Shogo digs deep into the questions we want to ask, but can’t.
What They Say:
“Friends of Friends.”
Yuki Hase, a high school boy, is concerned about a girl of his classmate, Kaori Fujimiya. She always stays alone and never tries to become close friends with anyone. Given half a chance one day, it seems that Yuki and Kaori become to have a good relationship that they begin to eat lunch together. Although they enjoy having conversations, Kaori, strangely enough, keeps denying their friendship. On that Friday, she confesses, “I have memory disorder. My memories disappear within one week….”
The Review: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the third episode, One Week Friends seems to dispel a lot of the questions or hesitations we had about the series. The introduction of Shogo into Hase and Fujimiya’s group means that there’s someone to ask the hard hitting questions. As it is, Hase is too kind to ask anything that would really hurt Fujimiya. But Shogo does. He asks if she’s faking it. He asks if it’s psychological trauma. He asks if she’s forgetting on purpose.
Shogo is a mean guy, but he’s what we need for the show. With this, we may finally get some answers behind Fujimiya’s convenient and annoying memory loss.
But at its heart, One Week Friends wants to still be an endearing show about the friendship between these three characters. On the roof, Fujimiya dishes out several different recipes of omelets for Hase to try. He decides he likes the one with 18 grams of sugar mixed in. This leads to the emotional climax of the episode.
For once, it’s not on the roof, it’s in the hallways of the school. Fujimiya, ever the math whiz, solves another question for the teacher on the board. This time, it’s a Monday and her memories have since gone. She writes the number 18 as part of the problem and she remembers something. She remembers the 18 grams of sugar.
This is beautiful and really what One Week Friends should do every week. Fujimiya’s memories aren’t going to suddenly all come back. Not ever, hopefully. They’ll be captured in these single shots of the littlest things. 18 grams of sugar. The crepe place being closed. Other things like this will jolt Fujimiya’s memory back into place forever because those are the cute little things that we love to remember. They’re the memories we can just think about and smile about, and One Week Friends captures that perfectly.
In Summary:
Any personal hesitation I had about the series is almost definitely gone now. One Week Friends has proven itself to be one of the most adorable and endearing shows in recent memory. Hase works perfectly with Fujimiya, who needs a gentler touch to ease her into friendship. And Shogo is the perfect foil to those two, giving a more realistic viewpoint of the world and their situation while still being kind in his own way (I mean, look no further than when he grabs her journal out of the classroom for her).
I didn’t mention any of the staff in the first episode review, but the Series Composition is being done by Shotaro Suga, the same guy behind Eccentric Family and My Teen Romantic Comedy. Those two shows both have some incredible characterization and now it’s no surprise to me that Hase and Fujimiya seem so indelible.
Grade: A-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Equipment:
Radeon 7850, 24” Dell UltraSharp U2410 set at 1920 x 1200, Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II
