Atori’s dark gifted kid past revealed.
So, this episode was… lower key. I never thought Tasokare Hotel was going to leave the episodic formula behind, so it makes sense to have a few more basic stories run in the middle. Thus, we get an episode that’s less dramatic and less sordid than the past couple.
Our guests this week are a kid with a rocket head and an older man with a record. The older man is identified by Atori – he’s a saxophone player whose music inspired Atori to try to take up the saxophone himself. It was an effort that seemed to end in failure because, while he relates being technically good at just about everything he tries, he couldn’t summon the passion to make it in the Jazz community.
Normally, I’d roll my eyes a little at something like this – most skills are really hard to execute at a high level of technical competence while letting “has no passion” show through as a fault. But Jazz in specific? While not a musical style that’s really my wheelhouse, even beyond music not really being an area of my expertise in general, there’s a focus on freestyle and improvisation that makes it notorious for this kind of thing.
In any case, this means we focus a little on Atori being out of sorts having to meet his idol in these conditions, knowing that since the guy had a bad heart, this is probably the time that got him. Meanwhile, the kid has a cat. Said cat doesn’t leave him, but also doesn’t want to be touched. Odd. We eventually get the story that the boy has asthma, and that despite this, and animals making his attacks worse, he tried his best to take care of the little cat, until one night, while running away from home, the two of them took a bad fall.
The cat, who was already sick before the fall, like the kindly old musician, is bound for the other side, while the boy is able to hear his mother’s voice begging him to wake up, letting him know that he has a life to go back to. There’s less investigation in this episode – both figures remember their destinations at about the same time as they get their faces back and that’s it. It’s more about emotional catharsis here, Atori and the boy getting to learn some important lessons and come out feeling a little better.
I’ll be honest, I’d been liking the meatier cases in episodes 3, 4, and 5, each of which revolved around one particular scenario and really dug into it, even if two of the three were multi-guest situations. I’m not saying this doesn’t serve a purpose, since presumably we want to work out things about Atori, but I am looking forward to getting more of the heavy stuff.