Sing "Yesterday" for Me

Episode 10

So just up front here, this episode of Sing "Yesterday" for Me ends on an absolutely vicious cliffhanger, which had me genuinely considering seeking out the manga to read through and find out what happened. (Unfortunately, that version of this story has not yet been released in English.) There's a sound at Haru's door, she sticks her head out of her room, then we cut to Rikuo receiving an apparently distressing phone call before we smash-cut to a brand-new set of ending credits. You know it must be serious because we'd only had that adorable arcade-themed ending for a few weeks before this! The thought of having to wait a week to see what went down absolutely consumes any other thoughts I had about this episode up to that point, which is intense considering how great the rest of this episode was.

One major thing helping the show work for me is how I seem to have been converted. Where I previously believed it would be best for none of Sing Yesterday's cast to not get together, I now find myself all aboard the Rikuo and Shinako ship. We see them go through another slow graduation this episode: Shinako's previous cleaning of her apartment allows Rikuo to finally make good on that visiting offer. The lead-up to that takes up most of this episode, making it some of the most carefully, agonizingly real portrayals of budding romance I've seen in an anime for a while. First prize again goes to Doga Kobo's idiosyncratic character animation, keeping these people from seeming too stiff or composed, the way a more static, polished production might. We see little stuff like Rikuo sucking his teeth before his awkward explanation of his gift to Shinako, or her playing with the phone cord as they have to point-blank just ask each other what they should do on New Year's. Sing Yesterday is an achingly human show overall, and bits like this are essential to communicating that.

I think I've mentioned it before, but it's to the point that if you struggle with ‘secondhand embarrassment’ with media, you may have trouble with this show and particularly parts of this episode. So much of the entertainment value is in its portrayals of people, specifically Rikuo and Shinako here, grappling with expressing their interest in each other in ways they're just not experienced enough to do smoothly. So you get stuff like Shinako blatantly suggesting that Rikuo should come up to her place for coffee, only for him to deflect it by thinking she's looking for a vending machine instead. The absurd real-world densities of their dragged-out date times are absolutely fascinating to me, rooting for them as much as I'm screaming at them to stop being so thick with each other.

Finally rounding that romantic corner as they do this week then is what pushes this episode to be such a winner for me. We knew from the start of the show that any future together couldn't happen until both Rikuo and Shinako did a lot of their own kinds of growing up, and the narrative codifies that here. It's in details like Shinako having cleaned up her apartment, of course, but she also spells out for us and Rikuo how she may finally be moving on from Yuu, in realizing that the longing left-over love she has for him doesn't necessarily have to be replaced by what she feels for Rikuo, and there are multiple ways of having feelings for people. Rikuo himself has of course done plenty of growing over these ten episodes so far, which I've discussed, and his slowly-manifesting maturity is on display here mostly in his motivations, as he pursues Shinako now not just because of his own hang-ups lingering from his college days, but because his friends and even Shinako herself are encouraging him to do so. Those shifting romantic dynamics I talked about last week have worked to rebrand these two from an inciting emotional incident of the plot to a true potentially-strong couple.

That's enabled further, I think, by how Sing Yesterday has slowly rebranded itself over the past few weeks. It only really became apparent to me this episode, but the show's initial ambitions of a young adult coming-of-age tale for Rikuo have fallen by the wayside recently in favor of becoming a proper multi-angle romance story. Maybe the shift was Rikuo getting his life back in a montage after specifically realizing romance with Shinako wouldn't be an option until he did so, but the result is that instead of just analyzing the characters' growth via the lenses they see each other through, that's now all explicitly wrapped up in their pursuit of smooching each other. Shinako's desire to move on romantically was definitely spurred, at least partly, by realizing how genuinely Rou had been pursuing her, and Haru in this episode articulates that she's realized she'll have to actively go after Rikuo now that she can't just be a passive prop in his growing-up process. I'm all for this, since while the early parts of Sing Yesterday were very evocative in their melancholy, I can't see that sadness skeleton of a plot carrying the show for much longer. Part of growing is being more proactive in your relationships in life, and everyone here is figuring that out.

And it works because Sing Yesterday proves here it can portray romance beyond awkward longing, with the heights reached between Rikuo and Shinako in her apartment towards the end of the episode. It might be inappropriate of me to call it a ‘climax’, since the crux of it is Rikuo recognizing Shinako's desire to take even a mutually-realized romance slow and providing her with a simple hug. But just as the show is excellent at portraying those awkward formative moments in a relationship, we get to see with this that it excels at showing the real tenderness and intimacy of two dorks who can finally be honest about how they feel about it each other. That slam-dunk pushes this episode over the top for me, but does also give me pause as we teeter over that aforementioned cliffhanger. I'm not sure that the lived-in human drama of Sing Yesterday would succeed with an infusion of shocking tragic plot twists, and Haru's position as the current outlier on the primary love triangle means that targeting her for anything like that would be a pretty cheap ploy indeed. For now I'll trust in Sing Yesterday's thus far careful understanding of what it's doing, while sitting on the edge of my seat to find out where it's going with this.

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Sing "Yesterday" for Me is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.