When Ryuunosuke spots Ten sleeping in a tree and delivers him safely home to Lum, she’s invited to dinner with Moroboshis. Ataru’s mom, who may be mistaking her for a boy nicer than her son, makes sure she gets her fill. The warm and caring interaction makes Ryuunosuke yearn to learn more about the mom she never knew.
This proves extremely difficult. Her first attempts to clearly broach the topic are deflected by her dad, who pretends not to have heard her. One of their usual knock-down, drag-out brawls ensues, and her dad eventually relents and tells her a confusing string of stories involving multiple women and dramatic situations with no clear connections.
Frustrated by what she deems to be lies, Ryuunosuke runs off into the night, only to encounter Ataru, Lum, and Ataru’s mom, to whom she suddenly clings and starts sobbing. While on the swings, Ryuunosuke gets the feeling she may be on the verge of remembering her real mom’s face, only for her dad to appear and imply it’s painful for him to dredge up memories of what he lost. It’s only the next day that her mom isn’t even dead, but simply left him.
Ryuunosuke’s obsession with learning what her mom looks like even influences her dreams, and when she hears him call out her mom’s name in his sleep, she starts to tenderly tuck him in, only for him to half-wake up and mistake her for his ex-wife. The next morning Ataru says he might’ve gotten confused because Ryuunosuke resembles her mom.
Because she very much wants that to be the case, she forces her dad to allow her access to a photo album with photos of her mom. But when she starts flipping through it, she sees multiple women, just like the ones in his seemingly made-up stories. Turns out after her mom left, he’d ask woman customers to play with his baby daughter.
The closing bombshell to this Ryuunosuke-focused episode that seesawed between zany comedy and poignant family drama is that her dad simply forgot who her mom is. This leads Ryuunosuke to run away from home and live with the Moroboshis for a few days, and you really can’t blame her!
