Bhavna

I say this with many J dramas but seriously I haven’t seen a J drama like this before. Manga artist and undercover superhero figure Kishibe Rohan has this incredible ability called Heaven’s Door that reveals a person’s entire story and script like a book on their face or sometimes an actual book. From there he can write his own commands on the pages. He is a compassionate enough figure that he only writes what is for the highest good even if those characters came to do him harm. The first episode about buying this mansion and how he and his editor have to pass this “manners test” is really interesting and surreal. The weird baby looking boy with no eyebrows who is the gatekeeper of the manners game and the mansion is left struggling under the commands written by Rohan and so they end up leaving the place and defeating this little manners baby.

Then another story about a strange girl with two eyes of different colors and how Izumi (Rohan’s editor)- her spacey post car accident boyfriend has a heart (?) transplant from her dad who died in a car accident and so somehow by weaving her, her mom, and this boyfriend’s scripts together he resolves the story in such a way that they come together… was surreal… and beautiful.

I’ve liked Issey Takahashi’s performance in Nagi’s Ling Vacation even though he was kind of an a-hole character in that, he carries some of that narcissistic quality into this role too but it’s layered with a kind of wisdom and compassion and power which makes him like a kind of God in this dreamworld. It’s interesting that several other actors from that same drama Nagi’s long vacation are also in this- like Tomoya Nakamura, Tanaka Shiratori, Kumi Takiuchi, and of course Takahashi himself. It’s a pleasant surprise to see that many characters from that series transplanted into this one.