The Lungfish Diaries

Over the last few weeks here at The Lungfish Diaries , I’ve attempted to move away from making predictions, mainly because I find spending energy on idle theorizing to be wasteful and often pointless. However, this week’s chapter plants several seeds that I think are likely to take root in the coming weeks: Chizuru thinks she played it too cool in asking him if he really loved “Mizuhara,” and this spurs her to reach out to him Kazuya begins to assume Chizuru has significant relationship experience and implicitly compares himself to a hypothetical ex-boyfriend of hers, not knowing that she very likely hasn’t ever been in a relationship Mini tells Kazuya he messed up in not affirming his love for “Ichinose” Put these together, and we conclude that Chizuru is coming over to (1) open up more about her real self, rather than merely suggesting that Kazuya doesn’t know the real her and is in love with her assumed persona, so that they can truly discuss the issue without judgment or assu...

What chapter 239 makes clear is that Chizuru wasn’t struggling to understand her feelings–or rather, her confusion in that regard isn’t what caused her to keep her distance for three months. Instead, she felt paralyzed because the various obstacles before her–the question of Ruka, the wisdom of potentially giving up her job, the uncertainty about Kazuya’s feelings for her vs. her persona–made her feel unable to even begin to figure it out. Chizuru, with nothing standing in her way of figuring out her feelings, smiles genuinely. Chizuru explains this chapter that her feelings are clouded, but rather than explain why they are clouded, or what she doesn’t understand, she digresses into two tangentially related topics: the thought that she needed to quit her job to make things right and that Kazuya might be in love with part of her that isn’t real. On the face of it, these questions don’t have any bearing to what her feelings are. If she weren’t in love with him, they wouldn’t m...

The grand confession finally got across in the clear this week. It was an aside, a footnote to a greater conflict. If you blinked, you might not have realized it happened at all. And yet, if you were paying attention, it was clear that the confession point point was never the real issue. It was, and always had been, a misdirection, a piece of narrative sleight of hand. Kazuya finally gets to say it in the clear. That goes back to the beginning, when it was clear, albeit not explicitly stated, that Chizuru understood what he was trying to say, at least in large part (175). And yet after that, Kazuya got tunnel vision. He became more preoccupied with the possibility of asking her out for real and following through the confession he thought had not been understood. That led us to Paradise, where we got one story about Kazuya, comically, trying to follow up on his confession attempt, while largely, but not completely, oblivious to what Mami was scheming or what Chizuru was...

Why a paid date? This, I think, is the most intriguing question about Chizuru’s choice of action in reaching out to Kazuya at long last. What purpose does it serve? The simple answer is that this is the ground she’s most comfortable on. Chizuru is uncertain about her feelings, and she may be seeking the safety and security of their paid relationship to sort this out, but taking a paid date is a serious choice. Accepting Kazuya’s money, at this point, is borderline unethical. The conflict between them is personal; it’s way over the line, and it shouldn’t continue in that way, as it can easily be construed as manipulating him and his feelings for monetary gain. More than that, they have something they desperately should discuss, and to ignore his attempts to talk about it personally, when the main issue at hand is an action of her doing, is simply wrong. So, with that in mind, I reject the idea that Chizuru is using the date merely as a comfortable space to work out her feelings… unl...