Lol, this is really reminding me of that high school friend I had, whose mother also mysteriously left one day in her childhood and whose father worked such long hours, he was never at home. I'm not Sendai (unfortunately - I'd love to have her level of patience), but I can definitely see why she feels most at ease around Miyagi, despite her being the stray cat that she is. Perhaps I'm just biased.

Miyagi is consistent and predictable, but not boring.... Reliably and persistently not boring at all.

And very much the stray cat.

To be fair, I read the novel in Japanese, and the Japanese itself is quite convoluted. It's not something that someone would normally tell in Japanese as well. I have no idea how I would translate that in a none awkward way as the Japanese itself if awkward.

And she is not even saying that they are important to each other. 大事なものに住んでる人 would translate more to "the person that lives in a place that is important". In reference to Sendai saying that the apartment is an important place to her (because it's the place where Miyagi is).

This is the sort of thing that makes me feel fairly comfortable with my interpretation of the MTL over all these chapters of hard graft - there's a kind of fundamental awkward about Miyagi that comes through, even when I'm having to rewrite half the words in my head as I read them.

Though I do also worry that I'm reading more into the character than is justified... I find myself ...not quite identifying with, but recognising a lot of myself in Miyagi, and reading her as awkward in a very fundamental way is almost certainly coloured by my own sense of being awkward and weird.

That explanation of their "evolved roommates" relationship fits well with how it read to me contextually, despite the awkward way of expressing it. And so very Miyagi - we're not just roommates, we're.... people who share an important place....

I really wish I had the time and energy to actually learn Japanese....

Yeah this was one of those chapters where it was both really sweet, and also I'm realllly curious to see what happens next chapter. One would hope that Sendai's gonna stay all emotional and blurt out stuff she's been too afraid to say, but it might just skip ahead to the next day instead if the author wants to be a jerk and keep dragging out eeeevery possible bit of progress.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it probably won't be a cliffhanger, since there was just a change in point of view - it's rare for there to be only one chapter from a particular point of view before swapping back, so with luck we'll get more ...

Also this is gonna absolutely break Miyagi's brain. It's almost like Sendai LIKES her or something, but obviously that is impossible, so why is Sendai acting like this??!???!?!?! It's a MYSTERY

Miyagi is going to be very very uncertain about how to respond to this.

She's not actually an idiot (stop sniggering in the background!), she knows Sendai has some .... interesting feels about her, even if they often seem to be more the erotic kind of feels than anything else. She knows that Sendai wants them to stay together as .... something? She surely suspects there's some romantic feelings involved, but she's not sure what to make of any of that stuff - not least because she just doesn't recognise any of the stuff that other people seem to be talking about when they go on and on about love...

What she does know about is promises and agreements and contracts - conditional relationships with well defined boundaries. Those are things that she can trust, and they're things she repeatedly comes back to in her relationship with Sendai. Sendai has always challenged them, but she's also always recognised how important they are to Miyagi, and respected that fact.

But that's all gone out the window, and keeps getting further and further out of sight as they spend more time living as "roommates" and then some ... For a while there was still the broad agreement that this would last until they finished uni, but even that's mostly forgotten now, by both of them. Sendai got more and more desperate to find a way to keep things going, which lead to her going down the route they're on right now: she's made herself Miyagi's property, wholly and as far as she's concerned forever.

Miyagi is a weird cookie, and her response to that was pretty much "okay then". But she's a responsible person, and one of the things that responsible people owners do is try and make sure that their people are healthy and happy - hence all that annoying nonsense (from Sendai's perspective) about having friends and a healthy social life and so on.

But at the same time, Miyagi rather likes this owning Sendai thing. She's finding herself getting more and more comfortable with the idea, and less and less comfortable with the idea of losing her person ... and the thing is, for Miyagi this is basically just how she's experiencing and expressing love. It's not something silly like possessiveness being her love language - she's never experienced romantic love before this, she's never felt anything even remotely like it; as near as can be, she has no "love language".

What she has is her Miyagi and Sendai language, and her Miyagi and Sendai feelings, and her Miyagi and Sendai relationship, and what she's been realising, finally, after painfully long, is that she really can't handle being without those things. Far more so than before - she's been feeling more and more comfortable being with Sendai, and correspondingly less and less comfortable being without her, and for a long time she had no way to frame those feelings. The "ownership" frame that Sendai created gave her something she could work with, though it's taken a while for her to figure things out in her head property - she finally had a way to express her feelings to herself: "I want to be Sendai's owner forever". It's a bit uncomfortable still, because it's a kind of possessiveness that's clearly not entirely healthy, but she can mitigate that without being forced to drop the ownership frame (by being a responsible people owner); but it also means she has a way to frame her feelings for Sendai to Sendai.

Of course, being Miyagi she took months and months to get there, and she took the most roundabout way she could find, but nevertheless here she is.

And because Miyagi is and will always be Miyagi, the way she chose to express her desire to be Sendai's owner forever was completely over the top (in context) - her own hard earned money, her own carefully (over) thought out choice of gift imbued with subtle meanings, her own inimitable style of gift giving, that all boils down to the simplest of messages: you are my everything.

Except, Miyagi being Miyagi, it's all within that ownership frame - you are mine, you will always be mine, and this is how I choose to mark that ownership. Which is why she insisted on taking back the necklace from before: that was a sign of their promise to be .... whatever the hell they were back then, but it's now been superseded, and now that old necklace is meaningless.

To get back to my initial point, Sendai weeping at this will be very confusing for Miyagi - she's going to be wondering how she hurt Sendai, and what she should do, whether she'll have to back off and relinquish her claim or something like that. The idea that Sendai is experiencing such a massive wave of relief that her emotions have boiled over is going to be really hard for Miyagi to grasp, particularly since Sendai probably won't be able to explain it - she'd need to say words to the effect of "I'm just so overwhelmingly happy that you did something like this to show how much you love me", and that would be totally breaking the rules. On top of which, Miyagi would probably (possibly?) start freaking out and running away at being told that this was an expression of love - I doubt she'll be able to accept that that's what this is until she's been able to figure out a new way of framing their relationship that allows her to be reasonably comfortable with such a thing.

So yeah.....

One thing that's interesting to see, though: Miyagi seems to have laid claim to Sendai's name. The moon and the leaf, marks of her possession of Sendai's very being, even down to her name - I'm guessing we'll see a whole lot more of "Hazuki", particularly when they're alone together. Whether Sendai will be allowed to take possession of Miyagi's name remains to be seen.... though Miyagi is a sucker for arguments from fairness, and Sendai...er, Hazuki... is a right sneaky one who's very good at figuring out how to get her way....

As for the significance of the necklaces, Hazuki is written with the kanji for leaf (ha 葉) and moon (tsuki 月).

Ahh, thanks for clarifying that, I was expecting something like that but my capacity to figure things like that out for myself is pretty limited...