I cringed a bit when Asumi made Marika call her father. No idea how she got the impression that this talk would be anything other than pure awkhardness, lol. But nice to see the girls bonding.
In the panel where Lion-san sees Old Marika in the afterlife, do we know if that’s a memory of his or his she still hanging around as a ghost because she has unfinished business, too?
Quite. And for that matter, how did she have Ukita senior’s number memorised? Was she planning on this from the beginning? It looks like there might be a phone book sitting on top of the pay phone’s enclosure (or maybe it’s just a manga magazine), but Marika definitely would have noticed if Asumi suddenly started consulting the phone book.
I have no idea. I feel like perhaps he’s imagining her while hanging around in the outskirts of the afterlife (as one does), but I don’t really get the point of this whole sequence with Lion-san. He has some memory of Marika, and then he gets distracted by memories of his father, and the Marika connection just disappears.
I thought the connection between all the story threads was new year - and wanting to be with family. For all three it was thinking about father, but all from very different situations.
It was quite a poignant chapter, especially the Lion-san sequence. Reminded me a lot of some of the poignant prequel chapters we’ve seen. Author seems good at ramping up the emotion levels with some of these scenes.
| Start Date | Chapter | Start Page |
Page Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 12 | Mission:18 | 123 | 30 |
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Page 123, rather a minor one, but ジャコビニ クリーニング on the awning Asumi is sheltering under in the fourth panel is perhaps named for the Draconids meteor shower, whose former name in English (and current name in Japanese) is the Giacobinids, because they’re triggered by the Giacobini-Zinner comet.
Page 128 and subsequent pages, ゲロ彗星 refers, of course, to the Vomit Comet, the nickname for the reduced-gravity aircraft, though I feel like it loses something in the translation without the rhyme. It amuses me a bit, though, that the English Wikipedia article uses the plane’s formal name, but the equivalent Japanese article is called 嘔吐彗星.
Page 139, I have no idea what board game these two are playing, and I’m not getting anything from Google either. Perhaps someone else recognises it?
That reduced gravity aircraft Wikipedia article is interesting. I liked the picture of Stephen Hawking at zero G!
EDIT - I also had a go at googling the board game but no luck. It seems to be an 11x10 board which is a bit odd. I do wonder if it’s a fictitious futuristic game for smart people…
Yeah, that’s what I counted, too. But yeah, Google was all “did you mean 10x10 or 11x11?”
For a moment, I thought the page with Marika might be a hint that she died in the crash, because afterwards there’s the page that shows Lion-san wandering through the devasted town until he sees his own grave and realizes he’s dead. So I thought maybe he met Marika 1.0 on the way. But of course, that doesn’t make sense, because Marika 2.0 is too old, so the cloning must have been several years earlier. Confused me a bit, your theory makes much more sense.