Anime Review: Chihayafuru:The Cresting Waves Almost Look Like Clouds in the Skies(1.20)

     Chihayafuru: The Cresting Waves Almost Look Like Clouds in the Skies(1.20)Review

In this episode Chihaya is informed that she can't go to the last tournament for class A and B players before the Queen/Master tournament because it's the day before the first day of exams week and the karuta advisor gets Tsutomu to be her tutor. Nishida is also not going to the tournament because he also needs to study for exams but Taichi is. The day of the match while studying Chihaya ends up sneaking away from studying in order to cheer Taichi on and ends up heading over to the tournament.

At the tournament Taichi does well in his first two matches but between the second and third round he learns that Arata is at the tournament, the two of them do talk for a bit between matches and Arata mentions that he thought that Taichi would've been playing in class A(since the official karuta rules state that if you come in second in two tournaments you advance to class A but Dr. Harada's karuta society doesn't do that). Taichi ends up loosing in his third match and it's pretty clear that he ended up loosing almost all confidence in himself after seeing Arata especially since he gave Taichi his phone number to give to Chihaya. When Chihaya arrives at the tournament Taichi tells her he lost and that Arata is there then Chihaya goes to see Arata play.

While watching Arata play his match Chihaya is overcome with joy that he's back to playing karuta and when she tells Taichi "It Happened." he realizes even though there was a part of him that really didn't want to see Arata come back there was a another part of him deep down that was just as happy as Chihaya that Arata come back. Arata actually ends up loosing his match although his opponent says that it's pure luck that he won. After the match Arata meets briefly with Chihaya and Taichi but Chihaya is soon dragged away by Kana who came to support Taichi and is now dragging Chihaya away to study. Before Arata leaves Taichi gives back the phone number because he thinks that Arata should be the one to decide if Chihaya should have it and then Arata admits that he wasn't sure that he should give it to her because he thought she and Taichi might be together, Taichi tells him they aren't.

In the end Chihaya is taken back to studying and Tsutomu tells her that Taichi makes sure that his number in the class because if he wasn't he couldn't play karuta anymore and Tsutomu tells her that she needs to also do what she has before she can do what she wants to. Dr. Harada gives Taichi the option to advance to class A but Taichi doesn't take it because he's more focus on not running away then making class A.

I loved this episode it had a good lesson on responsibility for Chihaya, it showed how far Taichi has come over the course of the show and it showed Arata's return to karuta. Please tell me your thoughts on this episode.