Hanasaku Iroha Episode 13--Mother Knows Best

It's all about family in this episode, as Ohana's mother spends the night at the inn, which lets Ohana get some closure about Ko.




Ohana's mom may be a jerk, but she's a jerk with good ideas. I was expecting her to be extremely critical of the inn, given her past with it, but instead she offered small suggestions on things that could easily be improved, like offering local candy flavors and randomizing bath cleaning times. Despite the nature of her job and the fact that she deliberately wrote a bad review without visiting the place, she does know what makes a good inn.





"I saw a dream. You succeeded the inn, and Ohana was there too."
However, the overwhelming theme of the episode was family, despite Ohana and her grandmother insisting on keeping the proper distance between customer and employee. The scene where Ohana's mother invites the two of them up to her room was easily the best one in the episode, since it showed the family ties that still exist between them even though the have all kept an emotional distance from each other for one reason or another. Another interesting part was the sibling dynamic; Enishi complains about the way his sister treated him when he was little, yet he doesn't hesitate to call Takako, who has a similar personality. His hindsight might be 20/20, but he still somehow managed to become reliant on the same type of woman, not even a blood relative this time. I look forward to seeing what this show decides to do with these family dynamics in future episodes.




Finally, as expected from the previous episode, Ohana has grown up a bit (although I have no idea how someone gets drunk on juice). She recognizes that she still likes Ko, but knows that they both have different lives now. Hopefully her determination to no longer rely on other people so much doesn't spontaneously disappear as the show moves into the second half. I'm really starting to wonder when we're going to see the much-hyped festival though, and what Ohana's wish will be, regardless of whether or not it will come true. Next week is a beach episode, and I really hope that it doesn't go back into the randomness that was the first couple episodes right when it looks like the show has found it's stride. I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, though.


Review success! Now if only she would print it...

Images from Crunchyroll.com.