Chobits — Tome 4

The fourth volume continues exploring the characters orbiting Hideki, particularly around his prep school, where his teacher Hiromu Shinbo and his classmate Yumi Omura move. Shinbo's romantic past, until now only hinted at, begins to come into view: his troubled relationship with a woman who seems to revive a lost love introduces a new variation on the series' central theme — that of human attachment projected onto a substitute, whether mechanical or simply idealized. This narrative thread echoes, in negative, the story of Minoru and Yuzuki developed in the previous volume, and enriches the mosaic of perspectives CLAMP is patiently building on the question of love and its authenticity. For her part, Yumi harbors sincere feelings for Hideki, feelings she struggles to express in the face of his growing attention toward Chi — though the series never falls into the clichés of a conventional love triangle, preferring to treat this silent rivalry with a restraint that makes it all the more touching. Chi, meanwhile, continues to progress in her learning of the world, but increasingly tangible signs suggest that something in her resists this normal development: words she can never manage to say, subjects that seem to trouble her for no apparent reason. The reader, like Hideki, begins to suspect that Chi's origin is anything but ordinary, though nothing is confirmed yet. This volume thus establishes a climate of feverish anticipation, where every everyday scene seems to carry a double meaning, and where the alternation between lightness and gravity reaches a particularly successful balance, characteristic of the maturity CLAMP has attained at the series' midpoint.