Kowloon Generic Romance Episode 13 Discussion

Ricky16 said:
Still, I can’t lie! I’m a little haunted by the fact that we never truly learned why Reiko died. Maybe that’s the point.

WatchTillTandava said:


The pill overdose (toxicity of medication from the company of Hebinuma Pharmaceutical which she acquired from that woman grey market-dealing them in Kowloon - they had a low safety profile to begin with and she took too many at once).

Or do you mean "why" she chose to knowingly risk potentially overdosing on pills?

Ricky16 said:
Yes, I'm asking about the later one.

WatchTillTandava said:


Recall the conversations she had with various characters, like with the woman who served as her drug dealer selling the pills, about considering herself a coward not wanting to know what was on the other side of a present gift-wrapped to her, or with Kudo about deliberately stopping reading a book before the chapter revealing everything and concluding the plot. About how she'd rather linger in that liminal in-between space and leave everything in that unfinished state and how she was unable and unwilling to accept changes around her, to her life and her environment. That's why she always wanted to go to the same restaurant and had certain habits and traditions or superstitions she strictly adhered to.

It's heavily implied that she couldn't accept everything consequential about her world/personal life changing with the slated demolition of the Kowloon neighborhood. She would have to move and lose her apartment, lose her current workplace situation and change jobs, and now potentially get married on top of that (even though she liked Kudo), which is one of the biggest expectations of a lifestyle change of all. She couldn't - or wasn't emotionally prepared to, face a new life bereft of nearly everything which had become familiar by that point.

The medication wasn't a surefire way to kill her because obviously she didn't have exact advanced scientific knowledge of the fatal dosage and her own pharmacokinetics and tolerance so she took a chance and a gamble. She was utterly incapable of making concrete definite decisions for herself and so leaving it up to the pills and their effects in a way was another way to roll the dice and avoid taking full responsibility. Precisely how she felt about it was basically laid out in that exchange with the drug dealer. Implied that if she died then that's what was meant to be, she'd be "fine" with it and fate had taken its course, but if she lived, then she presumably would have accepted that too, when the time came left her job and moved out of a condemned Kowloon, and married Kudo.

Meanwhile her "doppelganger" or clone-not clone of sorts, the Reiko we know better, Kujirai A, went in the opposite direction and gradually become more and more unlike her counterpart throughout the series, crawling and then eventually running toward and embracing change. She was ready and prepared in the end to leave Kowloon, got a new job as a travel agent, and is shown in the last few minutes of the series reconnecting with Kudo years later outside the old neighborhood.