Well, once you’re caught up wait for the ghost to go the bathroom, grab a cup of coffee, and travel back in time to talk to us. Are you familiar with the rules?
I’m actually liking the characters and their little quirks. I really like that Hirai went to the coffee shop and didn’t get greeted for a while, decided that they didn’t really care too much about the customers, and was like, “Yeah, I like this place.”
I’m not sure I caught true meaning of the part about water flowing from high places to low places, but I liked it a lot. Was it to explain there was a gravity-like force that tells your heart that someone is sad and not being forthright about it?
I thought it was a gravity-like force that attracts you to certain people and makes you be open and honest with them, so at the slightest nudge from Kei, Hirai would have no choice but to open her heart and tell her everything. I had sort of gotten tired by that point though, so I may have missed something.
Yes, I really like how Hirai is not entirely in tune with how most things are supposed to work (and I guess in Japan there’s an increased societal expectation to fit in compared to some other parts of the world). Which makes her family background extra oppressing for her.
Okies, finished the reading. Interestingly, the English translation skips the umpteenth repetition of the rules, and simply summarises the paragraph to the comments specifically relevant to Hirai.
On the subject of not changing the past, in the movie version, Past-Kazu (Kei’s not in the movie) spots the thermometer in Future-Hirai’s coffee cup, and immediately realises that Kumi is about to die, even though she didn’t know in the original timeline. (Also, that realisation is conveyed entirely by Kazu’s facial expression, quite effectively.)
(Also in the movie version, Hirai’s mourning clothes include a long, black coat, so in the scene where she’s showing off how stylish she looks in black, she also does Neo’s bullet-time dance from the original Matrix while exclaiming マトリックス、マトリックス, which amuses me a bit.)
