The Fruit of Grisaia

Episode 5

The death of her cat in the last episode has sent Michiru into a deep depression. We knew that she was having emotional problems previously, not only because she appears to harbor both a blue-eyed and a green-eyed personality, but also because we saw her taking medication. When this episode starts, she's tried to kill herself with that same medication – etizolam, it turns out, which is used for anxiety and panic attacks, along with insomnia. So either her doctors don't know about the other personality or she is refusing treatment for it; either way, all she manages to do is suppress her blue-eyed self, something only Yuuji appears aware of. That she's using an anti-anxiety medication to keep one of her personalities in check (and keep in mind that this is coming from an English teacher, not a doctor) seems symbolic of her seeing her anxious self as someone completely Other from Michiru – a being who must and can be repressed rather than a chemical imbalance in her brain. While panic attacks can cause you to feel like you're looking down on yourself from some other place, this seems a bit more extreme than that.

Speaking of extreme, Yuuji's reaction to the situation takes him from “concerned friend” to “totally creepy guy” very quickly. One minute he's exposing the exchange diary Michiru's two selves kept, the next he's pinning Green-Eyes onto the bed and forcing pills down her throat so that he can bury Blue-Eyes alive in a coffin. “I just wanted to see if you really wanted to live,” he essentially explains later. (I've paraphrased two minutes of dialogue.) Right. Good plan, Yuuji – bury the suicidal girl with a panic disorder alive in a coffin after she's suffered the death of someone she loves. That'll help.

Because this is anime and not real life, it works and Yuuji is not arrested. And when the episode isn't straining our credulity with Yuuji's tactics, it is actually quite touching. We learn about Michiru's troubled past, her health issues both physical and mental, and find out precisely who this other personality is. In some ways it's the same old story whose first part we hope never to hear again – bullied child commits suicide, sick child receives organ transplant. (When Michiru remembers the past, her friend appears to have bruises all over her face before she dies.) It's a short segment, really, but still relatively effective in terms of emotional content. It would have been better served by getting more longer to play out, but it is still easily one of the best parts of the episode.

Whether or not the transplanted organ came from this deceased friend is never really stated, and the uncertain location of both the show and Michiru's past don't really help us to understand whether or not the organ came with the friend's spirit or whether Michiru somehow summoned her. That confusion is one of the major downsides to both the flashback and the ending of the episode, as it allows us to waste time trying to guess if they're in Japan or America instead of focusing on Michiru's more important emotional transformation. There's also a very rushed feeling to the whole thing, clearly indicating (at least to me) that a lot of game has been condensed into very little anime. It's a shame, because it feels like there's a lot more to Michiru's past than we're getting, all of which could have been very important to fully appreciating her need to hide behind a tsundere clown mask.

This episode is also remarkable for the slim number of panty shots (one, really, plus recaps of a couple from the opening episode) and school antics. We have one scene of a goofy chibi (which involves a chainsaw, so that's pretty great) and that's pretty much it. The Fruit of Grisaia really is at its best when it's being serious, so from that angle, this is one of the better episodes. It may not dig into Michiru as much as it could have, but this is still fairly compelling as it grapples with severe depression and anxiety.

Rating: B

The Fruit of Grisaia is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rebecca Silverman teaches writing and literature at the university level and writes ANN's manga review column, RTO.