capeyson — 16 years ago(December 15, 2009 05:34 AM)

Look, I've scoured every comment I could find here and on the internet, and no one has really explained entirely coherently what really happened to Kuno.
I've seen this movie a ton of timesit's one of my all-time favoritesbut I have never been able to figure it out.
It seems pretty clear that Hoshino set something up. Probably he aimed to do what he did to the other girl. Fine. But what the hell was the girl clique's role in the whole thing? If Hoshino wanted to rape and pimp a girl, he didn't need them to do anything; moreover, them knowing in detail what happened gives them leverage over himit seems pretty silly to needlessly involve a bunch of chipper, vindictive girls in a monstrous crime that can all be pinned on you. Or is Hoshino just stupid?
The girls later say, "I just told you to scare her," to some guys. So it looks like THE GIRLS set it up. Then THE GUYS say it was all Hoshino's idea to rape her. That suggests something like the girls wanted, on their own, to scare her, and then Hoshino hijacked the thing and told them to rape her.
But that too makes no sense, because the whole thing was premised on Kuno meeting Hoshino in the factorythat's what Yuchi tells Kuno when he takes her there"He's in there" So, presumably everyone knew Hoshino was involved in some way. And why would the girls want Hoshino involved anyway? Is it because they needed a credible source to tell Kuno to meet Hoshino (she wouldn't believe them)? Ok, so then they get Hoshino to cooperate in their moronic scheme, Hoshino calls Yuichi, and Yuichi calls Kuno. Then we're back to, "What, did the girls think Hoshino cooperated with them just because he loves to do favors for vindictive girls?" What did they think he was going to do?
Everyone tends to just say, "Hoshino forced Yuichi to do blah blah" and leave it at that. I admit, that's the explanation that makes sense in terms of the story, but the whole scene with the girls afterwards makes mush of it. They clearly had SOMETHING to do with it, and my problem is that their involvement makes sense ON ITS OWN, and Hoshino's makes sense ON ITS OWN, but the two together makes no sense at allto me anyway. Why in the world would either of them cooperate with the other? Again, Hoshino didn't need them for anything (as far as I can tell). And if they wanted to scare her, they must have known that involving Hoshino would result in something more than a little fright.
Maybe the explanation is just that they were really, really stupid and thought they could get at Kuno by going to Hoshino and having him set up a scare, which he would presumably do out of the sheer badness of his heart or something. And then he did what he could only do, and they realized how stupid they were.
If anyone's got a better theory or knows for sure what Iwai intended, by all meansreply!