Hanasaku Iroha – Episode 22

Last time on Hanasaku Iroha there were actually quite a few plot points in the air.  There was a wedding in the works, or perhaps not in the works, since the groom was surprise-disinherited.  Minchi and Ohana were fighting over Tohru, or worse, not fighting over Tohru.  They set off an all-out War of Passive Aggression over Tohru.  Things are hopping, the show is more like a soap-opera style drama than the slice-of-life show it was at the beginning.  Maybe it’s a symptom of the summer anime season drawing to a close.  I don’t want to think about that, losing Hanasaku Iroha and all these other good shows that are airing.  Well, let’s enjoy episode 22 of Hanasaku Iroha while it’s here.

…thirty minutes pass…

For a wedding dress, it's really not very frilly at all. I'm not sure I could identify a single unambiguous frill on it, in fact. It's basically just a bedsheet with big ideas.

My hopes for drama were dashed by how horribly reasonable everyone is.  Apparently Enishi and Takako were actually in love, and so the inheritance didn’t make a difference to their plans to marry.  Ohana and Minchi got in a nice fistfight, at least, but that only served to clear the air between them, and then Tohru had go and spoil the whole love triangle by coming out and stating he has no romantic interest in children.  So everything goes back to normal, Minchi goes back to pining over Tohru and Ohana goes back to pining over Kou-chan, who I had really thought had been dealt with some seven episodes ago, but I guess Ohana just can’t let go.

Why on earth would you purposefully seek to induce in yourself an unrequited love?  (Translation note: Doki translated “kataomoi” as “crush”, “unrequited love” would be a better translation.  “Crush” is mostly neutral on the question of requition, and to the extent that it carries meaning, it carries the meaning that you don’t know how he feels because you’ve never worked up the courage to tell him, as opposed to Kou-chan, who supposedly “dumped” Ohana.)  It seems like it would only create pain for you, wanting what you can’t have.  I guess it is romantic, in a sense.  It displays traditional feminine virtue – loyalty to a particular man, even when that loyalty comes with some personal cost attached.  Traditional feminine virtue is a good thing for a girl to be in the habit of signaling, and I guess it’s cheap for her right now.  She’s too busy with her job and school to really go seeking guys during free time, all the guys at school are pining after Yuina and Minchi, and at her job there’s really only Tohru, who is excluded for various reasons.  We’ll see how she feels about Kou-chan when Kissui Inn shuts down and she has more time to socialize.

So yeah, Kissui Inn is shutting down.  I guess that’s the finale plot arc, and this wedding business was just to clear up loose ends in advance of it.  Dunno what Ohana’s going to do, she has been earning room and board by working at Kissui Inn.  Maybe she’ll go back to Tokyo to live with her mother?  You figure, if your mother can abandon you once, she could do it again.  Maybe she can go work at Yuina’s inn.  Yuina seems to be helping out at Kissui Inn a lot, it seems like it would be fair.