Tasuku has finally settled on an idea for the building he is renovating for Cat Clutter: he wants Saki and Haru to use it for their wedding. As the group moves to make this happen, spurred in part by some revelations from Tchaiko’s past and present, some other members of Cat Clutter are also ready to take the next step forward in their lives.
As I knew going into this series, the ending is a tad bit abrupt and I do truly wish that the series was just a couple of volumes longer to smooth out a few elements. Yuhki Kamatani does an admirable job at giving every character a sense of closure however and in some cases that comes from not resolving everything. Our Dreams At Dusk has always seemed to be heavily tied to Tasuku’s time in high school and from the beginning, I assumed that the story would take place over the course of three years or less and that simply wouldn’t be enough time for some characters, especially the younger part of the cast including Tsubaki and Misora, to fully sort things out.
I say this not to be demeaning to teens but speaking from my own experience, I didn’t even begin to suspect my own queer identity until 18 and many of my friends are in their late 20s or 30s and still trying to sort things out! In some ways I think this lack of a firm, definitive ending for the cast makes the story less traditional than many other “coming-out” YA stories and all the more realistic for it.
And speaking of identities, knowing that Kamatani is ace I was fully expecting the story to contain at least one ace character (after all, it’d be strange to write a story about queer folks and not include at least one representation of yourself) and I correctly suspected that Someone-san would be ace. With that in mind, I’ve had mixed feelings of apprehension about this for a while and seeing that yes, the lone ace character in the cast is the strangest, most-distant, and sometimes portrayed as “inhuman” (the only fantastical element of the entire series is Someone-san’s walks) character did make me sigh a bit.
This is directly brought up in the text and Someone-san does directly refute the idea that they are ace because they’re detached from the world or vice-versa, “That’s one facet. I’m a composite.” Knowing that Kamatani is both asexual and x-gender does allow me to realize that this combination of traits that make up Someone-san doesn’t come from a place of misunderstanding, something I can’t always say about ace characters who far too often in other works of fiction are literally aliens or robots (i.e, something inhuman which makes me suspiciously wonder about the unconscious biases of those authors), but I still certainly would have loved to see more ace characters just to make this rather clear.
Even with that quibble, I hope we get many more works from Kamatani in English in the future! While I wasn’t a fan of the first half of Nabari no Ou (the part the anime covered) I’ve seen some people discuss another completed work of theirs, Shounen Note, which sounds more akin to Our Dreams At Dusk and I would love for someone to publish that manga. Although I will also certainly hold out hope that someday, somehow, they can return to Cat Clutter and show us even more tales from this group.