Episode 6 –
Anna has to go away for a few days, but tells the girls to challenge every team they can in order to practice. However, every challenge they send out comes back with a refusal and it’s probably either because they’re girls or word has gotten around about the last game they played.
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Koume finds a bunch of neighborhood boys with no place to play baseball and brings them to play with the girls, but Akiko doesn’t want to play against a bunch of elementary school kids. However, Koume talks her into it and they agree to play Tarou and his friends.
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The girls find that even these children play better than them and are very disheartened when they lose to them as well. But Noe had been taking copious notes during the game and has come up with some ideas to help the girls play better. She tells them her ideas, including telling Koume and Akiko to act like a married couple. It was funny when Koume asked her mother what it was like to be married and her poor family must be thinking all kinds of things!
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The girls play Tarou’s team again, and this time, they do much better although they still lose in the end. The team wants Koume and Akiko to live as newlyweds so that they will be more in sync with one another. Akiko comes to stay with Koume for a while and observes how Koume and Saburou work so well together in the kitchen. She sees how they help each other out and begins to see what it’s like to work in harmony with someone.
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They play Tarou’s team again and this time Koume and Akiko begin to use signals and they do a lot better. Anna returns during the game and can see how much the girls have improved, but I think they still lost because of Tomoe wanting to hit a homerun and missing. When Koume returns home, her father tells her that he has arranged for her to become engaged to Saburou! I can see why he did it and for that era, it’s perfectly acceptable, but Koume is just about to turn fourteen and Saburou is already six years older than her and Koume feels that she’s still to young to think of such things as marriage. And Saburou must feel the same, because they are suddenly out of sync with one another and are too embarrassed to even look at each other. This was so funny, but I think that they will make a good couple eventually. That is if they choose to be.