Yakuza Fiancé: Raise wa Tanin ga Ii

Episode 9

Last episode, “To Be Honest, I Want to Marry You,” ended with a marriage proposal. As Kirishima and Yoshino plot to take down Ozu and his goons, Kirishima suggests that once he turns 18, the two of them get married because there is nobody else out there who will understand them like they understand one another. Naturally, Yoshino pulls a face and negotiates him down to making a wager where the two will officially date if he wins by dispatching all their opponents before midnight.

This seems as good a point as any to pause and take a look at the ways Yoshino and Kirishima have evolved over the last nine episodes because I think he's right. Both of them have changed remarkably as humans in the time they've known each other. Yoshino is the first person to treat Kirishima like a human, not a wild dog or sex object. Sure, it took some wild antics to catch his attention, but now that they've settled into a comfortable rhythm, he seems to have a much greater interest in the world around him than he ever did before. He hasn't referred to his death wish in months. While it is never the responsibility of one human to fix another, it goes to show that being treated with decency can go a long way toward helping someone be better. She's the only one who sees his humanity underneath all the layers of mess and the only one he can let his guard down around.

Conversely, Yoshino has pretty much dropped her attempt at maintaining a veneer of being an everygirl. She hasn't quite reached the level of being a ruthless murderer/drug dealer/human trafficker, but she is pretty unhinged and willing to pull off some wild stunts to defend herself and the people she cares about. She operates out of her own sense of pride and moral code, and if she were to settle down with someone 'normal,' she would always be forced to deny a part of herself. The part of herself that, for example, rides a bike down a set of stairs to crash into the skull of the petty thug trying to murder her before tasing him. She would always be missing something, unless she chooses to spend her life with a man like Kirishima. Well, staying single is an option, but that's not narratively convenient, so we'll just slide on past it.

Of course, Kirishima is not the only morally questionable man after Yoshino's hand. Shoma almost certainly wouldn't be adverse; Yoshino may only see him as a brother, but it doesn't take a lot of reading behind the lines that his feelings for her aren't exclusively familial. Now, we also have Azami Suo, the man behind the plot to capture Yoshino. Not that I can say with any confidence that his intentions are romantic; he's obviously a scary, dangerous man, as evidenced by the gory scene he left behind after “confronting” the yakuza who were hassling Ozu. His tattoos go so far up the back of his neck that they're impossible to hide, and he wears a surgeon's mask to hide a rather brutal scar. That's right, he's the third man in the OP, the one throwing a sinister grin at the audience over his shoulder. He's voiced by Hiroshi Kamiya, a voice actor with enough range that I can't fully guess his character type and intentions based on the casting. He is also, funnily, the only male voice actor in the cast capable of sounding below the age of 30.

Kirishima and Yoshino's plot to foil the chinpira out for their blood makes this the most action-driven, gangster movie-esque episode yet, but to mixed results. I took a look at the manga last week, and now it's a bit frustrating knowing what I'm missing compared to the moderately stiff anime production — why did they make Shoma's hair so stringy — and see the weak points here. There are some decent bursts of action, like Kirishima throwing a guy over his shoulder and disarming another, but other points have a distinct lack of impact. Their confrontation takes place at a crowded festival, culminating in the lights being turned out, which allows Kirishima to dispatch his foes in total darkness. But it took a minute for me to realize just why exactly nobody was reacting to all these men getting knocked out around them, because it just looked slightly darker than normal rather than pitch black.

As fun as it was watching Kirishima threaten to stab a man in the back of the throat with his own knife or hearing Yoshino taunt her attacker by saying his threat to rape her in front of Kirishima would only turn on her would-be suitor, the true star of the show is the flashy dude with curly red hair. Based on his remarks to Shoma, he's not a yakuza himself; rather, he's a hired hand. When he gets the message that things are over, he immediately pulls out of his fight, calls Shoma a beanpole, and informs him that there are things happening that Shoma's too low-level to know about but are about to make his life very, very difficult.

In short,