Really hyped for this series, because it definitely plays to what I'd consider my favorite aspect of Tokuwo Tsumu's excellent body of work- their ability to blur genre lines, to complicate and challenge the implicit divisions we deploy between gentle fluff and hard drama by uniting them within the same topos as the products of private spheres and naturalized norms, of the rafts we build for ourselves to navigate tumultuous worlds, which are sometimes solid and stable enough to make us feel we're on solid ground, only for the swell of a wave or the bugle of a larger ship to remind us that we've always been at sea. You see this floating, numbing darkness lapping intermittently around the edges of Shuuden, gurgling up menacingly in the last chapters of Ise and Shima, and sluicing down the gaps between timeframes and bodies across Tsuki to Koi, jerking the characters out of the genres they've taken as the norms of the world, their comfort zones shored up by shared umwelts. And yet so much of the warmth of Tsumu's stories comes from the ways in which their characters face this encroachment-that-was-always-there, this already-ending, and strive to push it back with moments and memories, seeking utopia in not some faraway paradise, but in the recollection of days where they were allowed to be quotidian, when nothing happened and everything was, those neat, calming rows of times both fixed and fillable like the ones we see laid across Sakura's diary, packed with the potential for both infinity and emptiness.
In this story too, the challenge comes in writing the unspeakable, of penning the repressed, of connecting the fragments of Haru's scattered self, because a missing link invalidates the entire chain, and she can ironically only move on, move forth, if the path winding down her life, lending it its shape and form in bliss and misery, is reconstructed to allow her passage again. To write, to read, to fill out a diary is to traverse a life, to chart and cross the ocean of her memories, letting her find and trace Sakura among the entries already present, and to perhaps reinterpret her as something more than a gap, an absence, a wound once she fills everything out. To avoid engaging with a tragedy is to avoid catharsis, because the purging of pain, misery and dread is found in the journey across a path we know well, in the tracing of a closed circle, in an acquaintance with what has already happened, but this time with out feet fixed and our hearts set, letting ourselves feel everything again, not so that we'd be empty at the end, but so we could fill with emotion anew- a new spring, a new opportunity, a new journal, a reclamation of the present. It is in the embrace of the quotidian that the traces to Haru reside, the key to purging the venom and filling herself with spring, with Sakura again, to constitute her love for her as something other than a lack, to fill the pages and make them more than paper. It's going to be difficult and heartbreaking and slow, but if she lets time move again, then spring- Sakura- shall also arrive, just as she arrives at the end of the chapter, representing perhaps Haru's subconscious desire to move on, to achieve some sort of final catharsis and completion. And then, at the end of her journey across herself, when she's brought herself to chart the geography of her soul and confirmed there's still places to go, can Haru finally resurrect Sakura in the truest sense- not as a void, not as a corpse, but as spring, as life, and the promise of a hundred springs more, finding a memory that convinces her to live on with love and hope, a past that connects her to her future and to herself.
(Also, I love how Early Haru looks like an Amano Shuninta character, what with the fangs and the scrunkly energy, because Tsumu and Shuninta are two of my favorite creators in the tangerine scene [obligatory sobbing for I Wouldn't Mind Being Loved to update])
