Oh, I'm ok on Chitose--we find out at various points that she's a B-list model, struggling to make a living (she's living at home, after all), with dreams of getting financial security for the family by making it onto one of the classical Japanese TV shows. She's not very nice to Chihaya, but she does care for her family.
The one character I really don't get is Taichi's mom. I don't think she ever is shown to be other than Ms. Pressure. She confuses me, since she contradicts the rule that Suetsugu is sympathetic on one level or the other to all her characters.
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The title poem for this week's episode is #41. Here's Mostow's translation:
My name already
is bandied about with
rumors I'm in love--
though, unknown to anyone, I thought,
I had only just begun to love her!
The poem draws a contrast between the public perception of the speaker's passion and the speaker's own sense of his own feelings. It is almost as if there are two different versions of the poet's love: that which gave rise to the rumors, and the internal, immediately recent passion, which the poet thinks unknown to anyone.
Kana uses this same dichotomy to convince Sumire to overlook her embarrassment at confessing her feelings for Taichi in the club room. "Do you really think that the president knows your / true feelings after hearing that little outburst?" The outburst fuels the public perception of love, but it does not express Sumire's "true feelings," the inward passion that is the deep reality of Sumire's feelings.
Kana divides outburst from feelings by appealing to the discipline of traditional poetry's formal rules. Sumire takes her point by accepting karuta as the discipline whereby she will prove and express her own deep feelings of love. Thus we get the episode's satisfying climax, where she dedicates herself to memorizing the poems, and finally cuts her nails.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Quadratic
Kanade enjoys in the poems strictly in the historical sense (Kanade's playing the role of the observer), whereas Sumire is wants to experience what the poems have been expressing, but "modernized" in the 21st century.
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Brilliant.
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I liked how the team moved forward in this episode. Nobody can understand why Chihaya cares so much about the first-years, until she explains her feelings of responsibility for collapsing at the nationals. Before that, the other team members were resisting her (Nishida's shooting down her seconding Tsukuba's request Taichi teach him the basics), and feeling annoyed by the first-years. Afterwards, Kana chases out after Sumire, and Nishida volunteers to teach Tsukuba himself. Sweet to see. Chihaya is carrying the team forward with her beautiful passion.