May 10th.
A little past nine in the evening, Haruto Nishikaze sat in front of his TV, waiting for Clannad season two, episode eighteen.
Before it even started, he pulled out his phone and emailed his buddy Ryuji Kageyama. "Only a few episodes left. If I still haven't cried by the end, you owe me ten meals."
Less than a minute later, the reply came back. "Yeah, yeah. With all those emotional moments and you still haven't shed a tear, you really are a block of wood."
"Ha. Making me cry? Impossible. It's just an anime. There's no way a cartoon is going to make me cry," Haruto scoffed.
The truth was, he normally did not watch anime at all. But his buddy Ryuji had evangelized at him relentlessly, insisting that Clannad was an anime that could make anyone cry.
Haruto had always been emotionally detached. He did not buy it for a second, so he made a bet with Ryuji.
If he actually cried, he would treat Ryuji to ten meals. If he did not, Ryuji was buying.
He had caught up on season one through the DVDs Ryuji lent him. Season two, he had been watching live since episode one.
Were there touching moments? Sure, plenty. But just as he had predicted, nothing had made him cry. Even when the female lead died in episode sixteen, he felt nothing.
These last few episodes would be no different, he figured.
It was just an anime. It was not going to make him cry. And even for the sake of ten free meals, he could definitely hold it together.
Ten o'clock.
Episode eighteen began.
It opened with the little girl and the robot. From the music to the visuals to the atmosphere, everything carried a deep sense of sadness.
But Haruto could not connect with it at all. If anything, these recurring scenes that had nothing to do with the main plot just annoyed him.
After the girl-and-robot segment, the OP played.
As Ryuji had said, the OP was beautiful. Haruto could admit that Yuta Shido was talented. But that was about it. It did not stir anything extra in him.
After the OP, the actual story began.
The male lead and his daughter were sitting on a train. Nearby was a mother with her young son.
The kid was being clingy and loud. The male lead snapped and yelled at the mother and child, not realizing he had scared his own daughter Ushio in the process.
When he came to his senses, she was gone.
He found her outside the restroom. Her eyes were red, obviously from crying, but when he asked if she had been crying, she shook her head.
"You're not allowed to cry."
"Who told you that?"
"Sanae."
"Really? She's stricter than I thought."
"But there are places where it's okay to cry."
"Where?"
"The bathroom."
"I guess that makes sense. Nobody can see you crying in there. But you know what, I think you should just cry whenever you feel like it. Better to get it all out now. When you grow up, there'll be times you want to cry but can't."
The person who wanted to cry but could not was obviously the male lead himself.
After getting off the train, the male lead took his daughter to buy a toy. He told her to pick whatever she wanted. She looked around but could not seem to find anything she liked, so the male lead picked up a robot and asked what she thought.
Her eyes seemed to sparkle. She nodded.
"That robot..."
Haruto suddenly recalled the girl-and-robot scenes from earlier.
The toy robot the male lead just bought looked exactly like the one in those segments.
Could the daughter be the little girl? Could this toy robot be that robot?
He thought about it but could not figure it out, so he kept watching.
That night, the daughter suddenly made a request. "Tell me about Mommy."
The male lead froze for a moment and did not agree.
At this point, Haruto felt an unexpected tightness in his chest, as if he had taken the same hit as the male lead. He could not help sniffling, but then he remembered "ten meals" and the crushing feeling eased up just a little.
On screen, the anime continued.
A night passed. The next morning was bright and clear. The male lead brought his daughter to a field of flowers.
Ushio ran through the flowers with her robot, playing happily, while the male lead leaned against a tree and closed his eyes to rest.
During his nap, the robot went missing. The male lead helped look for it but could not find it, so he suggested giving up and buying an identical one on the way home.
His daughter would not hear of it. She kept searching with her head down, refusing to quit.
The male lead gave up and sat down nearby, watching her small figure move through the flowers.
A gust of wind blew. Clouds covered the sun, casting shadows.
In the middle of the flower field, the image suddenly shifted to a little boy, unmistakably the male lead as a child.
The young version of the male lead seemed to be searching for something too. Behind him, a man approached, but the perspective cut back to the present before anything more was revealed.
Another gust of wind. The male lead jolted awake with a sudden realization. He had been to this place as a child.
He stood up, told his daughter he was going to look around nearby, and walked off.
In the evening light, he walked briskly until he spotted a woman. It was his grandmother.
She told him about his father's life. Losing his wife when he was still so young. How impossibly hard everything had been, both work and life. And how, despite all of it, he had raised his son alone.
The male lead could not help reflecting on his own situation. Only now did he truly understand what his father had gone through. Only now did he realize that he had been an even worse parent than the man he had resented.
"Oh no."
Haruto suddenly felt things were getting dangerous.
He was about to break. He took a deep breath and fought to hold on. But the scene that followed hit like a bomb with enough force to level a city.
The male lead and his grandmother returned to the edge of the flower field.
Ushio still had not found the robot. The male lead walked into the flowers.
"You've been looking this whole time, huh?"
"Yeah."
"I see."
As he said this, the male lead remembered how his father used to squat down to talk to him at eye level. So he walked up to his daughter and knelt.
"Ushio, that robot might never turn up again. It can't be helped. So let me buy you a new one instead, okay?"
"That one is the only one."
"But the store had a whole bunch of them."
"That one was the one you picked for me. The one you bought for me."
"Huh?"
"It was the first time... Daddy..."
Hearing his daughter's words, the male lead went still.
Everything suddenly clicked into place.
No wonder his daughter, a little girl, had loved a toy robot so much. No wonder she had refused to give up searching when it went missing.
He lowered his head, as if he could not bear to look at her anymore.
"Ushio, you've been lonely, haven't you?"
"Yeah."
"Did you have fun on this trip with me?"
"Yeah."
"I see."
"..."
"Ushio, can I... stay by your side? I know I've been a terrible father up until now. But from here on, I'm going to try my hardest for you. So, can I be with you?"
"Yeah."
"Really?"
"I want you to be with me."
"I see."
"But... I lost something important today, and it hurts. Daddy, does that mean... I don't have to hold it in anymore? Sanae told me. The places where it's okay to cry are the bathroom... and in Daddy's arms."
"Yeah. Yeah."
The male lead nodded twice.
His daughter ran to him and threw herself into his arms, sobbing freely.
The background music swelled and shifted with the moment, and it destroyed Haruto completely.
The man his buddy Ryuji had called a "block of wood," the man who had been absolutely certain that no anime could ever make him cry, was now sitting there with tears streaming down his face.
On screen, the story was not over yet.
On the train ride home, the male lead began telling his daughter about her mother.
"Your mom, she always seemed like she was about to cry. Even when I first met her. No confidence, fragile, standing at the bottom of the hill leading to school."
"And guess what she said standing there? She closed her eyes and shouted, 'Anpan.'"
"That was her thing. She'd call out the name of something she wanted to eat. It was how she worked up her courage."
"Sanae-san was busy with work back then and didn't have time to make her lunch. She could have squeezed it in if she really tried, but your mom turned her down."
"That's the kind of person she was."
"And then... let me think... and then... and also..."
His voice cracked. The tears he had been fighting spilled over and would not stop. Memories of the female lead flashed across the screen one after another as the male lead's words dissolved into quiet sobbing.
Haruto had not even finished wiping away his first round of tears, and he got hit all over again.
He was completely wrecked.
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