Isshuukan Friends – 02

A new week, a new friend.

Well whaddaya know. Now she has a diary! Problem solved, right?

Problem Solution

Not sure why she didn’t do this earlier.

In the premiere I questioned Kaori’s lack of attempt to preserve her precious memories from each week; the simplest method being a written record. Well, as it so happens Yuuki has the same idea and he suggests she keep a diary of her time with him, which actually works pretty well. Failing that, Kaori could have pulled a Tada Banri and taken it a step further by leaving a video record of their time together. But clearly that wasn’t necessary so all’s well that ends well, sort of. I’m jumping the gun a bit though, so let me take a few steps back and return to the start of the friends’ second week.

Making Friends

I guess he has to get this every lunch now.

As usual, I was expecting Isshuukan Friends to be much more dramatic than it actually was. I figured Yuuki would have a much harder time befriending Kaori again, leading to considerable angst. Instead, the issue was resolved very easily since Kaori herself recognizes that she’s missing memories of one specific person. That is a bit of a clever loophole that I didn’t think of previously, and now knowing it, I would say that Kaori can definitely exploit it to help piece her memories together week after week. Kaori being aware of her missing memories aside though, the way she accepted Yuuki’s words and gladly became his friend so easily the second time around was the big surprise to me in terms of how well the show again dodged the potential for drama. I really like this.

Kaori’s perspective.

Now back to the diary-keeping. As previously mentioned, the plan was more or less a great success. I read a comment from the previous episode expressing concern about Kaori trusting the words of a “former self” that she does not know. But I think given the circumstances, there is absolutely no reason for the Kaori of last week to lie to or play a cruel prank on the Kaori of this week. And if the Kaori of this week isn’t some sort of wacky conspiracy theorist, skepticism over the veracity of the written record probably won’t ever be a problem. What’s interesting to me though, is that we actually encountered a little more complications from the diary than from Yuuki just straight up approaching Kaori directly. I suppose that’s to be expected since we might expect a more personal approach to produce better results. But either way, Kaori forcing herself to pretend to remember Yuuki didn’t become a huge problem as the ever-honest and straight-forward guy apologizes immediately and the tension is broken.

The preview for next week suggest that Yuuki will bring his friend Shougo into the equation. I’m not sure how well this will turn out, but no doubt it will only multiply Kaori’s memory problems. She’d have yet another person to call her friend though, so clearly it’s worth it. Plus, seeing how the show has handled things so far, it doesn’t look like we’ll be in for much drama regardless of how many new friends Kaori starts making now.

See you next week for more friend-making!

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