Konohana Kitan

Episode 4

I've come to anticipate receiving a certain baseline amount of warm fuzzies from Konohana Kitan every week, but I never expected it to so heavily deliver on the feels. Being an episodic slice-of-life series, Konohana Kitan is bound to have some light comical stories of daily life at Konohanatei, while other segments will aim slightly more for the heavy emotions. This week, we happen to get both flavors for the price of one, resulting in the show's best episode yet.

The first half of the episode gives us the breezy sitcom plot of the week. Ren wakes up one morning looking shockingly pregnant, only to discover that an egg has attached itself to her stomach in the night, and things only get sillier from there. The story is fun because it continues to dig into the show's yuri themes by explicitly playing Natsume as Ren's hapless spouse, even going so far as to have Natsume swear that she will help Ren raise whatever comes out of that egg as her own. The whole segment spotlights the show's two central relationships; both Ren and Satsuki are saved from terrible nightmares by romantic visions of Natsume and Yuzu respectively, which is exactly as cute as it sounds. The segment also introduces us to the show's mascot character, a boar spirit named Urinosuke that is heavily implied to be a baku, the benevolent eater of nightmares. It's a simple and effective segment that makes the characters' feelings for each other more explicitly romantic while giving them a wacky scenario to banter over. In other words, it's an excellent Konohana Kitan story.

The episode's second half is where things get kicked up a notch, telling a standalone story involving an old woman and her daughter, Shino. The episode starts as a familiar “The girls are in charge of a baby!” story, but it quickly evolves into something more complex when baby Shino begins rapidly aging, transitioning from childhood to young adulthood over the span of just a few days. This curious case takes a turn for the heartbreaking when it's revealed that Shino is really the manifestation of a doll the woman has been carrying around for years in remembrance of her daughter who died tragically young.

What's most impressive about this tale is its succinct and expert pacing; every one of our main girls gets a moment to interact with Shino during an important stage of her life, and each scene adds up to a complete arc for the girl by the time she reaches adulthood. Her early “years” are spent with Yuzu and Satsuki, where the latter expresses a more maternal side that has Yuzu positively blushing. As a child, she experiences her first crush with Natsume (who she mistakes for a boy), then gets to explore fashion and her own ideas of beauty with Ren as a preteen. As a teenager, she lashes out at Kiri, who seems to be the only one outside Tsubaki who knows about Shino's true nature. By the time she accepts the ephemerality of her life and approaches her ailing mother as a fully matured young woman, Shino says “I've lived a truly fulfilling, dream-like life”, and we really believe her. The final reveal that the mother was herself a spirit looking to move on and be at peace is less a twist and more the natural and satisfying conclusion to an unexpectedly moving story.

What both of these two vignettes have in common are their preoccupation with dreaming, along with deep ties to Japanese folklore and mythology. Despite both halves of the episode being tonally disparate, they both explore the relationships dreams have with their dreamers. The Urinosuke segment uses Ren and Satsuki's visions to reveal the depths of the affection they're just now beginning to show their respective partners, while Shino's story gives an old woman the opportunity to share the love that she's never stopped giving to her daughter. Konohana Kitan is supposed to be a simple story about cute fox girls who should absolutely be dating, and it continues to succeed admirably on that front, but this week's episode proved just how thoughtful and impactful the show can really be at the top of its game.

Rating: A-

Konohana Kitan is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is an English teacher who has loved anime his entire life, and he spends way too much time on Twitter and his blog.