Ookami-san to Shichinin no Nakamatachi - Episode 7

What's this? Ryouko and Ryoushi on a date? Surely not! Of course, this isn't some kind of beautiful blossoming of the relationship between these two, but rather another of Ringo's bright ideas under the guise of helping one of the Otogi Bank's clients.

The client (or I suppose you could say clients) in question are Jin Hanasaki, a quiet baseball ace who suddenly finds that he arrives home every day to a clean home and fresh food prepared by some mysterious stranger. Thanks to the Otogi Bank, he discovers that this mysterious person is in fact the strait-laced and shy Ami Jizou, who appears to have falled for Jin after he lent her an umbrella one time. Although this appears to be an entirely one-sided infatuation, Hanasaki is determined to repay Jizou for all the time she spent cleaning his house and so on, to which Ringo suggests he take her on a date of course, forcing Ryouko and Ryoushi to make it a double date to make things more comfortable for their clients.


Everything seems to go as smoothly as you might have expected (that being not particularly) until Ryouko takes it upon herself to rescue a kitten stuck in a tree. Next thing we know she's fallen into a pond, hit her head, and proves to be suffering from that cartoon classic condition which comes from a blow to the noggin - amnesia. More specifically, Ryouko seems to think that she's thirteen again, meaning that she behaves like the cute girl of her past rather than the tsundere who is desperate to hide her true self from everyone. Despite being treated to Ryouko at her most adorable, Morino is still keen to get her to a hospital - a task which ends up with Ryouko getting annoyed with him (an early demonstration of her younger tsundere side?) and an encounter with Hitsujikai which sheds a little more light on his past with Ryouko before she regains her current memories.

Although this episode manages to pile on cliché after cliché, from the awkward date to the inevitable amnesia, for some bizarre reason the whole package works really well to make for a funny and entertaining instalment that had be laughing and/or smiling throughout. I'm really not sure how J.C. Staff manage to do it, but they certainly seem to have a knack for making the bets out of even the weakest material, and this particular instalment must surely be as good an example of this as any, as Ookami-san seems to be on the up and up.