Recap
After Suzu signs to him that his kiss wasn’t great, Issei drags her off to a zombie movie and then burgers. They text and eat, and she mentions not seeing a movie since she was a medical student 15 years ago. He was 10 but doesn’t care about their 10-year age difference. Suzu looks a little disconcerted, and he does have ketchup all over his face.
Suzu has to leave suddenly for an emergency delivery. A woman who refuses to give her name gives birth to a baby she doesn’t want.
Issei texts Suzu that night, inviting her to another movie. She reads but doesn’t answer. He keeps checking, and the next morning the food truck guy notices he’s down. He distracts himself by talking to Haru about watching the porn they found, but the tape gets confiscated.
Suzu tries to talk to the new mother about her options. Sasaki abruptly tries to the mother interested in the baby and she gets upset. Outside, Suzu scolds Sasaki for focusing on the mother. She tells him about getting sued when a mother in her care died. She was ruled to have made no mistakes, but still dreams about it.
Sasaki remembers being told his wife and child had both died.
Issei invites Suzu out again. She almost doesn’t go and is then dismayed to see Haru there too. Haru is also dismayed when Issei immediately signs to an interested Suzu about his thoughts on porn, forcing Haru to translate. Haru notices they get along well and Issei claims they’re dating, but Haru knows it hasn’t happened yet. Haru tells Suzu that he’s older than Issei, but Issei is his senior at work.
Issei walks Suzu home despite her objections and teaches her the signs for their names.
At Issei’s work, he takes on a group of cats to find homes for. At Suzu’s work, the mother abandons the baby. They meet up and tell each other about their days. Issei wants to go after the mother because he lost his own parents in High School and missed them horribly.
Suzu is upset everyone keeps calling the baby pitiful even though he’s only two days old and may be fine without his parents. Issei remembers being called pitiful at his parents’ funeral and asks Suzu if he’s pitiful because he’s different. She says he’s confident and fascinating and pushy and too interested in porn. She envies him. He thanks her and hopes the baby has an awesome life like him.
Everyone at the clinic says goodbye to the baby. Charlie with the pink hair shows up to give his mother, one of the nurses, an umbrella. He explains that he’s a nap buddy and sleeps with people (just sleeps) for money. Sasaki is stunned.
Sasaki eats outside when Issei’s boss, Chiaki, shows up. She knows Sasaki and his deceased wife, who he gets extra food for out of habit. He asks if his face is really strange, she says it’s handsome but then he makes a strange face.
Suzu texts Issei first this time and is annoyed when he doesn’t reply. But he’s ahead of her, across the train tracks in the snow. He signs her name and “I love you.”
Thoughts
A couple of translation notes:
Issei’s sign for よきよき is translated as “it’s legit” by Viki, probably because it’s a kind of slang that young men use for “great”. It could also be translated as “cool”.
What Issei signs to Suzu from across the tracks, 好きだ, could be translated as “I like you” though Japanese people also use it for “I love you.” To me, it feels too soon for him to say “love” and I suspect he really means “like”. On the other hand, he is being very direct. Usually, a first confession in a Japanese drama is said in an indirect way that translates more literally as “I like things about you” so in that sense I get translating it so bluntly.
Onto the show itself.
Japanese shows can be didactic, and it’s definitely not subtle with Suzu’s lessons to Sasaki and Issei about how mothers can have different situations and children don’t need their birth parents to have fulfilling lives. On the other hand, I’ve seen so many “parents love their children and only do what they think is best for them no matter how abusive that may seem” themes in Asian dramas that I’m happy to see other opinions put out there.
And like Suzu, it can upset me when people casually make assumptions, so I like seeing them challenged as she does here. Issei does the same thing in the first episode when he points out an older man who died alone probably had a happy life. He had a porn tape after all.
I love that Suzu is so smart and thoughtful, picking up sign language quickly and enthusiastically and getting along with Issei and Haru so easily. She’s clearly been suffering and sad and going through a hard time, but that’s because these things happen, not some deep personal flaw she needs to overcome.
It’s also nice to see a show skip past all the usual angst of whether characters like each other or not, at least on Issei’s part. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be that complicated.