I dunno, that seems a bit too obvious.
Summary
The class arrives at the lodge at the foot of Mt. Yomiyama. Mochizuki has fixed the tape and our investigators listen to the rest. At the foot of the mountain Matsunaga got into a fight with a classmate and accidentally killed him. The latter’s absence went unnoticed that night, and when Matsunaga went back into the forest in the morning his body had vanished. When he asked his classmates about the other boy they had no idea who he was talking about, and as he makes the recording he’s sure he’ll soon forget too. No one died afterwards, and what happened is clear – that boy was the extra student. Killing him is what stopped the curse.
During dinner Akazawa stands and asks to say a few words. She apologizes for her ineptitude as head of countermeasures, declares that Mei is to blame for what happened since she didn’t avoid contact with Kouichi, and demands that she apologize. Kouichi, Teshigawara, and Mochizuki stand up for her but she relents and does so anyway. In the process Teshigawara almost lets slip how to stop the curse and an asthmatic classmate has an attack. His inhaler is empty and the phones are down, so Chibiki takes him to the hospital.
Kouichi shows Mei the class photo from 1972, which he finally found. She takes off her eyepatch to look at it and asks Kouichi to describe the 1972 Misaki; he describes him as looking blurred. Mei then tells him more about the other Misaki, her recently deceased cousin. The latter was one of twins. When Kirkia’s daughter was still-born Misaki’s parents were having financial trouble and decided to give Kirika one of their daughters. Misaki and Mei weren’t cousins – they were sisters. Mei was not allowed to see her birth mother, but she secretly began spending time with Misaki, who suddenly died this past April, before Kouichi joined the class, becoming the first victim of the curse. Mei didn’t tell anyone because she was unwilling to admit it had happened. That’s one reason she says Kouichi isn’t the extra student.
The main reason, however, is her artificial eye. Specifically, by ‘things that should remain unseen’, she means the color of death, and she doesn’t see it in herself or Kouichi. It’s clearest in dead people – she could see it in the 1972 Misaki – but it is also visible in those who are about to die. That’s why she wears an eyepatch, but when Kouichi presses she admits she knows who the extra is. Before she can say who Teshigawara bursts into the room – he says he may have done something horrible….
Thoughts
Now this is more like it. Akazawa’s reaction isn’t excusable, but it is understandable. Everyone is scared and that’s causing them to look for a scapegoat, something or someone they can decisively point to as the reason for everything. Since Akazawa got some nodding heads from her friends when she made her pronouncement she’s clearly not alone in putting the blame on Mei. Not everyone agrees with her conclusion, and as Mei herself asks, what purpose would apologizing serve? It’s not going to undo what’s happened, and, while this may not have been what Mei was getting at, it’s just a way to mask the class’s collective responsibility.
Whether or not what happened was inevitable, as Teshigawara tries to argue, the fact remains that multiple people could have done things differently, Akazawa not the least of them. At least she admits she didn’t perform her job (but, and since I haven’t brought it up yet, what, exactly does the head of countermeasures do anyway?) even if that doesn’t extend to admitting she bears some of the blame. This kind of conflict, dividing the class when they should be working together, with both sides reactions being understandable, is much more interesting than Kouichi blundering around wondering why people keep dying.
Even finally finding out how to stop the curse isn’t without possible tension. Just about any well-adjusted person would balk at the idea of killing someone, even if they’re supposed to be already dead and everyone will forget what happened in due course, and as long as there’s no way to find out who the extra student is, there’s the risk of killing the wrong person, which is definitely murder and not something that’ll be forgotten.
Unfortunately, that got undermined a little thanks to Mei having a way to find out all along, but at least her reasons for holding things back make more sense that any reason offered for why the class didn’t just tell Kouichi what’s going on in the first place. Or maybe I’m just more sympathetic to her because I was similarly reserved at that age. She’d just lost her best (and probably only) friend, and that just sucks, never mind that it may herald a year of watching your classmates die; nobody wants to go through that, especially when they’re already dealing with grief. Nor is seeing dead, or about to be dead, people a particularly welcome ability in that situation; without knowing how to stop the curse it’s only going to freak out the affected people, so it doesn’t do much good by itself. Maybe not airtight reasoning given what’s at stake, and how certain people got blamed, but the former at least is a highly emotional response, and those aren’t always logical.
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