One thing I love about Horimiya is that it never explicitly mentions anything, but we know. Miyamura as a middle schooler was bullied to the extent of him causing himself self harm by piercing his ears. He never says it but we know through Shindou’s relieved looks, through Hori crying when Miyamura wants to repierce his ears. She begs him never to do it again. You know then that they talked about it or at least Hori put two and two together.
Sawada is attached to Miyamura because she lost her brother just the year prior to her meeting the cast. We have no idea how it happened, but we can assume it wasn’t a physical illness.
The manga talks about issues as they are in real life, which really is that most of the time we never talk about them. And people grow closer because they can read in between the lines. It’s the painful things no one wants to talk about because they want to move forward or because the pain is too great.
Taishan is one of the Five Sacred Mountains (in Daoism and Chinese Buddhism) and people often climb it to watch the sunrise. This practice and the mountain in general have become popular with university students and young people wishing to blow off steam especially.
They will often take the train to visit, arriving to Taishan at midnight and climbing five hours and nearly 8000 steps to catch the sunrise. The location above is a train station.
