach, even as she worries that he's slipping away from her by sinking into his anguish. In Shima's mind, he embodies one of my favorite lines from the play Inherit the Wind: "Maybe it's you who've moved away by standing still."

The really sad (and frustrating) thing is that they could connect if they'd just reach out. Mitsumi isn't going to keep walking forward without trying to pull Shima along with her, but he seems afraid that he doesn't deserve it. However, Mitsumi isn't someone to wallow, and that's one of her great strengths. When Fumi tells her that she's now dating the guy she had a crush on, Mitsumi's first reaction isn't concern about losing her friend; it's a genuine joy for Fumi's happiness. She doesn't expect everything to have stayed the same back home while she was away—she's just ready to roll with the changes and enjoy. While she may have serious plans and tend to map out her future, she's also not stagnant. If Shima allows her, she'll always be there to help.

It's something she gets from her aunt. Episode eight explicitly reveals that Nao is trans if you hadn't picked up on that yet, and from where I'm sitting as a cis woman, her portrayal feels very solid (please correct me if I'm wrong). No one makes a big deal out of it, and even when Egashira realizes that Nao is a woman despite looking like a man when they first meet, she just accepts it and moves on. It certainly helps that Nao is exactly the adult Egashira needs in her life because the poor girl is struggling to find out who she is and how she wants to present herself, not in a gendered sense, but in terms of finding her emotional truth. That's a plain old human experience, and Nao is sensitive enough and observant enough to express things in a way that Egashira can understand. It feels like no one has ever done that for her before; all of her life advice seems to have come from magazines. Nao, as a stylist, can speak familiarly but with the added benefit of being a caring person. She's the voice Egashira can and needs to hear.

The Shima drama makes these two episodes feel heavier than the ones that came before. That's okay because we needed to know what was going on in his life for his relationship with Mitsumi to move forward. Episode nine's beautiful scene of Mitsumi crunching on a watermelon while images of her hometown play serve to ground us in the present. Now that she's back in his life, he can consider moving forward.

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Skip and Loafer is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.