Recap

Kousei finally gets to the competition with Kaori. After his trauma gets to him, Kaori tries to give him another push to get over it by sticking with him. Afterwards she collapses, bringing everyone to worry about her condition. It would appear she is fine, but the event sparks guilt in Kousei. Coupled with how he deals with his crush on her, he finds it hard to talk to her face to face. After she waits to confront him, he is sparked towards action. Will he really be able to put his problems behind him?

Episode 4

It’s at this part of the show that I must admit I’ve been underplaying how deep-rooted Kousei’s trauma is. At first, I thought he simply wanted to forget his mother after how she treated him in his youth. Now it seems that his problems are more complex than that. His dependency on his mother’s approval created an unhealthy relationship between her and the piano that didn’t exist in reality. It’s now that I’m starting to believe what some have been saying about the troubling nature of how his friends are tackling getting him back on the piano. I still think the idea of him “not hearing his own music” is a melodramatic creation of fiction, but I would be remiss in not acknowledging that he has legitimate psychological trauma.

I’m not very familiar with how violin competitions work, but I found what happened in this episode to be very strange. Is the accompanist’s performance linked to the violins? I’m wondering if Kaori could have continued on and still been judged independently. I understand her stopping was as much to give Kousei confidence as anything, but it just seemed strange that she was allowed to do that. I went to watch a few competitions in my earlier years as a trumpeter, and I feel like this kind of behavior would have gotten the two thrown off the stage before they were able to regroup. I suppose she did obviously lose the competition, but it just seemed like a grossly selfish way to go about it. Her energy and brashness seem insane from an isolated perspective, but with this fainting spell the clues are starting to add up as to why she might be so driven to be different.

Episode 5

Once again, we see Kousei become the one with something to be sorry about, despite the fact that this whole debacle is something they forced him into in the first place. Still, while others believe this to be some kind of bullying, I think what this truly is becomes more of a failure to communicate. As far as I know, no one really knows about the extent of Kousei’s abuse under his mother when he was a prodigy. All everyone knows is that he stopped playing after his mother died. It’s this key piece of information that is making his friends not understand just how troubled Kousei really is. I hope they aren’t going to be all that contributes to Kousei’s healing process, as the problems he is dealing with require professional help, not cajoling.

It was something we were all afraid would happen, but it seems that we’re getting more and more confirmation as time goes on that Tsubaki actually does have feelings for Kousei. The OP had always seemed to be at least partially alluding to this. The episode starts out slow in alluding to it further, having another great reaction-face scene with her teammate. Once she’s walked home by her old crush, we get the nail in the coffin. I can see no other reason why she would talk about it like she did if she wasn’t holding out for someone else, and it doesn’t take a lot of guessing to see who that really is.

Still, I can see why he is taking these experiences as uplifting instead of hurtful: I dont think he fully understands himself. We know by now that he has a massive crush on Kaori. After seeing her in her most beautiful, playing masterfully on stage with all the confidence in the world, he wants to believe that she can help him. The emotional bond he’s made forces him to see past the less attractive parts of her personality to focus on her sense of freedom and joy, something Kousei has long lacked. The last scene with Kaori on the bridge is where I finally think her actions turn into outright emotional manipulation. Kaori has no one to blame for how her performance went but herself, and yet she seems to be abusing the position she has in Kousei’s mind in order to force him back into the music scene. Still, her words after making the request do seem to imply she just doesn’t understand why Kousei has such a problem with playing. We’ll have to see how the anime handles him accepting her request from here.