Episode 27: Nanami's Egg

Nanami lays an egg, and hilarity ensues.

This is a summary of episode 27 of the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena.  You are welcome to link to it, but not to repost it elsewhere.  For more information, and other episode summaries, see the index.

Nanami dreams that she is a little child, and finds a decorated Easter egg while playing in the sandbox.  When she wakes up, she finds the egg in bed with her.  She wonders if maybe she laid it, like a hen, while she was asleep - but of course, that's impossible.  As she walks with Tsuwabuki to school (noteworthy point:  one of the items he lists on her schedule for the day is that her gym class has been switched to a "girls-only health and hygiene" class), Nanami muses to herself that this must be some kind of plot to get everyone to ridicule her.  Throughout the episode we see images from Nanami's imagination:  people figuring out that she laid the egg; ostracising her as a space alien, pervert, or similar; and throwing her in a cage with other egg-laying creatures.

Nanami shows the egg to Miki, not telling him where it came from, and he tells her it's quite unusual; freshly laid, but not a bird or reptile egg.  He mentions that there are a few mammals that lay eggs; as soon as he says that, Nanami leaves, and misses his conclusion that humans are not among those mammals.  She stops worrying that the other girls will ostracize her for laying eggs, and starts worrying that they'll ostracize her for not having known about it and for being so immature and late to start.

Her worries on that point are intensified when she collides with worldly, womanly Jury in the hall.  Jury is carrying something heavy in a leather case, and warns Nanami to be careful because "You could have scratched my tama." Jury talks about how she started when she was seven, she used to have much smaller tama but now her tama are this size, you should try it, it feels so good, and so on.  She is talking about bowling.  But Jury never actually shows Nanami the tama, and because of her own fears, grammatical ambiguities, and the pun between tama (bowling ball) and tamago (egg), Nanami misunderstands completely.

Nanami continues behaving oddly.  Himemiya comments that Nanami is acting the way Himemiya's pet hen (also named Nanami) did when she laid an egg, and she and Utena joke that they wonder who the father is.  Human Nanami has an unfortunate conversation with her brother in which she asks him if he prefers a boy or a girl, he says he likes girls, and she says she does too.  He gives her a stern lecture about homosexuality being against God's plan.  When she says that's not what she meant, he tells her that they've been able to live happily together because she's the sort of girl who doesn't dishonour her family by laying eggs.  That may be some kind of cultural reference.

Nanami becomes depressed, thinking she will have to get rid of the egg.  She rejects as unthinkable the idea of eating it.  Instead, she abandons it under a tree in the forest.  But that night, in a fit of remorse, she runs back to look for it and finds Saionji, camping out in the moonlight, cooking a meal on a camping stove, a meal of...  fried eggs.  Fortunately, he hasn't fried hers yet; she snatches it away and runs off.  While Utena and Himemiya, in bed, speculate on the nature of reincarnation and genetic memory, Nanami wanders the woods in a daze until she finds a huge egg, colored like hers, that seems to be an alien spaceship.  It blasts energy beams at her, breaks in half, and then she wakes up in her own bed and finds bits of broken eggshell under the covers.

In the last scene, Utena wonders where Chu-Chu has been; she hasn't seen him in a while.  Himemiya says he'll be back soon.  Then he rings the doorbell, and he and Himemiya exchange meaningful glances.

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