Tsunehiro (Hiro) bails on the group and crashes in a net café for the night, but crosses paths with a few of them the next day after diverting some of his pachinko winnings into fishing gear and heading to a spot where a million-yen bounty (somewhere near $6,675 on air date) has been placed on catching a houndshark (a real thing – not to be confused with a shark dog).
Brendan is old.
The loan sharks are, of course, also drawn by the bounty, and end up trying to catch Hiro, who leads them on another exhausting chase. Takaaki joins in and outlasts them, ending the episode by taking over the debt and putting Hiro up in his apartment for the foreseeable future.
It feels like we’re finally done settling into the plot in the latest of Japan’s now-biennial fishing anime, and it’s been long enough since Slow Loop that I’m ready to re-learn pretty much everything. It also helps that this is a different beast than the more recent high-school girl offerings, though there may be some overlap.
I certainly can’t call this plot rushed, though it’s had the decency to not really be repetitive so far with its backstory, even if Hiro’s flashbacks in this episode might have leaned towards superfluous. “Thorough” might be an apt descriptor, as the show endeavors to make sure his hopelessness is adequately established. In contrast, Takaaki has a rapid montage suggesting his own relationship with mortality, which I look forward to being explored in due time.
The closest thing I have to a real complaint about the episode involves the chase scene, where there’s an overhead tracking shot of a covered bridge of some kind. The show does that blinking arrow thing you sometimes see in anime to show the positions of the characters within, but it starts the accompanying audio tones before the arrows are actually in frame. Small potatoes in the grand scheme.
Summary:
I’ll miss the loan sharks, but I’m ready to cross the Hero’s Journey threshold and start the fishing – and befriending – in earnest.
The Con Artists 
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