Warning! This review on Kamisama ni Natta Hi Chapter nine contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen the episode yet, I recommend watching it and then going back to read the review.
# 9 The day of suicide
Kamisama ni Natta Hi Chapter nine begins with the discovery of the hacker. His investigations eventually led him to Hina and her connection to Dr. Korogi. His desire to show its validity manages to unravel the girl’s truth, which only makes him regret because he understands what this means, Hina must perish. Trying to redeem himself, he contacts Hina and makes her aware of everything, accepts her fate and says goodbye to everyone. However, Youta is not happy about this and tries to take them away, but they only end with a bitter goodbye. This time there is no more count towards the end of the world.
The value of a life
In the very last section we begin to see the truth behind our protagonist and who should be some kind of antagonist. Both characters were introduced to us mysteriously, little or nothing we really knew about them. In the last chapter we learned about the reality of little Hina, the tragic illness she was born with, and the miracle she was part of. These revelations led us to conclude that sooner or later we would have to say goodbye to her, and all that entails. Nothing revealed, however, raised the idea that his disappearance would be due to intervention by “people from above”.
This is why the premise was born to know more about our hacker, our supposed antagonist. We didn’t have to be geniuses to understand that Suzuki doesn’t enjoy freedom. In an age of technology like this, a hacker is a potential threat to almost any business. The fact that he was under the CEO’s custody and constant surveillance must lead us to conclude that he had already committed bad deeds with his talent. This chapter confirms the painfully obvious fact that the young Suzuki participated in illegal actions, but on behalf of his parents. While this is not a justification, in the end it is an undeniable truth that it was only used. Which in the end creates a kind of complex for him.
The young Suzuki was used, beaten and mistreated by the people who were supposed to protect him. His disapproval and distrust of adults are not unfounded. His obsession with investigating Dr. Korogi made him do something he did not expect to take his life. In reality, our hacker was determined to prove that his life had a purpose, that his talent wasn’t something only evil does. Unfortunately, he came across what he most wanted to avoid. In revealing the truth of the doctor’s examination, I have a child prodigy. Therefore, he desperately wanted to be excluded from the final decision. He felt like he was just doing the dirty work again.
A life is not in our power to decide when to end. The debate about the Death Stone is based on exactly that. Who should we choose which life to take? What are our criteria? Is there a moral, non-Christian, that affirms extenuating circumstances? It is a complex topic, yet easy to discard. We saw it in the episode. The decision to take Hina’s life was made in a matter of seconds, and all under the guise of “the common good”. Again, I ask the question, is it fair to sacrifice someone for the good of “everyone”? What would a life have to contribute to be considered valuable? Because in the context we’ve seen, they’re all available regardless of their talents.
The end of the world
As we moved on to another point, it finally became clear what “the end of the world” really meant. It wasn’t a sentence in the truest sense of the word, but it was an intuitive variant. Does that mean they sold us bait? The answer is NO, let’s get one thing straight: the phrase about the end of the world has always been interpretive. Nothing made us believe that the world was literally going to end.
Is Hina’s omniscience evidence that we should take her explanation of the end of the world literally? Again it’s a NO, the fact that his predictions were always correct did not suggest that the end of the world would work as some sort of catastrophe. The latter is explained by herself in this chapter, her prediction was not wrong, but it was wrong. It’s not that the world will end in 30 days, it’s that it can’t predict anything beyond those 30 days.
The world everyone knows and inhabits is not going to end, and this is not a cheap storytelling resource, much less a deus ex machina. Don’t confuse expectations with the featured script. From the first moment we were allowed to see that the end of the world was not necessarily literal. From the beginning there was a possibility that Hina was the only one who disappeared and that would “end” the world, if only for her.
I dare to say that those who are no strangers to Ricardo Piglia’s “White Night” could already understand reality because they were not guided by appearances that hid the unexpected truth from us. It’s not the script’s fault that we lost our bearings for a second, the reality is that the answers were always there. Feeling disappointed with the premise change, which, by the way, never changed, is frankly illogical and a bit ridiculous. The world will end, at least the world as it is called, that is the weight of the miracle that Hina is.
The good bye
It is fair and necessary to devote a few lines to this situation. When the truth is revealed, Hina accepts her fate without an object, but Youta cannot be that stoic. In a vain attempt to help her, he takes her with him, but that is useless as Hina had no intention of fleeing. She faces him according to her choice. Holding on to her and trying to prevent the inevitable makes Hina question Youta’s reasons. It is true that both are united and that she helped him as much as she could, but that doesn’t seem enough to understand the boy’s desperation. What drives Youta to go so far? He calls it “love”, the point is that it is not clear what kind of love he is referring to.
Personally, I want to believe in filial love for the simple reason that both have acted as accomplices and companions, almost like brothers. Chances are we are talking about romantic love, but that would mean forcing the feelings too much. It’s true that both of them have become a support for the other and that they had moments of spark between them, but that doesn’t cancel out that it doesn’t feel natural. When your feelings are romantic, they seem more of an obligation than a real feeling for one another. Filial love is much more believable and understandable, it’s too obvious that there is complicity between the two. Which leads to a complete lack of sexual tension, a prerequisite for romantic feelings. I hope they don’t force the inexcusable.
Final comment
Kamisama ni Natta Hi Chapter nine was an episode of revelations, which made it one of the chapters that was more up for debate. First, we have the script, the revelation of the reality of the end of the world has led several to wonder whether or not it was a good twist on the premise, although I have to insist that it hasn’t changed. Second, we have the hacker’s past and if the story really contributed or not, my position is that it was necessary to know its breaking point. And finally, the confession without a confession between Youta and Hina, this point even made me doubt.
Before I finish on that, I have to say that while I enjoyed the anime, I don’t love that the revelations went on for so long. While I like the dynamic between Hina and Youta, I am not pleased to see them try to force feelings between them. There are many expectations for this project that I have revealed so far. I still want to hope for the best for the end, but my hopes are starting to fade.
So far, I leave you the usual questions: What did you think of this chapter? How do you see the revelations we saw in this episode? What do you think about the feelings between Hina and Youta? In the next chapter we will deal with the aftermath of Hina’s loss and the admission of the young Suzuki to Youta’s group.
