Okuyasu Nijimura Quotes

The loudest dare in Diamond Is Unbreakable is also the one that ends its holiday. Shigechi has lost his lunch bag and blames Josuke and Okuyasu, and Okuyasu, fed up, dares him to let Harvest search the whole room. The exasperation is earned. A few episodes earlier Harvest's swarm was the boys' search engine for loose change and a winning lottery ticket, and the money was only split evenly after Josuke and Okuyasu beat Shigechi into it. So the dare carries that grudge as much as the sandwich. The mechanism is what the audience knows and the boys do not. The bag Shigechi is hunting was never his: a dog ran off with his own at the park, he picked up Kira's by mistake, and Kira's has a severed hand inside. Kira is hiding in the same building to get it back. Okuyasu is inviting the one thorough search that finds him, at top volume, for the most trivial reason in the show. The dramatic irony depends on the comedy being sincere, and it is.

Okuyasu is usually filed as the dim one, and this line is where that file stops working. Minutes earlier Rohan had written into him an order to kill himself if Josuke tried to help, and now his best friend is chasing the man responsible through a wrecked studio, shouting that he is not done punching him. Okuyasu's response is a deadpan compliment, with a trailing ellipsis doing the work of a raised eyebrow. That is not a slow person's joke. It is the joke of someone who sees exactly how out of proportion Josuke's rage is and praises it as a virtue anyway. The episode then explains the rage, and Okuyasu is the one who asks why the hair matters so much; Koichi answers with the fever, the blizzard and the stranger with the regent hairstyle. Putting the question in his mouth puts him in the audience's seat. He is the character allowed to say the obvious thing out loud so the story can answer it, and that is a job for someone paying attention.