Your lie in April

Episode 9

Wow, this week's episode of Your Lie in April is one of the most backloaded episodes of anime I've ever seen.

I was shocked by how quickly the first 10 minutes of episode 9 sped past. It felt like nothing happened in that first half of the episode. Mostly, we got recap of Emi's performance from the previous one, interspersed with flashbacks of when she first learned to play piano as a child. We got to see her intense reaction to finding Kosei backstage at her performance, and Tsubaki, Watari and Kaori anticipating Kosei's moment in the sun from the audience. Then he got on stage and the other shoe dropped.

This draws us back to how Your Lie in April's episode structure resembles musical forms. Many of the performance episodes, including the previous one, divide themselves into something like a binary form: two halves that mirror each other. Last week was a perfect example, with Takeshi and Emi's performances, each demonstrating both their technical virtuosity, and communicating to the audience why they started playing piano and what different types of performers they are. Those two performances single-handedly established them as characters beyond the rough outline of "Kosei's angry childhood rivals." This week is divided into two sections as well, but in a way that wouldn't work as a musical piece at all. Nearly everything of importance is in the second half.

As melodramatic as Your Lie in April can be, it's still shocking when the show dives into truly serious issues. Here, we got glimpses of one that's been hinted at before—Kaori's pills all over the counter further suggest that she's hiding a serious illness—and Kosei's more explicit trauma was finally brought into full, vivid color (though often not literally). Kosei's mother didn't just mentally abuse him, she physically abused him too, leaving him with all sorts of bruises and cuts that he was forced to make up excuses for. The episode also delves further into the particular kind of emotional abuse he suffered at her hands. Kosei's mother berated him and made him feel like a failure when he didn't achieve absolute perfection, even to the degree where any audience member or judge couldn't tell the difference. Even worse, she tied his success into her own health, making dips in her condition his fault by tying it to his musical "blunders." Even when Kosei is doing well, and telling Tsubaki cheerily that his mom will get better because of his performance, it's such a messed-up sentiment that you feel ill listening to it.

This episode pulls no punches, making it clear how much the creators of Your Lie in April understand the powerful toll this abuse can have on a kid. The argument that its slapstick humor and Kaori's pushiness "made light of" physical or emotional abuse seems extremely uncomfortable now, juxtaposed against its stark characterizations of the real thing. In anime like this, you know when it wants you to take the hitting and pushing seriously, because it stops rendering them in super-deformed caricature. You can actually see the wounds, rendered realistically, and they last longer than a joke frame. As soon as Your Lie in April began showing us just how traumatized Kosei was, I wondered if it was going to go deeper in a future episode. Now we have our answer.

The real question is: how well did it address it otherwise? Your Lie in April has pushed the melodrama so high in previous episodes, it feels like it's constantly trying to top itself on that regard. While it makes perfect sense for a show about hormonal teens performing music to be full of emotionally manipulative direction, that means you have a tall order to fill when you want to communicate something truly upsetting. On that count, I'm not sure that this episode fully succeeded.

It tries, for sure. The threadbare nature of the episode was clearly designed to put Kosei's flashbacks in harsher contrast. The show also wove in Emi's flashbacks (and Takeshi's in the previous episode) seamlessly with their performances by using the same music, whereas for Kosei's memories of abuse, it chose to switch to a minimalist soundtrack Your Lie in April uses for non-performing scenes, or to other music (such as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, with the composer once again serving as the show's musical symbol for torment). The presentation calls back to Kosei's previous psychological episodes, drawing on the viewer's memory of those earlier scenes. Everything we saw then starts to make an eerie, sickening bit of sense. Still, as someone for whom this kind of material hits a little close to home, I didn't feel like I got the full emotional impact I should have from these scenes. It stung me, but it didn't throttle me. That's partly because Your Lie in April treats everything with this level of emotional weight. It's so drowning in melodrama, that even when it wants to emphasize something, it all blurs together.

I'm hoping that this is just the start of exploring Kosei's abuse at the hands of his mother. I'm hoping that if the show keeps digging into that—such a crucial part of what makes Kosei tick—that it will tone down the other stuff enough to give this the attention it deserves. I'm hoping that when we eventually address Kaori's illness, it does the same for her emotional issues. As much as I normally love how intense Your Lie in April is about everything, I don't want that to come at the expense of giving serious issues their full, deserved gravitas. To me, that's a far bigger issue in its representations of these issues than some poorly-executed slapstick humor. When you do address this kind of material, you should make sure all your notes land.

Rating: B

Your lie in April is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rose is a graduate student in musicology, who has written about anime and many other topics for Autostraddle.com and her own blog. She tweets at @composerose.