Kotaro Lives Alone – Episode 4

 

Kotaro visits his friend Kakeru at home and meets his housekeeper (Ms. Yoshida) who takes care of Kakeru and does the cleaning and chores. This housekeeper does everything for Kakeru. Kotaro tries to teach his fiend how to be more independent and how to do things for himself. In the first lesson, Kotaro teaches Kakeru how to catch crayfish from a pond and then they return to Kotaro’s apartment to cook miso soup.

Later Kotaro asks Karino to teach him the rules of dodgeball. However, Kotaro fails to dodge and gets hit with the ball most of the time. He feels that missing the ball is akin to ignoring one’s friend. In the second half of the episode Kotaro’s friends celebrate his birthday. As usual, Kotaro acts oddly. He spends many days practicing ways to increase his lung capacity because he wants to ensure that he blows out all of his birthday candles with one blow. In fact, he runs way from his birthday party at home so that he can take his cake to share with all his friends. These friends turn out to be stray cats in the park. He successfully blows out all the candles in one try.

Next, his friend Takuya drops by to encourage Kotaro to run away with him, because Takuya thinks his mother nags him too much. They don’t actually run away and just simply spend the day visiting a convenience store and talking at the playground. Takuya believes that running away will make his parents appreciate him more. Kotaro has no parents and so he tells Takuya how much he envies Takuya’s life. He explains to him that he doesn’t even have anyone at his house to miss him. Takuya quickly runs away to return home. Then Karino drops by to say how angry his was that he didn’t know where Kotaro was all day. So in the end Kotaro does have friends who care about him.

There were may words that I understood in this episode. I understood almost all of Kotaro’s self-introduction to Kakeru’s housekeeper e.g. “はじめましてであ”. Also when talking about things that were currently happening Kotaro used the word “今” a lot. Also I recognized the Katakana for cake when the characters were at Kotaro’s birthday party:　“ケーキ”

Kotaro Lives Alone – Episode 3

 

At the beginning of the episode, there is a salesperson standing on the sidewalk handing out free balloons. Kotaro is concerned that the salesperson may fly away because he has so many balloons. To get pass the one-person-one balloon rule, Kotaro returns to this salesperson several times until he acquires four balloons which his asks Karino to draw faces on. Kotaro names the balloons father, mother, little brother and little sister. In a very melancholy scene, the salesperson who sold him the balloons watches him play by himself in a playground with these four balloons tied to his belt.

Later, Karino meets with his editor about the progress of his Manga series. Kotaro tags along and defends Karino against the harsh criticism of his boss. Kotaro later asks another neighbor, Isamu, to help him shop for fashionable attire at the mall. Kotaro believes wearing fashionable clothes will make him popular with everyone and help him to have more friends. Later he visits Aktomo at the club where she works because Karino tells him that’s the best way to spend time with her. He learns that she may have to move out of the apartment building and he really wants her to stay.

In this episode we also see flashbacks to Kotaro’s traumatic upbringing. It seems as though his father was violent with him. So this helps explains why he never wants his photo taken because he does not want his father to find him. Also a new character is introduced, Ayano Kobayashi. She is a lawyer who is supposed to visit Kotaro weekly to give him money from his mother’s life insurance.

Kotaro Lives Alone – Episode 2

 

In the second episode we learn why Kotaro speaks like he is so much older. He is mimicking the speech pattern of a cartoon character Tonosaman. Also, Kotaro starts acting very weird because the public bathhouse that he likes to frequent is closed. As a result, he goes out of his way to avoid his neighbors and others because he is fanatically concerned about hygiene. Karino and Aktomo try to help him overcome his worries. Later Kotaro goes to enroll himself in school.  During the lunch hour he spends his time showing off his Bento lunch meal to other students. I watched the episode several times but couldn’t really figure out what the moral was, because so many different things were going on.

Once again, there was a lot of familiar dialogue. I recognized the kanji for child (子). Also whole phrases are now more comprehensible to me. For example, when Karino was running to join Kotaro at school I recognized this phrase だから　来なくてよいと言っているwhen Kotaro was telling Karino that he didn’t need to come. I didn’t understand all the grammar, but the context clues helped.

Kotaro Lives Alone - Episode 1

In the first episode we are introduced to a cute, but strange four-year old boy named Kotaro who has recently moved into an apartment complex. As a gesture of kindness, he delivers boxes of tissues to his new neighbors. One neighbor, Shin Karino, lives next door and is a struggling manga artist. Another is Matshuki Aktomo, who I believe is a waitress, but I’m not sure. What I do know is that she hates her job and is dealing with personal demons. 

Karino accompanies Kotaro on his errands, because he is worried that a crazed predator might try to kidnap a 4-year-old boy walking around the city alone. By the end of the episode Karino is pleased that he can finally make Kotaro smile because of the clever Manga cartoons that Karino draws of Kotaro’s bandages.

I recognized quite a lot of the vocabulary in this episode. In the Japanese subtitles, I recognized the character for parents 親| Karino asked for Kotaro’s assistance using the word ちょうと| Many characters explained their actions using the connecting phrase  から| When discussing his parents Kotaro used the words for mother はは and father　ちち