[BWTraveller]

And here begins Taro's backstory.

Spoiler:

When Taro was five he started having strange dreams of a "strange woman" (now clearly Mika) crying, every night. His dad chalked it up to stress over the impending move. He was naturally stressed over this, especially since he wouldn't be able to see his best friend and crush Mika every day anymore, though Mika tried to tell him that when the new bridge was finished they'd be able to see each other every day with ease. Finally, the night before the move he saw himself crying instead of the woman. He went to say goodbye to Mika, planning to confess and ask her to marry him in the future, but with the confusion over the dreams, the stress of the move and his natural shyness he couldn't bring himself to say anything. Without saying it, he ended up just keeping everything bottled up inside until he threw a tantrum in the car on the way to the new house. His dad turned to try and calm him right as they approached an intersection, and noticed all too late that another car was driving through. The crash was horrible, and he passed out, only to wake up as an adult, in a strange and near-empty room with an article on the wall about the deaths of the Nishimori couple and their son Tooru.

Mika comes in, gets angry that he's dwelling on it again, then says that she thinks they should separate for a while because she feels like she's going to break herself soon. Terribly confused by this large body and situation, he goes for a walk, and gets excited when he sees the now-complete bridge, runs across it to find "Mika" (still not clear that it was Mika who greeted him earlier) only to get run over by a truck and wake up the day before the move. He starts to deliberately repeat this over and over, always trying but failing to confess, always throwing a fit, always waking up in the future, and dying sometime fairly soon after to once more repeat his one last day together with Mika. Finally, after countless loops he grows to realize just how wrong this is, how he'll never be able to move forward this way, and so he cries like in the dream and asks Mika to marry him. Having heard her agree, he leaves calmer, confident that he'll always be her one true love, and without the fit as a distraction his father's able to stop at the intersection, and a cheerful five-year-old Tooru looks out his car window.


So Taro's powers first awoke because of an accident that killed Tooru, and he was unable to move forward until he accepted his situation and thus avoided taking Tooru's life, without ever knowing that this turned his life from a path where he would indeed get together with Mika but neither would be happy to one where someone else would take a far larger place in her heart. Kind of tragic for him. I really hope that the author gives him someone to be happy with by the end of the story, considering all he's been through. Either way though, it makes me wonder whether the connection between them is the reason why Tooru has the same power (or for that matter whether it really started with one or the other, or as a result of both of them.