One Week Friends - Episode 10

After a period of everything going so well between Kaori, Hase and their wider circle of friends, it feels like everything has been shattered and destroyed by the appearance of transfer student Hajime Kujo and one single word - "traitor".

With his name and this one word causing Kaori's memories to reset, it seems that everything is back to home it was at the very start - Fujimiya still has her diary to remind her of who Hase is, and still has some weekly learned knowledge of others around her, but all of the little memories that gave substance to her relationship with Hase is seem to have disappeared into the ether, leaving our protagonist struggling to cope in its aftermath.  This isn't exactly helped by Kujo's cold attitude towards him and others - he reveals that he attended elementary school with Kaori but nothing more, which seems at odds with his previous utterance.

Nevertheless, and in spite of a clear shift for the worse in the dynamic of their relationship, Hase once again soldiers on in trying to rebuild the bridged broken between himself and Fujimiya, with Saki also playing her part in trying to help as she frets over the prospect of being left alone again.  As Kaori waits to meet Hase outside of school one day, we finally get a glimpse into the cause of the former's mental trauma - suggestions that she and Kujo were once dating, and and that this had had repercussions for her relationship with other members of her class. This is something Kaori runs from and Kujo is unwilling to talk about, but even without this knowledge Hase seems determined to keep moving forward somehow.

The decision to spend so many weeks building up the friendship between Kaori and the others around her prior to this point was well and truly vindicated by this latest instalment of One Week Friends, which was all the more powerful for the extent to which it was capable of pulling the rug out from under this cozy group of friends to provide some quietly devastating drama as a result. Although a lot of this drama could probably have been negated by someone talking properly to Kujo about what was going on from the very start, I can't bemoan the episode some powerful and moving fare before finally reaching that point, giving it ample opportunity for the kind of character-centric drama that I love.