Let’s take a closer look at this loneliness that Eiji’s talking about.
Ash’s mother abandoned him after he was born. James was hardly a father to Ash at all. Griffin, who was ten years older than his little brother, assumed the role of both parents before he was drafted to Vietnam. These are the facts we know. So then, was there no one around Ash who cared about him until he met Eiji?
Take Blanca, for example. He’s not any different from Ash as he’s very lonely too. But he’s not deprived of his humanity like some other adults in Banana Fish. Still, he swallowed the bitter pill long ago and learned the hard way not to try to bend the rules of the game. Also, Blanca can’t dissociate Ash from his past. He can’t see beyond the bruises on his wrists and ankles when he looks at him. And that’s perhaps his biggest mistake.
We kind of have an idea about what Blanca lived through but I can only imagine how fucked-up life has been for him to be so damn practical about what to do with Ash when he first meets him. Instead of rebelling at the idea of a child ending up in such circumstances, he simply thinks to himself, “This world is the only place this child can belong to.” That’s why Blanca teaches Ash how to survive in the underworld, not how to escape from it. But that’s not what Ash wants. Ash never wished to become a king in the world he was thrown in. He wants to tear it down at the risk of his own life.
Blanca (thinking): What if people gave him love instead of a reason to fear them? What if someone held out his arms not to abuse him, but to gently embrace him? Anyway… It’s no use thinking about these things.
Dino: Something to drink?
Blanca: No, thank you. I’m fine.
Blanca (thinking): He never had a choice to begin with. And he won’t in the future either.
From Ash’s perspective, Blanca is probably the best thing that happened to him in those years. Other than Private Opinion, the preview of episode 22 unexpectedly gives us an idea about how little Ash saw Blanca. In the preview Blanca tells Ash, “You used to be such a sweet boy. You’d secretly read the books I had finished, scrape the food you didn’t like off your plate to mine and follow me around like a duckling.”
Yeah, I’m melting inside too. Someone please draw fanarts of these scenes? Like this maybe?
Back to our point… Since Ash is a child, he behaves around Blanca the same way a child behaves around a trusted adult as this preview tells us. But I don’t think he ever forgot who Blanca was and why he was there. Blanca would make sure he always remembered that in the first place.
So Blanca never becomes a parent figure for Ash. He doesn’t (can’t) really give him the love and care he needs at that age. What’s more, the Central Park scene at the end of the story kind of proves to us that these two have never and will never be a cure to each other’s loneliness.
