March Comes In Like A Lion E5: Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The fifth episode of this commission, "June Comes In Like a Cuckoo," is also the last. I'm not really expecting anything like closure or synthesis of the preceding story arcs, as this doesn't seem like a show that's about tying things together into a "main" plot. Either way, my thoughts on the series (or at least, what I've seen of it) will come at the end.


Open on a younger Rei playing against his maybe-father while a tea kettle heats up really, really dramatically over a stove in the background. Rei's internal narration tells us that this guy was apparently a friend of Rei's father, not the man himself. Okay, that makes his family situation a little less confusing. This younger (12-13 years old or so, by the looks of him) Rei loses to the adult. I think that makes this the first shogi match we've seen him lose. Young Rei explains to his opponent why he made the mistakes that he made, who complements him on "not playing like a child." Rei informs us that even though this guy was just a family friend, he always felt excited when he came over.

Then Rei's father makes his first unambiguous onscreen appearance, coming home and apologizing for his lateness.

This is before Rei's family died then. But when we say Rei's face a second ago, he looked every bit as miserable as usual. I guess losing his family just made him feel vindicated in his misery.

Or...wait, okay, I misinterpreted earlier. Rei actually beat the guy a second ago, he didn't lose to him. It was just hard to tell who was saying what at that bit. Okay.

Apparently, Rei's father and this other guy knew each other ever since they were in a shogi club together in their younger days. Rei's father wasn't a pro shogi player (this is seinen, not shonen), but it was a favorite hobby of both of theirs, and Rei picked it up from him. To tell the truth, Rei tells us, shogi was far from his favorite game at that age. However, it was the game he would play with his father during the little time they were able to spend together. Very little time together, due to Japan. Rei would have rather played outside and done sportsball type stuff with his dad, but shogi it was.

Huh. Okay then. I can see how his progi career might be loaded down with complex emotional issues in the wake of his parents' untimely deaths, yeah.

He had trouble making friends at school, and was often bullied. His description of how social interactions between the other kids were like a language he couldn't speak make it sound like he might be slightly autistic. I think that more or less fits with his portrayal thus far. Anyway, that shogi-playing friend of his dad's was one of the few people outside of his family who he had a positive relationship with, as he remembers things.

Back to the present. Rei is playing against himself in his apartment when he gets a phone call. Also, he's starting to get some actual furniture installed, good for him.

It's Akari asking him to pick Momo up from kindergarten, since everyone else in the family (including herself) had something important come up. Rei heads out the door. As he crosses the bridge, a tour boat on the river gets his attention.

He momentarily looks haunted. Like, moreso than usual. I'm guessing one of these was involved in the loss of his family by drowning that the intro and outro hint at.

Cut to Momo at kindergarten, being adorable as she waits for pickup. Rei arrives, and she skips and sings to herself as he leads her home by the hand. Even Rei is unable to remain miserable for long in the face of such cuteness, and starts weakly smiling as he asks her what she's singing. Let me guess, it's going to be something from her Ersatz Totaro thing which will get him butthurt about Nikocado again. Ah, no, it's just a song about a cat, never mind, we're good for now.

Just then, the wind picks up and snatches away Momo's hat. Rei runs and retrieves it before it can roll into the river, and in the few seconds that he has his back turned Momo finds herself in a new predicament.

If only the cats were here, I'm sure they could talk that beast down.
​

The l...

...oh. Okay.

The dog can talk too. And I think, given the dissimilarity between what the dog is saying and how Momo is interpreting its actions, that I can now safely conclude that the people can't understand what the animals are saying.

Rei helps get the dog's owner get it back under control, but not before Momo trips while running away from it and hurts herself, starting to cry. If nothing else, the dog and its owner are both very apologetic about this.

Kirei picks Momo up and carries her home. None of the others have gotten back yet, so it falls on him to tend to her wounds. She just some bad scratches on her hands, apparently, so he has her help him find the first aid kit and cleans and dresses her wounds. As he's disinfecting her scratches, he looks into her tearful face and has a PTSD flashback. He sees a woman (his mother, I think?) laying dead on a hospital gurney. Then another little girl, who I think is his sister we glimpsed in that photo a while back, with a face somewhat similar to Momo's. Then everything is covered up in snow and ice crystals (not sure what that visual detail is about; we've only seen liquid water in these flashback bits until now) before we slowly return to the here and now.

Fucking hell Rei, you have undiagnosed PTSD as well as depression. Screw the stigma, get some damned therapy!

It takes him a minute to recover. Fortunately, Momo manages to be patient. Jump ahead to a bit later, when Akari has gotten home. Rei apologizes for letting this happen. She brushes it off, saying that kids fall and hurt themselves all the time. Momo says cute stuff. After Rei leaves, Momo mentions that she saw Rei crying as he tended to her wounds. Akari surmises that something must have reminded him of something. Hina, who has also arrived by this time, is curious about what she means. Meanwhile, Rei just walks home alone.

Another flashback. Rei starts giving us some more details about the event. Apparently, he was away on a school trip when his parents and little sister were killed in an accident.

Going by the imagery and PTSD triggers, I'd been assuming that Rei was also in the accident, and was the only survivor out of the four. Guess he wasn't actually there in person after all. Still awful, perhaps even worse in some ways, but surprising for me.

The music gets pretty intense here. The art style as well, as Rei is watching the rain outside the morgue window and the authorities figure out what to do with him in the background. Has a real wintery horror vibe to it.

Also, it turns out his family was killed in a car accident, not a boat sinking. Huh? The heck is up with all the drowning imagery and Rei being triggered (in the actual psychology sense) by tour boats, then? Weird.

None of Rei's extended family were able or willing to take him in, so it looked like he was about to be sent to an orphanage. With his social issues, desire for quiet, and history of being bullied, Rei knew he wouldn't survive at an orphanage.

But then...okay, this is really fucking weird, and I'm not sure if I'm interpreting it correctly, but if I am then this is just totally WTF. That friend of his father's (who, unlike his father, actually is a pro shogi player) visits Rei and offers to adopt him, but only if he agrees to become a progi.

...what?

"I'll adopt my late friend's orphan son, but only if he agrees to become a pro chess player like myself?"

That's...huh?

I haven't been too sharp when it comes to catching the finer plot points of this show, and there's also a lot that went over my head due to it being steeped in Japanese cultural practices. So, maybe I'm misinterpreting what just happened here. If I'm not though, then...just, what?

Rei doesn't particularly like shogi, even though he's a prodigy at it, and he has particularly conflicted feelings about it after losing his father. But it's his only alternative to the orphanage. Thus explaining his weird, unexplained resentment of this guy when we saw them playing against each other in the pilot.

Hmm. I think Rei needs to find some hobbies. Going into another profession or trying to double down on schoolwork would probably be prohibitively difficult for someone like him, so he needs the shogi to support himself. He seems to have a ton of free time though, so I think finding some other stuff - commercial or otherwise - to fill it with would do him a world of good. He should also burn his foster dad's house down, but that's a different matter.

Back to the present. Rei wakes up the following morning, and pulls a thread on his shirt that is definitely not a metaphor for how hyperfocusing on his past traumas is destroying him.

Good. I hate it when shows do symbolism and shit. Always nice to see characters just complain about wardrobe issues with no metaphors going on.

It's a windy day, making him struggle against the door a bit to get it open. Still better than the recent heat wave, I suppose. He walks to a department store and buys a little sewing kit to fix his shirt with. This isn't symbolic of anything though, so I don't think it's foreshadowing him getting professional help and/or confronting his foster father. He goes home, threads the needle, and launches into another flashback.

Rei's foster family already had two children; a son around his age, and a daughter four years older. Naturally, they were raised to be obsessed with shogi, and resented Rei for coming into their house and overshadowing them. To the point where his foster sister started physically hitting him for beating her at shogi. The mother wanted to be lenient with her, on account of her being "just a girl." Internalized sexism, its what's for dinner. Dad Of The Year, on the other hand, punished her harshly for this. Not because she physically assaulted her adoptive younger brother, but because she exhibited bad sportsmanship and dishonored the noble spirit of shogi. This fucking guy, I swear.

Rei developed some weird thoughts about his foster sister.

Things continued to escalate, with her bullying of Rei getting worse and worse. And her freaking out at both Rei and her father when Rei dared to call him "dad" in front of her. Rei narrates how shogi was literally the only thing that could ever stay in his foster father's mind for longer than a few minutes, and everything else could only "matter" to him if he could see a causal chain connecting them to shogi. His family had to make themselves shogi-relevant as best they could to prevent him from forgetting about them.

I'm starting to think that fosterdad might actually be further down along the autistic spectrum than Rei. That kind of persistent, all-encompassing monomania is not neurotypical.

Being persistently, consistently beaten at shogi by Rei caused his foster brother to break down after a while. He became depressed, losing his interest in schoolwork to the point of concerning his teachers. Fosterdad blamed his son for this. Shortly thereafter, when fosterdad nominated Rei for some shogi related thing over his biodaughter, the same thing happened. The brother shut himself away and became an otaku, immersing himself in videogames and never coming out again. The sister became a juvenile delinquent, forgetting about school and just going full time petty criminal. Rei just buried himself completely in shogi.

Ah, I see. That's why a bunch of things haven't been tracking. Losing his family was only one source of trauma and emotional damage for Rei, and probably not the main one. Being raised from that point on by a lunatic who made Rei complicit in destroying his own children's lives was the other and likely bigger one.

Jump ahead to what appears to be a middle or early high school aged Rei doing the dishes, and happening to catch part of a nature documentary on TV.

This prompted him to quit school, start making money in shogi tournaments that he'd just managed to start winning his way into, and get his own apartment as quickly as possible. To get himself out of that house and hopefully save a little bit of his foster siblings' young adulthoods, instead of letting himself be a cuckoo.

Of course, the difference here is that it was his foster siblings' OWN parents who are guilty of practicing this brood parasitism-like behavior. But Rei still blames himself, and given how he's been raised that's just to be expected. Cue him moving into this unfurnished apartment, and being found drowning his misery in alcohol by Akari.

He finishes sewing his shirt back together. It was something his father gave him to use as extra insulation when he left on that school trip. It was much too big on him at the time, but he's since grown into it.

Trying to preserve the person who he was, or who he might have been able to become, despite his self loathing and guilt causing him to pick at it? Eh....nah, I still don't think it's meant to be symbolic.

The episode ends with him looking out the window and envying the cuckoo bird. The cuckoo, at least, doesn't realize what it's doing as it follows its instincts. It doesn't understand or feel for what it's doing to the other bird family.


And, that's the first five episodes of "March Comes In Like a Lion."

I think I would have enjoyed it quite a bit more if episode five had come earlier, say as the second or third ep. A lot more about Rei makes sense in retrospect now, but it was confusing and a little frustrating up until now, and I don't see how the story benefitted by keeping this backstory a secret until now. Now that I have the full picture, it's a lot more compelling, and I'm able to sympathize with Rei much more now that I know his problems are much bigger than just "he should get on antidepressants already."

The side plots and slice-of-lifeness as a whole I could take or leave. In some ways, they kind of feel like distractions from the main story. In others, they provide some welcome levity and breaks from it. At this point, you've probably all gathered that I prefer very focused narratives as a matter of personal taste. Very few of the sideplots and diversions of MCILaL are bad, so objectively I'd say this is a good story of its structure. It's just not a structure I'm fond of.

So, decent show. It would have been better if it didn't withhold this contextualizing backstory information for so long, but still pretty good. Either way though, I don't think it's for me.