Migi to Dali – 11

「さかさまの女」 (Sakasami no Onna)
“Upside-Down Woman”

Episode 11 of Migi to Dali begs to question exactly how salvageable Eiji’s family is as Reiko reveals her darkest, most damning secret. But now that Metry’s children know why they’ve been forced into the roles they play in the narrative, the three are tasked with making sense of the truth.

A PERFECT FAMILY?

Metry’s backstory was overwhelmingly haunting with what that family put her through. Reiko tossed away the genuine connection she made with Metry to force her into the most heinous schemes to make her their surrogate parent. It was disturbing to see how Metry was coerced into assaulting Reiko’s husband Akira only for him to find out later and be forcefully smitten around her. It’s bad news all around, and Reiko holding her egregious plan against Metry only made matters worse for both families.

To know that Migi and Dali were already imprisoned in the same storage room with Metry as Reiko handpicked the one son away from her who could fit into Reiko’s “perfect family” is stomach-turning. The Ichijo’s power-plays against Metry feed on the predatory nature of class and wealth as Metry truly had no way to avoid being exploited until she was no longer useful for the Ichijos. Reiko not only disenfranchised Metry once she realized keeping her husband out of the loop on her surrogacy scheme backfired, but her spiteful behavior propped up the illusion of having a perfect family at the cost of another impoverished family’s autonomy.

In the process, you also now have Eiji wondering what his place in the world is. He’s the first person to realize that he was Migi and Dali’s third brother, but because he was sheltered from the truth by his birth mother, he also has to live with the fact that he accidentally killed her. Migi might have been contemplating accepting Eiji as their third brother, but Dali refuses to acknowledge this, holding onto the vengeance that gave him a sense of purpose.

It certainly doesn’t help that Eiji has nothing left to lose after being rejected by Dali and finding out that his real birth mother was killed by his hands on the night that he shoved her. With this in mind, he has no qualms about just up and erasing everything about this family that he considers to be sullied by Reiko’s malice. Being in a household where hypnotic conditioning and compulsive lying kept them in the neighborhood’s high esteem only served to keep Eiji sheltered and unable to handle what it took to keep him withdrawn. At this point, Eiji only looks to continue his destructive path by setting his home and family ablaze in grief over finding that he could only blame himself for actions his mother had encouraged and reinforced. But now that he’s stabbed Reiko and set his home ablaze, only he can determine what his future without the Ichijo home will be like.