Suzuka – 09

Quickie Summary:
Yamato continues to try his hardest at track practice in order to prove himself and make Suzuka notice him, finishing the 100 meter dash with an amazing time of 10.98 seconds. After practice, Yamato runs into Suzuka, so he tries to tell her about his accomplishment, but she doesn’t seem to care. When he pulls her arm, she breaks free and proclaims that she hates him. It seems that seeing Yamato doing track reminds Suzuka too much of her senpai from long ago. One day after practice, Yamato overhears Miyamoto and Suzuka talking about Yokohama and a guy named Kazuki. Yamato frets over the name on his day off until he chases Gorou-chan onto Suzuka’s balcony. He catches sight of the picture sitting on her dresser and makes the connection that that person must be Kazuki, the person Suzuka likes. He gets an address from Miho and rushes after Suzuka.

Though this series is called Suzuka, this episode is a prime example of why I don’t like her so much as a character. Her continued attitude towards everything Yamato gets really tiring really fast. That’s part of the reason I don’t particularly like volumes two, three, and four: because we get a long stretches of down and then up. So now that she’s slammed Yamato so much, you can expect a period when their relationship gets a bit better. The storytelling picks up by volume 5 when Honoka starts to get a lot of screen time.
One of the big changes that was made early on in this series was the removal of the hole in the wall between Suzuka and Yamato’s rooms. They’ve managed to work around it every single time, with today being no exception. Instead of chasing Gorou-chan through the hole, Yamato chased him on the roof and over to her balcony. Really makes me wonder why they took out that plot device though. They could have kept it in all the same and be following the manga that much more closely. *shrug*
I had expected them to cover all the material through the end of the third volume with this episode, but they stopped a chapter short. I can understand their reasoning though, considering that the next couple of chapters are probably best seen together. And I guess this is a good point since it gives us a bit of a cliffhanger. Next episode should give us some Suzuka back story/flashbacks. Unfortunately, the preview shows some really poor animation, so I don’t have high hopes in terms of production value.