I’ve been opening these posts with some variation of, “I can’t believe Jotaro wasn’t the focus of this episode!” for three weeks now, so it’s about time I stop being surprised whenever it happens. His training camp’s overlap with Rei’s birthday is the origin of the conflict here, so he’s at least involved in the plot, but it’s his daughter’s feelings that Taiso Samurai is interested in exploring. Quite simply, she’s overburdened. Going to school, doing the shopping and cooking for the family, putting on a smile for her dad even when he puts himself first… It’s too much for a nine year old girl to bear. Though this week’s resolution sees her cling tearfully to her father, I couldn’t help but feel like he got off easy. No parent enjoys seeing their child cry, but such a straightforward and cathartic expression of sadness made their subsequent reconciliation a piece of cake. We probably won’t get a story about fatherhood to follow up this depiction of a difficult childhood, and that’s a damn shame, because it’s precisely what Rei deserves.
Her dad may be thick as a brick, but at least she’s got Big Bird to come home to every day. This was the episode that finally justified his raucous presence, both in the Aragaki household and the larger story. He was a gift from Mari, given soon after the passing of her mother, and Rei swiftly attached herself to him as a means of coping with that loss. In the present, Rei’s irritation with her father leads her to leave a half-eaten dinner out where Big Bird can get into it, and he chokes and falls unconscious midway through his scavenging session. It’s fitting that he suffers for Rei’s negligence, since his association with her mom compounds her guilt over the mistake, and keeps her relationship to her deceased parent in view. Good choice on the writers’ part, but it felt terrible to see her call both Dad and Grandma in a panic, only for neither one to pick up their phone. Leo’s return near the end of the episode didn’t come fast enough to avert the crisis, either. It’s Rei against the world, though it really shouldn’t be.
Thankfully, she receives a revelation from Mari later in the episode that takes some of the weight off her fragile shoulders. It’s about her mom, whose grave she frequently visits and whose presence she desperately misses, to the point that she tries to emulate her behavior as a means of connection. Rei has been holding herself to the standard of a prim and proper mother figure, but Grandma clues her in to the secret lazy spells and temper flare-ups that she never knew about. She specifically hears about her mom’s impatience with Jotaro, which opens her eyes to the idea of confronting the people you love, instead of silently tolerating their failures. But when she and Dad are finally reunited, she doesn’t request that he honor her birthday (which I expected, mostly because I wanted to see it happen). Instead, the show shunts us into a story about a bike that he gave her despite her inability to ride – her request is merely that he teach her.
I wasn’t a fan of this development, as I wanted the initial ‘training camp vs. birthday’ tension to be resolved here. As Rei says in the final minute of the episode, though, she doesn’t want Jotaro to “use her as an excuse to give up gymnastics.” She maintains her mental grip on the idea of supporting her dad, and the show puts a nice spin on it in the last scene, but there’s just one problem. She’s sacrificing her chance at a normal childhood for a person who spends more time off screen than on, and whose gymnastics career plays third fiddle in a show titled “Gymnastics Samurai” (that’s two problems, actually). Yes, I’m going there after promising not to in the opening paragraph. What good will Rei’s selflessness end up being if we don’t get around to Jotaro’s part in the story? And when we do get there, how will his daughter factor into that story, if at all? I’ll probably see Taiso Samurai through to the end at this point, but it’s unlikely to have an answer for that second question, so I’m keeping my expectations low.
