Recap

The gang gets Kaori to her competition in the nick of time. Her playing blows the audience out of the water, and solidifies Kousei’s crush. Unfortunately, her unorthodox style gets no points from the judges. Realizing he’s only second fiddle to Ryota, he becomes melancholy once again, but he just can’t get her out of his head.

This episode epitomizes one of the great mysteries of Japanese media, one I’ve been puzzled about since I first watched Nodame Cantabile. Your Lie In April is a manga series, obviously it has no audio. How, then, does an artist properly depict what is going on in a musical competition? Sure one can use their imagination, but not everyone is going to even know the piece a story is talking about, and even then, the vague descriptions of what a person is doing right or wrong pales in comparison to hearing the genuine article. It’s why I do love whenever these types of stories become animated. Every wrong note is something you can hear yourself, and Kaori’s defiant performance is the audial treat of the show, not just something you have to imagine for yourself.

That said, the Kreutzer is an interesting selection. The piece is 40 minutes long, so even here in the anime we only got to taste a thin slice of what it had to offer. This knowledge does explain Ryota’s constant boredom, even if it’s a great piece I’m not sure I could stand hearing the same thing more than four times. Still, the show does a great job at letting us see why Kaori’s performance was so memorable with her striking movements and energetic flares. The best way of getting into a romance for me is falling in love with the characters the same way the characters fall in love with each other. It helps that I have always been a lover of classical music, but hearing Kaori’s performance was the icing on the cake of her cute design and effervescent personality.

I think it’s pretty interesting that Kousei’s crush is mostly built off of total admiration of her work. He doesn’t agree with her personality, not yet anyway, but he can appreciate the beauty of her raw talent in a way his friends couldn’t imagine. As melodramatic as it sounded, I appreciated that Kousei seemed to be thinking like a teenager when he realized how one sided his feelings were. To her, he’s just someone she just met, and nowhere near an object of affection. I imagine it’s not going to be long before Kaori hears Kousei perform, and that mentality starts to change. I can’t imagine her crush on Ryota lasting for too long, even for an affable playboy he seems terribly blasé in the way he pursues girls. It did set up a good scene showing how close the two of them are. Kousei has no reason to cover for Ryota ditching to see another girl otherwise. I hope that doesn’t come back to bite him later on.