With You and the Rain

Episode 8

Although we've gotten to know a little bit about Fuji each week, nothing quite hits home like her empathy with the lone white camellia on the bush of red flowers. Her simple statement about relating to the bloom sums up who she is and how she sees herself more than anything else thus far. She feels different from everyone around her, but in a way that's somehow more lonely than if she'd identified with something else; by saying that she's like the one white blossom on a hedge of red flowers, she's saying that she looks more or less like everyone else, but she feels like she doesn't fit in. There's something about her that's unlike everyone else around her.

Viewers can recognize this as Fuji being introverted. She's not uncomfortable around other people, but she's at her best when she's with people she knows well (her high school friends) or who don't make demands of her, like her little neighbor. Seeing how easily others interact with people likely makes her feel like she's quite right somehow. Maybe that's what made her bring Kimi home in the first place: he says he's a dog and plenty of people are willing to see him as such, but there's something that's different about him. He's a tanuki in a dog park, which isn't that dissimilar from being a white camellia on a red camellia bush. Fuji sees Kimi as a kindred spirit.

That's hardly unusual between pets and people. There are definitely days when I feel like my cats and dog understand me better than any human, and as an introvert myself, they're much more comfortable to be around at the end of the day. But for Fuji and Kimi, this episode solidifies their relationship for viewers. Kimi is her safe space, her person who lets her relax fully in an emotional sense. It's an important piece of the bond between human and animal, and for a white camellia like Fuji, it takes on even greater significance in terms of her social and emotional well-being.

It's clear that Kimi gets something similar from her, too. The title of this week's episode, “Cry,” refers to the first time he makes noises other than his little chirps and grunts; he whines like a sad puppy. It's striking because before this moment, he would have written out, “I was lonely,” or “I missed you” on his pad of paper; that he instead vocalized his distress shows the depth of it. It also indicates that he's fully comfortable with Fuji at this point. He's embarrassed when she points out that he was whining, which means that he finds that sort of utterance to be childish or otherwise beneath him, which seems to suggest that he only did it because of the strength of his feelings. He knew she'd be home late, but that didn't soothe what he felt, and he expressed it in the most natural way he could.

Although it's made up of the same short-segment format as the rest of the series, episode eight brings everything together. From Fuji leaving her friends in her apartment during their get together to go get some air (in two senses; she's sobering up and she's resetting her social self so that she can cope with people in her space) to building snow bunnies to explaining the distance between Siberia and Japan to Kii-chan, this is all about Fuji finding ways to be comfortable in the world and how Kimi enhances that. She may be the white camellia, but as the older woman says when she hands her a cut bloom, there are other white buds hidden within the leaves.

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With You and the Rain is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.