Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 21

Wow…

This episode really screamed “Mushishi”, and I mean that in the most positive way. Here I thought that Porfy ran into an old hag who was after a quick buck. Heh, how I was wrong.

The episode starts with Porfy waking up, and Dora cooking breakfast, smiling very gently. Porfy starts his breakfast. As he didn’t eat anything the previous day, he eats as quickly as he can. Dora continues to treat him kindly in a way that’s almost too perfectly acted. Porfy then sneezes, and she changes completely, getting overly worried and wondering whether he caught a cold. Porfy tries to lighten the mood, but she quickly tells him to be quiet, and that he should tell her as soon as possible once he catches a cold.

She then turns off scary-mode and gives Porfy some more candy, saying how Porfy “loved them since he was small”. Before Porfy has the time to think what she meant, he suddenly realizes that his backpack is gone. Dora suggests that one of the homeless dogs ran off with it (but then again, what would a bunch of dogs want with a bag full of tools). Porfy runs away in order to search for them. When he’s gone, Dora says that he’ll return, since it’s his home.

Porfy looks around, and after a while he runs into the kid from the previous episode again. He wants to run away, but Porfy stops him. When the kid realizes that Porfy isn’t scary, he offers him to help search for it. After a few hours, they still haven’t found anything, so the kid takes him to his father. Soon, the entire neighbourhood is searching, and as it turns out, one of them saw Dora that night and followed her, so the backpack is safe. Surprisingly, nothing was removed from it.

In the meantime, we learn that the kid’s name is Chiro (or however that bastardization of Italian is spelled), and he indeed lived inside the town for his entire life, and hates the idea that he’s going to leave some day. But as his father gets older, he’s going to have to leave some day. Porfy can understand him, as he loved his own home as well. And Dora once had a child, who died. Chiro father also tells how the city they lived in was once a Greek colony, in the time of the ancient Greeks.

In any case, when the guy who found it reveals that he’s seen Dora carry the backpack, Porfy starts yelling at him, calling him a liar. He doesn’t believe that the nice Dora would do such a thing. Obviously, the guy gets angry, but his partner stops him, saying how everyone in town knows that Dora is rather eccentric. Porfy still won’t listen, but before they can continue their argument, Chiro’s father steps in between them.

Chiro’s father takes Porfy to the local church, if I understood things correctly, and he explains how Dora didn’t hide the backpack in order to harm Porfy, but instead she wanted him to stay, since Porfy is about the same age as her dead child. Porfy then returns to Dora, who is more delighted than ever to see him, though she then notices that Porfy has his backpack back. She then tells him that she hid the backpack because of what Porfy said that evening, how he was planning to leave the next day.

The then starts calling Porfy Antonino (her dead son’s name), and starts yelling that he’ll remember soon if he stays here. Porfy says that he needs to go away, in order to search for his sister. Dora then throws a wine-glass at him, screaming at him that he should leave. Porfy leaves, but after a minute, he finds that he can’t just leave things as they are and returns again.

He talks to Dora, through a closed door, and he reckons how Dora and he are possibly the same, and how he lost his family as well. Dora says how it’s painful to remember Antonio. Porfy reckons that if it hurts so much, it would be better for her to forget about Antonino, but he himself will never forget his family and the time they spent together. They then say goodbye, after Porfy tells Dora to stop drinking so much, and obliges to Dora’s request of calling her “mother” one final time.

We then cue to a shot of Dora, emptying all her wine-bottles, Chiro and his father happily doing their jobs, collecting firewood and Porfy and Apollo have left the city, while Porfy complains to Apollo how he keeps sitting on his shoulder and should instead fly for himself, and the episode ends.

I must say, that the scene where Dora suddenly started yelling at Porfy was really powerful. It was wonderfully animated, and I never suspected that she’d end getting so angry as she did, after all her nice acts against Porfy. But then again, when she saw Porfy as her own son, and her son suddenly rejects her and starts yelling, I can imagine how her mother-instinct would break down.

And indeed, Dora was a perfect person for Porfy to run into. I originally thought that this would be just a lesson to Porfy to stop trusting everyone, but as it turns out, it was meant to show him how there are people, suffering even worse than he does. Dora has been living all along, thinking about her lost son, so much that it becomes painful when she remembers him. He instead has the knowledge of Mina, being still alive that helps him.

Still, in any way, Porfy really grew up in this episode. You can see how he’s learned to accept his parents’ death a bit more, compared to his scared looks at the beginning of the previous episode, and he also learned to watch what he says to others, considering how Dora reacted to his words.

And really, such gorgeous background art! I was already getting used to the look of Simitra in the first quarter of this series to really notice, but the art in this series really looks beautiful, and to think that this is a travelling-anime we’re dealing with, so the creators are going to have to come up with many more interesting city-designs. I can’t wait!