Josh’s Anime Blog

It’s the 12th and final episode of ef - a tale of memories.  Will Renji and Chihiro end up together, or is Renji’s arc doomed to a sad ending.  And what comes of the others too?

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The highlights of this episode:

• Chihiro writes in her diary to herself to not mind the torn out diary pages as they were “mistakes” and for her never to get into a relationship with a boy named “Renji Asou.”
• 13 hours have passed since Chihiro broke up with Renji. Renji sees Himura on the church’s roof. Himura tells Renji that “it’s really over” and that miracles don’t really exist, only “inevitabilities and accidents.” Renji asks Himura why he’s always waiting at the church, but Himura tells him that he’s already forgotten why.
• Renji’s mother, who is worry about Renji secluding himself in his room, looks in on him. Renji tells her that he hopes tomorrow never comes, but his mother just tells him “couldn’t tomorrow be a better day than today.” This causes Renji to suddenly rush out of the house, remembering that Chihiro had told him those same words just the day before.
• Kuze finds Renji grieving out on the street that night, and asks him what’s up. Renji asks him what he should do to fulfill his dream, but Kuze tells him that to fulfill a dream, one must have a dream to begin with. Renji asks what if the dream is impossible, and Kuze then tells him he must wait for a miracle then. Renji gives Kuze Himura’s line about there not being miracles, but Kuze tells him that even if that’s true, all the world’s inevitabilities and accidents may converge in such a way that make something seem like a miracle.
• The next day, Renji walks to the train station and sees Chihiro there, but Chihiro asks him who he is and if they’ve met before, which causes Renji to run away in distress again. Renji goes to the school rooftop to distress over the situation some more when he suddenly sees one of the pages of the diary fly by as a paper airplane. Renji rushes out of the school and is able to catch the sheet - the final sheet Chihiro wrote in her diary after ripping the pages out.
• Renji reads the page, where Chihiro writes that she had planned from the start to break up with him upon finishing the novel, and that she thinks that she’ll be fine, since she’ll forget about everything in the end.
• Renji decides to try to find all the pages of Chihiro’s diary as he can, and through climbing trees, walking around the outside of buildings, and other treacherous feats, Renji is able to collect several of the missing pages, and runs back to the train station. Chihiro, seeing the beaten up Renji holding her diary pages, asks him why he did that. Nevertheless, she had found that she can’t forget about him - that she can’t not think about him over the course of 13 hours. The two embrace with Renji telling Chihiro that he’ll never let her forget him again.
• We then go through and see everyone working on their own dreams:
  • Kyosuke’s ex-girlfriend constantly works to try to finish Kyosuke’s last unfinished movie from the club.
  • Hiro has dropped out of school to work full time as a manga artist while Miyako lives with Hiro and continues to go to school so she can some day discover what her dream is.
  • Kei continues to play her best at basketball while Kyosuke continues to try to make his perfect movie starring Kei as those two appear to be in a near-relationship status.
  • Renji finally decides that he wants to be a novelist and puts that on his career interest survey, and decides to start a novel about his story with Chihiro.
  • Finally, Himura finally meets the girl he was waiting in the church for…Yuko Amamiya

That was a pretty good conclusion to the series I thought. I think Renji going out and finding all those sheets from Chihiro’s diary was maybe pushing it, but then again I guess it just shows how dedicated he is to her. Also, I had mused whether Chihiro would actually be able to forget him, even if she wanted to, since memories get reset every time she remembers, and this ended up being the case.

Past that, the conclusion was about (most) everyone finding out what their dream is, which is much of the point of the series to begin with. Really the only people without a solid dream yet at this point are Miyako and Chihiro, but they’re both still looking for them.

I guess the only thing I wish I had seen in this series is all 6 main characters together at the end, maybe having lunch or something, but oh well. I thought it would have tied the two stories together a little more than they are, but it’s ultimately a rather minor detail I think.

Overall I have to say that this ranks as one of the better series I’ve seen in a long time.