okay. alright. alright. let's do these one at a time.
once again, the answer to the question "where does the story go from here" is obvious in hindsight!
so in volume 4 we peeled back all the layers of artifice to reveal the real real world of the story, as it were. there kanoko managed to bring her feelings for hime to light, even if just a little bit, while sumika found some closure for what happened with nene by supporting kanoko. with all this in mind... it's easy to start wondering what the point of the artifice is in the first place. if all it leads to is these girls bottling their feelings, confusing each other, and all that, then why bother? why can't we all just be open and honest all the time? what value do these performances have?
well, it's quite simple, really. it's because even in "reality", we're still performing. the social conventions people in society at large follow, often without even thinking about them, are also artificial! and arbitrary and stupid, and in this volume we get to see just how much grief all these unexplained rules of social interaction cause yano. no one says what they're thinking, their words don't actually mean what she thinks they mean, and everyone always misunderstands what she says... it's very easy to see the appeal the café's fantasy had to her, then. it's honest about being a performance! the rules are all laid out, and she can study them and know what to do! and she even figures out how to apply these lessons to outside the café, allowing her to make some friends at school. to yano, the artifice isn't something to escape from; it's a reprieve from the incomprehensible rules of the real world.
absolute fucking genius!! oh my god, exploring all these themes through yano's (extremely relatable) autism and coming full circle to where we started?? it's just incredible. and then we see how her view of this – of her performance as a kindness that she has to go out of her way to do – clashes with hime's, whose façade is just plainly dishonest and something that she wants to abandon when with yano. yano struggles to make both of them follow the script because that's how she shows her appreciation for hime, but hime only reads that as yano pushing her away, which in turn only makes yano more confused about juggling all these different modes of acting... and how about having yano be jealous of kanoko — the girl who knows exactly what kind of façade hime wants from her??? it's just perfect. oh my goodness.
yep, another fantastic volume. it continues to expand on the themes brilliantly, while just being really good character drama! really looking forward to the next volume, where hime and yano will finally talk things out and clear things up and everything will be fine :)