Kokoro Connect - Episode 4

Psst, I've got a secret for you~ <3

Now that was a lot of dialogue. For the most part, the episode contained serious conversations between Taichi and the other two girls whom he hasn't dealt with yet (i.e. Iori and Himeko). Like in Yui's case, the two have been keeping something hidden from the others, fearing it might ruin their relationships with one another. For Iori, it was as I had suspected—her troubles stem from family issues. But for Himeko, the problem was not so much a physical side effect from the body switching, but rather, a psychological one. Let's dig deeper into Taichi's respective talks with each of them, shall we?

Starting off with Iori, the shocking blow came right at the start when she revealed that she technically had five fathers. From that, you could already tell that the Nagase family is an extremely broken one, with Iori's mother now having to support her daughter as a single mother, as none of the fathers are seemingly around to help out. More depressing is the fact that Iori resorted to essentially becoming someone else in order to please each of her fathers, wanting the constantly-changing head of her household to be content so that the chances of him leaving due to dissatisfaction would be lower. The loss of one's identity in itself, in terms of personality, is bad enough already, but when this ends up including one's physical identity too, the psychological damage should not be taken lightly. I think that's Iori's strong will and the support of her friends are the only things that have been keeping her together all this time. Without them, who knows what state she would've been in now? And although she continues to struggle with the slow process of rebuilding the "me" that is hers and hers alone (i.e. not a mask which she puts on to please others), the fact that she was able to get this issue off her chest by telling Taichi is definitely a good sign. Ganbatte, Iori!

Moving on to Himeko, given her cold personality, I guess it shouldn't come as surprising when she starts verbally challenging Taichi who was just worried about her. However, the confession about her problems with trusting people was, and that is what intrigued me. Usually, trust issues develop due to a traumatic experience at a young age. But in Himeko's case, she claims she was "born that way" (nope, not a reference to a certain song). And even though she blamed her lack of trust on the body switching, which was indeed valid, I still think there's something else behind her inability to trust people. Maybe I'm over analyzing this but it just doesn't seem natural for someone to be born with trust issues; there must be some other factor involved. Nonetheless, it was nice to see Taichi get through to Himeko with his wise words of encouragement. His comforting reassurance not only enabled her to open up to the others in the end, but also made her half-joke about the possibility of her falling for him. And although he's a so-called "selfless freak", there's no denying Taichi has a positive influence on the group.

In the end, all's well that ends well as two more club members were able to lift some weight off their shoulders. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but Himeko's confession to Taichi at the end was pretty hot (go ahead, call me disgusting), especially since she didn't add a "just kidding" right after. However, from the shocking title of the next episode in the preview, next week may be the last time we see Iori. If she does end up dying (most likely via a suicide), I really don't know how the other four will be able to cope with it. Obviously, I hope the scenes shown were just shots taken out of context and that the title is just purposely misleading. Anyways, this was a great episode of Kokoro Connect overall.