After the confrontations in the last episode, everybody rethinks their relationships. Even Yo, having friend-zoned Ren for years, looks at him through the window and thinks, “What a pity.”
Yo’s mom is sorting her stuff and cleaning out her house. One has the feeling that she has been watching Tidying Up With Marie Kondo! She asks Yo if she can toss an old red toy car of hers, and Yo agrees.
She is surprised at work by a visit from Narumi Yu, who has been improving sales in a branch store. They are friendly and not at all awkward. Then Mizusawa Ryusei arrives and boy was I surprised to see Yo hide behind a chair! She’s not at all brave like she had been before. Yu, like a good friend, picks up on her feelings and hides her with his coat.
We skip to Ren’s office to see Maki helping other men besides him, and appearing to be moving on. But at lunchtime she sits by him to offer the advice that if you love someone, sometimes you have to be pushy. He should just be honest with Yo. Then she walks away with her head up but holding back the tears. Aww…I like her after all.
Yo goes to eat at a diner which she had frequented with Ryusei. She is surprised to see in a display case, a small red toy car like the one she told her mother to throw away. Amazingly it is a collectable and now worth $1,000.
At this point Ren calls her for some help with a project he is working on that involves having a fashion sense, which he claims to not have. Spotting him through the window, she thinks about how attractive he is, and how if they hadn’t been best friends for so long, they could have had a different kind of relationship. “It’s a pity,” she broods.
She launches into telling him about different styles of shoes, and that high heels are power shoes that give a woman confidence. She has her favorites. During it all, he reflects that he admires her energy and never get tired of watching her. But he doesn’t tell her this; he only asks if she ate garlic. They are definitely at cross-purposes. They stay up all night working together.
The next morning Yo asks her mom about the toy car and is horrified to see that her brother has painted it and put it into his snail tank! You realize a thing is worth more than you thought, after you have lost it. This is one of those maxims they throw at us as the theme of an episode. What is she losing?
Yo’s boss, Director Hayashi, has a meeting with Ryusei but is going to be late. She sends Yo ahead to meet him first. Ah… there’s no way to avoid him! She tells him that she’s only there for business, and when he tries to sweet talk her she asks pointedly, “Don’t you have something else to say?” She asks him what happened five years ago, but the Director arrives before he can answer.
Ryusei tells them about being Yo’s first customer and how she fit him with dress shoes that he wore to an important presentation. He still wears them on special occasions, including that evening. Look at that! They both have power shoes!
Yo is so stressed after this meeting that she goes out and gets drunk on purpose. Ren walks in and ends up piggybacking her home. He gets up the nerve to say that nothing started between them because he wasn’t pushy enough. But she’s too drunk and interrupts, talking about Ryusei, and he is deflated.
The next day Yo’s assistant accidentally erases some information they were supposed to give Ryusei about an order, and they are madly trying to remeasure all the shoes when he walks in. He is very nice about it and tries to retrieve the data. When his first try doesn’t work he thinks a bit and tries again. Hey presto! He got it! They are all happy, and when he leaves he politely asks Yo to dinner for a chance to clear things up.
When she goes to meet him she wears her power shoes and also, because she’s worried he’s too assertive and dangerous, she wears puffy bloomers under her dress. He apologizes for running off, with the excuse that he was afraid he was losing his edge because she coddled him too much. It doesn’t really satisfy her, but he pays her back the money she had loaned him.
Afterwards she meets up with Ren, and I won’t tell you which of them saw her face-plant on the sidewalk and show off those bloomers. But sitting with Ren on the park bench, she thinks that she’s had her best friend with her all this time, and it’s too bad the best one got away.
We are now halfway through the drama; are we progressing well? We went through the ex-boyfriend and the almost-boyfriend pretty quickly, and don’t know how big a part of the story the ex-ex-boyfriend will be. Yo and Ren like each other but haven’t said anything. Well, Mr. Knightly didn’t say anything to Emma until he was sure she liked him. Was this episode Ren’s best chance? We will see.
Until next time,
Telzeytalks
Dramas With a Side of Kimchi