Recap
A young Ryuji helps his dad at their restaurant. His dad is worried about the restaurant.
Present day Ryuji wakes up in the classroom to Amane smiling at him. The upcoming midterms are an issue for perpetually napping Ryuji. If he gets stuck with extra summer classes he won’t beable to work at the restaurant. He begs Amane to tutor him.
Their first study session is in Ryuji’s room. Amane is bewildered by his excitement at such an innocent time together. While at the house he sees the butsudan (shrine) with the picture of Ryuji’s dad.
Ryuji does a prayer and tells Amane how his father died when Ryuji was in 7th grade. He worked at the restaurant until he passed and must have loved it so much. Ryuji doesn’t work at the restaurant because he loves it, he works there for his dad. He’s emotional, but tries to act normal.
Amane sits in front of the shrine and tells the father about meeting Ryuji and going to the restaurant. He promises to help and tells the dad not to worry.
We get a cute studying montage: Amane waking Ryuji up in class, Ryuji studying while working at the restaurant, Amane creating special notes for Ryuji, Amane napping on Ryuji’s shoulder.
In the end Ryuji passes, barely. Their celebratory hug has Amane feeling awkward so he runs. Ryuji follows him to buy him a drink and invites Amane to his home for cold noodles.
Amane meets Ryuji’s younger siblings and mom. The family is amused by Amane’s enthusiasm and pile Amane’s plate high with bits from their own.
Walking Amane home, Ryuji talks about the pressure he’s been putting on himself because of his dad’s worries. Amane’s words helped him feel relieved. He’s lucky Amane is here.
Amane back hugs Ryuji and tells him what he wasn’t planning to tell him, that he likes him. He doesn’t want an answer, just wants him to know. Before Ryuji can say anything, Amane goes running again!
Thoughts
Our jaded Amane who sleeps with older men and thinks he can’t fall in love is getting excited over study sessions and hugs. It’s such nice character growth for him.
And while the episode was Ryuji focused, we still saw Amane take another step as he went from hiding these new feelings to sharing them. Even if he had run immediately after.
Ryuji’s backstory makes a lot of sense with his combination of hyper-responsibility and yet inability to stay awake in class. It’s also lovely to see how two personalities can complement each other. Amane pathologically avoids being serious, which isn’t always good for him but is something that Ryuji needs. Ryuji puts enough pressure on himself, he doesn’t need more.
It’s important that Amane did more than just say some nice words though, his offer of help involved hands-on tutoring. In that way, he literally relieved Ryuji of a real pressure he couldn’t handle on his own.
I love that this show has a similar set up to My Love Mix-Up because it’s fun to see the different direction it can go from there. Here, our less serious guy is actually the better student. Variety is nice.
A few random notes:
I don’t know much about bustudan, the in-home shrines, but they are interesting.
The cold noodles they eat with Ryuji’s family are called Hiyashi Chuka and they are delicious.
While I’m at it, it finally occurred to me to look up what Amane ate at Ryuji’s restaurant; it’s called whitebait in English but Shirasu in Japanese. They’re immature fish and apparently the location of Ryuji’s family restaurant is the real life location of a restaurant that is famous for serving it.
Also, Ryuji’s family cat seems to have the run of the entire island of Enoshima.
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If It’s With You is currently available in the US on GaGaOOLala