“You Are So Beautiful”

“You Are So Beautiful” is the Billy Preston recording that plays while Kido and Misuzu talk about Daisuké Taniguchi. The song first seems to make Misuzu’s tears a response to Daisuké’s suffering, but she explains that the music itself always overwhelms her. In the pause between their shared sadness and their exchange about the recording, the ballad becomes a small, intimate scene of recognition: grief gives way to a conversation about tenderness, age, and the once-embarrassing directness of love songs.

The song in the conversation

Kido and Misuzu have been discussing Daisuké’s painful decision and Misuzu’s helplessness as she watched him from the sidelines. Kido responds with sympathy, nodding along as the classic ballad rises from the speakers. Piano and strings build to a dramatic crescendo and chorus. Seeing Misuzu tear up, he assumes the emotion is about Daisuké; her explanation gently corrects his reading. The song, she says, always affects her this way, and she jokes that she is becoming a crybaby as she gets older.

That correction shifts the scene without undoing its sadness. Misuzu is still speaking in the wake of Daisuké’s story, but her tears are not simply evidence of grief for him. They belong to her own long-standing response to the song. She wipes her eyes while smiling, and Kido, captivated by the tenderness in her expression, returns her sad smile. Music gives the conversation a feeling that neither of them has to reduce to a single cause.

A shared response to the recording

Kido knows Joe Cocker’s version and asks whether the recording playing is the original. Misuzu confirms that it is and says she prefers this performer. Kido has not heard Preston before, but says he may agree with her and finds it good. Their exchange is brief and ordinary: a question about which version is playing, a preference, and the pleasure of discovering a recording together. Its modest scale matters because it follows an emotionally charged account of Daisuké’s suffering. The conversation can move, for a moment, from what could not be changed to a present, shared appreciation.

The song also makes age part of that shared moment. Kido remarks that when he was younger, lyrics directly praising a lover made him squeamish, and wonders if he, too, is getting old. The confession echoes Misuzu’s self-deprecating joke about becoming more tearful. Both connect aging with a changed capacity to receive emotion: what once embarrassed Kido can now move him, while Misuzu can acknowledge her tears without hiding them. The ballad’s direct expression of love becomes a measure of how their responses have softened.

From Daisuké to Kyoichi

After wiping her eyes and seeming to regain control, Misuzu returns to the brothers’ history. She says Kyoichi always called Daisuké a little shit and never appreciated what he did. Kyoichi could not understand why she would date his brother—or, as Misuzu revises it, could not accept it. His complicated feelings also involved Daisuké’s possible role in saving their father’s life: he resented the idea that his supposedly unsuccessful brother might be in a position to do so, and became irritated when Daisuké could not decide what to do.

The placement of this recollection after the music’s crescendo lets the scene hold two kinds of feeling together. Misuzu’s tenderness toward Daisuké is set against Kyoichi’s contempt and jealousy, while her tears are allowed to have a source beyond either man. The song does not resolve the family’s history or make Daisuké’s decision less painful. Instead, it briefly gives Kido and Misuzu a shared emotional language before Misuzu names the conflict that had shaped her view of the brothers.

Narrative significance

The recording’s importance is concentrated in the reaction it elicits and the conversation it opens. Kido initially interprets Misuzu’s tears through the story of Daisuké, but her explanation makes him attend to her own response; he then shares his changing feelings about love lyrics. This small correction turns sympathy into a more personal exchange. The song is not merely background to an account of loss: it creates a pause in that account, where Kido and Misuzu can meet through music without pretending that the sadness has disappeared.

The scene’s emotional movement is deliberately modest. A dramatic musical rise leads to tears, but not to a declaration or a solution. Misuzu smiles as she wipes her eyes; Kido mirrors her sad smile; they compare versions, then speak about aging before returning to Daisuké and Kyoichi. In that sequence, the ballad’s ideal of direct praise sits beside the difficulty of Daisuké’s life and the brothers’ unresolved feelings. Its tenderness is real, but it does not erase what the surrounding conversation has made painful.