Suzuka – 10

Short Summary:
Yamato visits the Asahina house, and is met at the gate by Suzuka’s sister. She takes him to a graveyard where Suzuka is praying. Realizing who Kazuki is to Suzuka, Yamato leaves before she sees him. The next day, Suzuka is practicing her jump when she starts to remember the events of three years ago, when Kazuki was still around. They shared a very playful, love/hate relationship while on the track team together. The picture of the two of them that she now holds dear was taken by Miyamoto during a track meet. Their relationship culminated in Kazuki’s confession to Suzuka one day, but she didn’t answer him at the time. Meanwhile, back in the present, Yamato hasn’t been showing up to track lately. Everyone’s concerned, and Suzuka even checks up on him at his apartment. Her words about him quitting the track team anger him so much that he blurts out that he’s not Tsuda Kazuki, and tells her to stop comparing him to a dead guy. She slaps him and runs back to her own room. At the track meet the next day, Yamato is nowhere to be found.

A pleasant surprise is what I would call this episode. The preview last week does this episode no justice, since that preview managed to show one of the only poorly drawn scenes in the entire episode. Which means that I think the rest of the episode is done pretty well. The browning out effect is a unique way of transitioning to and from flashbacks, but I’m not a big fan of the effect. The falling leaves in the graveyard scene were a nice touch, but understandably not as pretty as, say, the falling sakura petals in Tsubasa Chronicle. I did, however, really like the music that is used in that scene: nice and slow piano pieces.
Yamato reaches his boiling point on the Kazuki topic this episode. He and Suzuka won’t stay like this forever, but this definitely isn’t the last time that she’ll slap him. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This episode was more for us to learn about Tsuda Kazuki, and to set up for the outburst near the end. The back and forth continues next week as the two make up (kind of). I admit that I’m kind of disappointed with the way Arima (the blonde guy in the preview) looks, as his eyes are lot creepier in the manga. But we’ll have to wait and see how his character turns out.