IRODUKU: The World in Colors

Episode 8

How do Hitomi's beginnings in the future mesh with her current life in the past? This episode gets into that more than any of the previous ones, and while the answers aren't necessarily what Kohaku wants or is anticipating, they do make a lot of sense. The baseline for this exploration is Kohaku's desire to make people happy via magic, a long-held wish, and the fact that Hitomi is the person most obviously in her path who she could help. She takes it upon herself to try to figure out two specific things on that front: how to help Hitomi see colors again and how to send her back to the future. While both of these are admirable (and at least one of them will facilitate the plot of the show sixty years from its present), they're also characteristic of Kohaku's not-yet-mature thinking. What she ought to be asking herself instead is why she sent (or rather, will send) Hitomi to the past in the first place – wouldn't it follow that it was in the goal of making her happy? And if that's the case, perhaps she's already accomplished the more important of the two things she's set for herself.

That the two goals are related is feeling much more obvious from hints dropped this week. Kohaku's current working theory is that Hitomi unconsciously cast a spell on herself that rendered her vision monochromatic, but that somehow being around Yuito is allowing that spell to weaken. In a classic case of overthinking, Kohaku determines that there's a literal magic spell here, and she sets out to try and recreate the potentially emotionally heightened circumstances that she thinks may have triggered Hitomi's color vision. She fails, because having your teenage grandmother try to engineer heart-pounding situations with the boy you like works about as well as having your not-teenage grandma do it, but she does get Hitomi to divulge what I suspect is a key piece of information. As Kohaku is having Hitomi look at pictures similar to Yuito's art, Hitomi comments that there was one picture book she remembers seeing in color as a child, but she doesn't remember the title or author. What if that book was one created by a future Yuito? And what it, remembering not only that it was her granddaughter's one chance to see color but also that she went to high school with Yuito, that prompted Kohaku to send Hitomi back through time in the first place?

That could still tie in with the possibility raised by both genre conventions and the story's own implications that Hitomi will somehow save Yuito, whether that's in a literal or a figurative sense. But the more important piece of the puzzle here is that Kohaku has very likely already done what she's determined to do: make Hitomi happy with magic. That there are two interpretations of the term “magic” that can be applied to Hitomi's circumstances makes things even more interesting – there's of course the literal magic being cast with spells in the story, but also the cornier but no less important theme of the “magic” of love and human relationships. In the future, Hitomi is alone. In the past, she's got friends and a boy she likes who may like her back. That, rather than a spell with components and a chant, may be the true magic that allows Hitomi to see in colors.

In the meantime, of course, we've still got Asagi trying desperately to figure out if and how to talk to Sho about her feelings for him, while Kurumi fights her own emotions about Chigusa, who gets hammier by the episode. Sho seems to be struggling with something as well, although whether that's based on his own feelings for Hitomi or the fact that he knows Yuito is fighting his is unclear. What's certain is that he in no way wants Hitomi to go back to the future, and Hitomi's comment to Kohaku that she'd rather stay is almost certain to throw everyone, especially Kohaku, for a loop. Kohaku's not in a place where she could understand wanting to live sixty years away from the people she grew up with, and in some ways, that could be the biggest growing experience of them all in this story as it begins to pick up emotional speed in its second half.

Rating: B

IRODUKU: The World in Colors is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.