Sola Episode 3 Summary:

While Yorito prepares to head out for school, he tells Matsuri to not do anything to the appliances around the house and to just behave herself. On his way out, Mana appears in front of his house. He tries his best to keep her from seeing Matsuri. He fails, but Matsuri herself kept away from view and watches the two walk off to school from upstairs.

At the hospital, Yorito presents Aono with another doll, but she rejects it. Koyori tries to make Yorito feel better, but he tells her it’s okay. He decides to leave immediately, and his sister is unhappy about his decision. Outside the hospital, Mana suspects that Yorito is hiding something as he is acting weird.

At the diner Mana works at, the man and Mayuko again are eating there. They talk about what their next move will be. Mana serves them their food and assumes that the two are a daughter/father combo, at the surprise of the man. Mayuko tells her it’s something like that. She continues to embarrass him. Mana’s co-worker has an infatuation with the man. Mana leaves early for work claiming having something to do.

Matsuri shows Yorito a table full of instant avocado-flavored ramen bowls. She bought them while they were on sale, but Yorito doesn’t believe they are edible. Yorito is still worried about Matsuri getting into trouble with what happened at the church. Matsuri tries some of the ramen and realizes how bad the ramen tastes. The door bell rings and Matsuri goes to open it. Yorito stops her and answers the door himself and finds Mana at the door. She’s there to cook him some dinner.

Yorito doesn’t want Mana going in, but she forces herself into the house anyway. She heads straight to the kitchen and finds all the ramen bowls. She starts preparing dinner while Matsuri upstairs wonders if Mana is Yorito’s girlfriend. Mana notices all the seasoning and spices are all gone, so she sends him off to get some. While Yorito heads off, Mana starts looking around the house to see what Yorito’s been hiding, but she finds nothing. When she goes back downstairs, she finds Matsuri eating some of the vegetables in the kitchen and they introduce themselves.

Matsuri and Mana strike up a discussion while waiting for Yorito to return. After he returns and the three are eating, Yorito is pretty much stuck between a rock and a hard place. Mana requests that Yorito explain everything that’s going on. He starts making up more lies, and eventually gives up and just tells Mana that he found her outside and she looked hungry, so he let her stay. Mana accepts that explanation and they continue eating dinner.

Mana continues to grill Yorito on why he didn’t tell her from the start. Yorito admits that he didn’t want his sister to know about Matsuri. Mana tells Yorito she won’t tell anyone else about Matsuri and accepts Matsuri. Matsuri heads out of the room, and when Mana goes to talk to her some more, she cannot find Matsuri and is led to believe that she ran off. Yorito tells Mana she’ll be back, but Mana talks Yorito into thinking Matsuri actually ran away. As they are about to run out to look for her, they find her at the door with a bundle of items on her back. She explains she went to get her stuff.

Sola Episode 3 Review:

Another fabulous episode of Sola. This time, it’s all about introducing Mana to Matsuri, albeit in a non-traditional manner. This episode leaned more towards the comic relief side than it did on the serious side. Such moments included Yorito talking about how Matsuri broke a number of appliances in his house from her strategy of using aggression to get things to work. Matsuri, of course, continues to be as care-free as ever as she just smiles and not worry about life.

It would seem this time that this episode took a page out of School Rumble, as misunderstanding after misunderstanding pile on between Yorito and Mana. Well, the odds were stacked against Yorito and though I didn’t expect the meeting between Mana and Matsuri to happen the way it did, I was somewhat relieved that it did happen because all the tension of trying to hide her from Mana was gone and now the love triangle is complete, despite Yorito and Mana both agreeing that they share no interest for each other. We’ll see, won’t we?

The whole scene at dinner was entertaining. Yorito lying about Matsuri turning from a cat into a human or coming from the future to save his life were such horrible lies. Although the setting of this series does allow for supernatural beings, namely Matsuri, the view from Mana’s perspective is of the normal world, free of strange phenomena, and Yorito saying such weird things are obviously not going to work.

I think the end of the episode with Matsuri grabbing her belongings was like a taste of reality. I just assumed all she had on her was some money and the clothes she was wearing. This element at least added some realism to the series. Didn’t I say this was a fabulous episode?