Kakuu OL Nikki (2017)

A Slice Of Life With No Dramatic Stakes

Imaginary OL Diary was the 2017 winner of the annual Mukoda Muniko Award given by a small committee of television writers to one such writer each year. Sakamoto Yuji, one of the members of the selection committee, called it his favorite drama series and said it is a "world-class masterpiece". And as much as I stan Sakamoto, I have to disagree with that assessment, and note that both he and Bakarhythm have written series that are much better than than this one. Bakarhythm's Brush Up Life is a world-class masterpiece. This series: not so much.

This series is the thoughts of a thirty-something bank teller, and the quotidian details of her and her friends'/co-workers' work life at a bank branch. They get ready at the branch's locker room, talk over lunches and dinners, and occasionally work out or go shopping together afterward. That's it. That's the series.

On the positive side, Bakarhythm is probably the best writer of dialogue currently working in Japan. He has a great ear for the normal dysfluencies of natural speech, and it's flow and repetitions. The series is pretty much focused on the difference between the tatemae of what the women say and do and honne of what they really feel and want. There is a bit of exploration of how they police each other's tatemae, but it never really rises to any level of critique of that policing. It's tone is more, "well, that's just what we do." But you can see the seeds of the conversations, relationships and interactions in Brush Up Life in this work which shares some of the same actors.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that the cishet man Bakarhythm plays the protagonist in a sort of minimal drag: make-up and clothes and that's it. I guess we're supposed to oooh and ahhh at a guy writing and acting from the POV of a woman of his age and at all of the rest of the cast acting like he's just one of the girls. It's a perfectly valid exercise for any writer to try writing from POVs outside of their experience. But do we laud any woman writer for routinely doing exactly that for virtually every series she writes? Have not men played women in classical theater both in Japan and the West for centuries?

And so I had to constantly ask myself as I watched: would this series work with a woman playing the protagonist? I still enjoyed the series with that thought in mind. But I do not think it was any kind of revelation about gender norms, nor do I think it was it trying to be. Instead, it's a deep dive into the minutia of daily work relationships at a bank branch with no dramatic stakes whatsoever. They talk about who has refilled the toilet paper in the woman's room the most often, and collectively deal with a broken space heater in the locker room. And if that's the level of excitement you are looking for in a drama, this series will provide it.

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