Higehiro

Episode 9

It only took the show two-thirds of its run to get here, but “Past” finally delivers on the long-teased promise of Sayu's backstory, offering some much-needed context and explanation for how exactly she wound up needing such a refuge as Yoshida in the first place. Some of those answers are surprising, many of them are not; as to whether the whole of the experience ends up justifying over two months of teasing and obfuscation? I suppose the answer is…kind of?

That probably makes me sound like a heartless bastard, so let me explain: The crux of what Sayu goes through is objectively heartbreaking, and any kid in her position could be excused for making some questionable life choices in the wake of it. It's actually a tale that is very similar to what we saw in Wonder Egg Priority: Because of her isolation and difficult time socializing, Sayu only managed to make one friend when she arrived at high school, whose name was Yuuko. After months of merciless bullying on the part of the school's “popular” girls, though, Yuuko was falling apart, especially since she seemed to be getting a double dose of the teasing on account of Sayu being too rich and pretty to target directly. Despite her best efforts, Sayu couldn't save Yuuko from leaping from the top of their school, and even though that was never Sayu's responsibility to begin with, that doesn't stop her from blaming herself. It definitely doesn't help that Sayu's cruel mother heaps on even more blame on top of that, going so far as to suspect Sayu of killing Yuuko outright.

Sayu wasn't alone, thankfully, as it turns out that her brother Issa is a genuinely good dude. He's the one who helped her “run away” from their toxic home life in the first place, though his plan was simply to give her some money so she could get some space at a local hotel for a little while. It wasn't until the money ran out, and Sayu's self-loathing became all-consuming, that she wandered into the arms of the first man who exploited her body for a place to stay, and so the cycle continued until she made her way to Yoshida.

On paper, this is a perfectly functional backstory for Sayu, and the show does a decent job at selling its broad strokes, thanks in no small part to Kana Ichinose's earnest performance. However, the episode as a whole didn't work nearly as well as it should have, for me. It's here that the similarity to shows like Wonder Egg Priority ends up hurting Higehiro in the long run, because WEP and other anime like it have something that Higehiro seriously struggles with: Production values.

Making anime is exceedingly difficult, and that's before you factor in whatever struggles Higehiro's may have encountered specifically because of the pandemic. That said, even though I'm usually happy to give a show some leeway with its visuals if the writing is strong enough, “Past” is an episode of Higehiro where the writing doesn't quite exceed that threshold. It is fine, but the script simply isn't strong enough to succeed at squeezing all Sayu's life-altering trauma into a single episode, which results in a story that is chock full of tropes and shortcuts – not to mention one very weird sequence I'll have to save for the Odds and Ends section.

That's where the rough presentation ends up doing the most damage. Anime is a visual medium, and when the writing won't pick up the slack, the visuals have to do all the work, and as we've discussed before, Higehiro kind of looks like crud even on its best days. Character faces are too stiff, the camera work is too plain, the storyboarding is too stilted and straightforward. So, in the end, do I understand why Sayu's life turned out the way it did? Sure I do. Do I feel that pain along with her, though? Not really, and that's a damn shame, because if there was any one episode that Higehiro needed to knock out of the park, it was this one.

It isn't a total loss, though. We've learned enough about Sayu's home life and personal struggle to get us from Point A to Point B, and with only a few episodes left in the series' run, that'll have to be enough. Now that we've seen where Sayu has been, we just have to find out where she's going next.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• One thing I have to mention before we get to That Scene™ is the repeated use of Yoshida's beard as a metaphor for his emotional state. Simply put, it's pretty lame, especially given that it's the namesake of the entire show. We're going to need more than three or four throwaway references to Yoshida's baby stubble for the motif to work, Higehiro.

• Okay, so: There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cut during Sayu's depression montage where she's shown lying butt naked on her hotel bed, her hand covered in a viscous white substance. Since the episode clearly established that she didn't start sleeping around until after the hotel money ran dry, and that she wouldn't have even had a dude to invite over in the meantime, the only way I can possibly interpret that scene is that she was masturbating. If so…why did the show feel the need to include that? With its placement in the montage, the implication sure reads like her giving herself the ol' five-finger fiddling was one of the first steps on the slippery slope towards being exploited/raped by adult men who were willing to sleep with a depressed, homeless teenager just for kicks. I sure hope that isn't the case, because a lot of awful things happened to Sayu this week, but there's nothing wrong with a person exercising a bit of self-love, even if they're sad when they do it. Teens do it all the time; even girls. It's fine. What a weird, weird thing to include for no apparent reason.

Higehiro is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.