This time around, Watashi eschews all possibilities of social interaction, instead deciding to lock himself away in his 4.5 tatami room day after day in the realisation that there's no such thing as a perfect and wonderful university life. This all seems pretty dull, until he awakes one day to find that this room is now literally his life - No matter what he does to try and leave, be it smashing walls, floors or ceilings, he always ends up in the exact same room, over and over again.
Or is it? As Watashi explores further simply to stay alive, so he begins to spot subtle differences in each room; in its paraphernalia, the books on the shelve and the clearly slightly divergent life lived within that particular room. For this is not a never-ending maze of identical rooms, but rather a seemingly infinite stack of parallel worlds, each one following one of the choices made by our protagonist. Of course, this is a fascinating discovery, but it still begs one question for Watashi - How the Hell does he get out?!
After seemingly setting us up for episode after episode of Watashi's life being "reset", this instalment certain proves to have thrown us all for a loop, introducing us to a key tenet of the series that perhaps should have been obvious when he look back on it via with the benefit of hindsight - Now the meaning of the oddities that we explained away or simply shrugged off earlier in the series have become clear, making me feel a little bit stupid yet leaving me loving this feeling of naive stupidity at the same time.
It's actually rather difficult to pinpoint just what's so great about this episode of The Tatami Galaxy - It isn't simply the reference to Franz Kafka's work, the use of parallel worlds or the markedly changed animation style which makes heavy use of "real" backdrops and scenery to far more notable effect. Instead, it's a combination of all of these things, coupled with a certain je ne sais quoi that ties everything together and makes the entire experience fascinating yet still oddly impenetrable. Here is a world that makes no sense, yet at the same time it makes perfect sense, while also unveiling much social commentary about modern expectations of one's life and a person's requirements to live it in a fulfilling manner. I don't own up to this often, but my simple 'blog can't do this episode, nor this series concept, justice - It needs a more concentrated and fastidious approach, for I suspect you could probably write a book about it. To be honest, I'm starting to hope that somebody does just that.
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