Mahoraba 25 & 26 (END)

Mahoraba 25

  
  

Normal Kozue still doesn't come back, and Tamami confronts Shiratori over Kozue this time in the penultimate (love that word) episode of Mahoraba. Satoshi's already done a nice summary for thi s episode, so I'll just add a bit here.

She knew it was coming, but it's still rough on even tough Tamami-chan. Poor thing... but at least she's behind Shiratori... to at least make sure he makes Kozue happy :) And good for Shiratori as well as he makes his own effort to bring Kozue back, without making the other Kozues -- Saki, Nanako, Chiyuri, and Natsume -- disappear. In the manga something else rather important happened after this chapter... but that ties into the next episode ;)

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Mahoraba 26 (END)

  
  
  
  

Shiratori finishes his Umeboshi Princess picture book to try and bring Kozue back in his own way. He tells the story to each of Kozue's different personalities as she changes from one to another, and when he runs out of pages she even helps him continue on. And finally... normal Kozue's back! But Tamami-chan gets her first, of course :)

And so the Narutakisou gang celebrates Kozue's 17th birthday, along with the Minazukis, Shiratori's friends from school (and Shirogane-sensei), Sa-chan and Mi-chan. I should say not only Kozue... but Saki and Nanako and Chiyuri and Natsume's birthday as well since they've all got a place on the cake.

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And so with one last umeboshi together, we bid farewell to the residents of Narutakisou -- but only in the anime we do as the manga continues on. And since the manga is still in progress, the ending was original as could be expected. Somewhat surprised that they didn't do Shiratori's big kokuhaku to Kozue (see volume 8 of the manga)... could've ended on a bit more exciting note with that, but I can't really complain since these last few episodes were very Mahoraba-ish in how things played out with Kozue's situation, you could say ;)

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Mahoraba Wrap-Up

I'm glad I read the manga before watching so I could get all of y'all excited about watching Mahoraba. I told you it'd be good, right? ;) I'll leave the heavy analysis of character and everything to Satoshi (Yoroshiku!). If you read my episode entries you'll get a better idea of how I feel about characters and story developments since I'm not good at summarizing those aspects in these final wrap-up entries. So I'll keep this short...

All I can say is job well done, JC Staff. As someone who's read the manga, one of Mahoraba's biggest accomplishments is being faithful to the source material and keeping the feel of the manga in the anime -- even the anime original developments didn't feel out of place at all. It's one of the best manga to anime transitions I've seen. Staff from a couple of other shows I won't name could learn a thing or two from Mahoraba :P

While I'm disappointed that there weren't enough episodes to continue with the manga storyline, the ending was more than satisfactory for me. I suppose we could hope for a season two where Kozue and Shiratori finally hook up, but it's not very likely given how things ended. So instead, I'd definitely recommend those who haven't read the manga to go find it. You'll learn a few things that didn't make it into the anime, and you'll see a different version of things as compared to the latter episodes of the anime. I won't go into detail about what happened in the manga chapters that correspond to after where the anime ended since it seems like it's being scanlated rather quickly and I don't want to spoil things and such ;) But I will say that the subject of how Kozue got her multiple personalites hasn't been touched on as of yet, and how her issue is resolved is headed in a somewhat different direction than the anime resolved it. At least it seems that way from what I've read (though volume 9)

All in all, Mahoraba stands out as one of the best shows this year so far, and is up there in my list of all-time favorites. I'll be hoping for a speedy licensing and release over here so I don't have to add yet more R2 DVDs to my "to buy" list (^^;;) It's sad that I won't be visiting Narutakisou and seeing Kozue-chan and all the other residents every week anymore, but our time together was wonderful. If you haven't visited yet then I'd highly, highly recommend that you stop by and have your own "Heartful Days" with everyone there :)