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”