Episode 15: Cooking Class

The episode begins in the student council room, where Hori and the friend group are gathered when Syu Iura bursts in carrying the team rosters for the upcoming sports day. Neither Miyamura nor Kakeru Sengoku wants to take part, for the same reason they avoided swimming, so the boys resort to a rain dance. To keep each squad's boys and girls even, every class splits by gender and is sorted onto the East or West team, meaning friends will end up as opponents. Sengoku admits he would have sat the whole thing out if Yuki and Iura were not with him, while Sakura Kouno dreads the girls' cheer routine, certain her lack of rhythm will humiliate her as it did the year before.

Walking home, Hori and Miyamura trade sports-day memories; his were soured by past bullying, but her encouragement that he try the 100-meter dash, since she thinks he runs well, leaves him actually looking forward to the day. After cheer practice, an anxious Sakura is coached through the routine by Yuki, even though the two were placed on rival teams, and Sengoku quietly smiles at the sight of them enjoying themselves together.

Cooking class pairs Sakura with Sengoku and Remi Ayasaki, none of whom can cook except her. When Sengoku slices his finger on a potato, Sakura escorts him to the clinic, and in their absence Remi improvises with extra ingredients that erupt into an eye-stinging purple smoke, forcing the class to air out the room. The group scrapes together enough curry for three, though Remi's undercooked rice ends up more like a watery gruel.

As Yuki distributes the event shirts, Miyamura and Tooru discuss the relay, which Miyamura is wary of given the track team's presence and Iura's crushing loss the previous year. Miyamura is also thrown by Hori's cheer getup, a dark jacket, white gloves, an armband, and a headband with a sash rather than a standard uniform, prompting only an "it's complicated." Jealousy then flares on both sides: Hori bristles when Miyamura sits near another girl during English, unloading her mood in place of the textbook passage, while Miyamura later removes a blazer that classmate Taiki Mizouchi had draped over the sneezing Hori and swaps in his own cardigan. His scheme to wear Mizouchi's blazer so its owner could not tell whose warmth was whose finally shows Hori that he can be jealous too.

Sports day teams are drawn, splitting friends between the East and West sides, and both Miyamura and Sengoku try to duck out. Hori's push convinces Miyamura to run the 100-meter, and Yuki helps a nervous Sakura with the cheer routine across team lines. A disastrous cooking class leaves Sakura wrangling Sengoku and Remi, whose experiments produce purple smoke and inedible rice. The back half turns on jealousy: Hori resents Miyamura's proximity to another girl, and Miyamura retaliates against Mizouchi's borrowed blazer, admitting his own possessiveness and revealing that the feeling runs both ways.

This is the second entry of Horimiya: The Missing Pieces and the fifteenth overall, adapting Chapters 47 through 50 across their cover breaks. It aired in Japan on July 8, 2023, with Chiaki Nagai writing the screenplay and Akihisa Shibata directing. The trivia explains that the tissue figure Miyamura makes is a teru teru bōzu weather charm, hung right side up to ask for sun and upside down, as he does, to wish for rain. It also notes that a tasuki is used to tie back the long sleeves of a kimono, and that Miyamura and Tooru each took a size Large event shirt.