I wouldn’t say this was among the most entertaining or exciting episodes of Yofukashi no Uta by a long shot. But it moved the needle on the exposition front, that’s for certain. Over the course of a long mystery-driven series certain chapters are tasked with the unglamorous job of getting things from point to point. I can take or leave these 22 minutes in their own right but the important question is where they take the story, and that is something I’m genuinely interested in.
This all comes down to Nazuna’s past of course, and this ep was all about that. What’s interesting is that despite that, the true picture is even more blurry than it was before, quite by intention. Kabura-san is tke key figure, notable in that she’s been anything but a key figure to this point. She dresses Naz and Kou up in nurse and patient cosplay and sends them off to explore with the explicit “don’t go in room 307!” instruction. That can only be taken as a direct order to do just that, so the question is what the info in that sealed room has to tell us.
After an amusing interchange on NTR the pair explore the room from the outside, though it’s only later – after Kabura “spirits Kou away” from the men’s room – that Nazuna enters the room. The deeper connection between the two women is obvious from the strands of memory that work their way into Nazuna’s conversation with Kou, though she purports to have no idea where they came from. Kou will theorize that Kabura was the one who turned Naz in the first place; Naz will propose just the opposite. Kabura denies both and neither seems to neatly fit, but there’s obviously a big grain of the truth mixed in there.
We know that Kabura (“Honda-san”) was a patient of the clinic, and stayed in that room. We know that a nurse with Nazuna’s face and last name worked at the clinic at the time. The most puzzling element of this – obviously a choice by the adaptation – is that nurse being played by a different seiyuu (Uchida Maaya). Why? One could interpret this to mean that “Nanakusa Haru” is in fact a different person than Nanakusa Nazuna. But we’ve seen no evidence that vampires voice’s change after they turn – in fact the ones we’ve seen that happen to (like Akkun) have displayed no difference at all. Could this be a twin situation? There’s nothing to rule it out but that always feels like a bit of a narrative cop-out.
Thanks to Kabura saving some of her blood as a means to keep her human memories alive (an interesting bit of foresight from someone who seemed to know nothing of vampires as a human) – blood she shares with Naz, along with the memories contained therein – we know Honda-san was a sickly human. She was tired of being a burden on her friends, and may have been on her way to the roof to commit suicide when she found Nurse Haru up there. We also know she was in love with Haru, and that Haru knew it. That rooftop scene suggests that Haru was already a vamp and turned Honda, but that explanation seems too simple and straightforward to be right.
There are obviously pieces missing that are necessary to complete this picture. The question is, are those pieces ones we’ve been given already, or have they been withheld up to now? The scene painted by Kabura’s memories doesn’t match the current reality, so either it’s intentionally vague or outright deceptive. The whole Kabura thing seems to have come more or less out of nowhere, so I hope some light is shed on those questions sooner rather than later.
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