A Love Story Between Two Musicians
Yell is the story of Yuichi and Oto who managed to meet, fall in love and marry at a time in Japanese history when most marriages were arranged. The series is a relatively faithful biography of the composer Koseki Yuji whose music is showcased throughout. (There is a one-week arc where the series cheerfully veers into the paranormal, and the historicity of that particular week may be in doubt.) The series follows Yuichi from his childhood where he was bullied for having a stutter through to a happy retirement following a long and successful career in the music industry making hit songs in the pre-war era, writing propaganda songs during the war, and composing the music for radio serials, film and stage productions after the war. Kubota Masataka plays this mild and gentle soul from high school through retirement.Yuichi's soulmate is Oto, the second daughter of a Christian family who had a small business making saddles. She encounters a famous operatic soprano when she is young and decides to become an opera singer. Oto is played by Nikaido Fumi whose voice is surprisingly convincing in the role.
The focus of this series is centered more on Yuichi than Oto mostly because the roles of wives and mothers were comparatively limited in early to mid century Japan, and so there are fewer family anecdotes about her to be incorporated into the series once they settled down and had their daughter Hana. Nevertheless, the show is pretty balanced between the two characters until the war when Yuichi's stories tend to dominate. There are also many lovely side stories involving the couple's siblings, friends and daughter.
The height of this series is Yuichi's involvement in the war. Yuichi proudly writes music for the war effort until late in the war when he makes a fateful morale trip near the front lines in Burma where he is confronted with the consequences of his support of the war - to the point that he stops composing for a period, and eventually writes a now beloved and haunting song for peace. The script really does not pull any punches in its portrayal of wartime Japan , showing the country's military fervor and its dire consequences, and this section of the series is quite moving.
Other than the war years, the tone of the series is pretty light with the dramatic obstacles being those usually associated with trying to establish oneself in the music industry and the expected parental objection to the match of Yuichi and Oto. The series was in production when the pandemic hit and for the first time in decades NHK had to put its asadora on hiatus for a few weeks. I don't think that the hiatus had any noticeable effect on the quality or the story, but the series ended up slightly shorter at 24 weeks instead of 26. A bigger impact on the length of the series arose from the decision to move from six episodes per week down to five, but I believe that decision was made prior to the pandemic and will remain true for the asadoras from Yell on. Thus, Yell has 120 episodes when prior asadora typically had 156.
Yell is an above average asadora with a few a particularly stellar weeks. The last week is a bit of a hodgepodge trying to complete a final romantic arc, doing the final payoff to a setup in Ep. 1, and building to a fanciful denouement in Ep. 119 to match the unusual opening scenes of the series. Ep. 120 is a final concert of Koseki's music with Nikaido concluding the series with a lovely performance of The Bells of Nagasaki.
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Sakamoto Yuji's Version of a Chinese Classic
It is surprising that this series is not well known or remembered - it was the most viewed Jdrama on broadcast TV in Japan for all of 2006, is based on an extremely well-known classic of Chinese literature and was written by one of Japan's best screenwriters, Sakamoto Yuji. Part of the reason, undoubtedly, is that it is pitched towards an age range that would be watching and enjoying Power Rangers or Kamen Rider with lots of broad acting, obligatory climactic fight scenes, fart jokes and a surprising amount of male urination. It's almost certainly not the best version of Journey To The West of the last few decades (Steven Chow's first film deconstruction of the story probably takes that crown), but it is a good, wholesome take on the old Buddhist children's story with some unexpected twists along the way.At eleven episodes Saiyuuki is a comparatively brief version of these tales, and, thus, this series skips the origin story of Goku (the Monkey King) and starts with the Japanese version of Tripikata, Sanzo Hoshi, freeing Goku from his 500 years of imprisonment in a rock and the Avenger team of Sa Gojo (Brother Sand) and Cho Hakkai (Brother Pig) already assembled for the journey. Each episode tells the story of the group encountering a demon along the way and overcoming the corresponding challenge with most of the encounters invented for this version (I'm pretty sure, for instance, there was no chapter involving time travel when I read a translation of the books). As is usual, for this series the group seeks to reach a sacred mountain, meet an incarnation of the Buddha and receive sacred scriptures, and no time is spent at all on the return to Chang'an.
Like the famous Japanese version from 1978 (the actor who played Goku in that version, Masski Sakai, appears here in the final episode as the Buddha), Sanzo Hoshi is played by a woman (in this case, Fukatsu Eri) but given he/him pronouns (at least in the version of the subs I watched). As in most versions of Journey To The West, Sanzo Hoshi is repeatedly captured and rescued by the rest of the troupe, but Sakamoto does give the character a bit more agency than usual. Sakamoto also adds an entirely noncanonical character in the form of a female thief, Rinrin, whose path intersects that of the travelers and ultimately becomes one of the team. Rinrin played by Mizukawa Asami is probably one of the best reasons to check out this version of the tale by providing a good, bantering foil and general competence in contrast to the impulsiveness of Goku.
Goku, as usual, is the focus of series, and is played by Katori Shingo who plays the Monkey King as kind of a blustering dumb jock/warrior but with some nice, quieter empathetic moments as well. Most episodes end with a fight scene where Goku's staff ultimately comes down on the head of the demon of the week who is then carted off to hell by a markedly breast-obsessed Taoist deity, Roushi (Lao Tzu) played by Okura Koji.
The 2006 version of Saiyuuki is a broad, largely comedic children's show with some nice lessons about working together and acceptance. Nevertheless, there are some surprisingly strong emotional beats along the way. It is probably worth seeking out, particularly if you enjoy Sakamoto's other series.
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This review may contain spoilers
Like Dad of Light, Yuube wa Otanoshimi Deshita ne is a pretty blatant ad for an MMORPG which serves as a conduit for two people to learn to express their emotions. This time the MMORPG is Dragon Quest X and the emotion is romance here between the stunning Miyako (Honda Tsubasa) and the relentlessly herbivorous Takumi (Okayama Amane). Like Good Morning Call the plot has the two unexpectedly sharing a house together because, in this case, they were guildies in the game and both playing characters of opposite gender and assuming the other was the same gender as their character. Ha. Ha. But that matters for barely an episode before they find that they enjoy each other IRL, and the main boss fight for the series over all is the tired, tropey, ineffectual man-boy character of Takumi which is eventually defeated by virtually every other character in the series including Miyako's ex telling him that, no, she really does like him.Tsubasa shines and Amane whines, and Terrace House's Kakei Miwako has a lovely turn as a comedic vixen playing Ayano, Miyako's best friend. The story is short and sweet, and ends on a kiss.
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I initially thought this production was nearly as good. My initial criticism of the first ten episodes was only that it makes some elements of the story far more explicit and is somewhat worse for doing so. There are countless examples, but here's one. The protagonist is icy and detached. In the original, the character is simply portrayed that way. In this version, an early minor character remarks that she's icy and detached. Lee Bo Young's performance is excellent and did not need the explicit framing of her character. Everything is similarly spelled out: the extent of the Hye Na's abuse, her birth mother's motivations, her birth mother's boyfriend's motivations, etc. Jung Seo Kung is writing in crayon compared to Sakamoto Yuji. Clarity in writing is generally a good thing, but subtlety can be more effective and that's certainly the case here.
Far worse, however, are episodes 11 and 12 in which Yoon Bok and Soo Jin are literally damselled by the biological mother's boyfriend who is in this version a serial child killer(!). And the two are, of course, rescued repeatedly by men to the point that the series briefly becomes a mediocre police procedural like the hundreds of other such shows produced on this planet each year. The original never limits the agency of the women in the story in this fashion, nor sinks to the use of such pedestrian tropes.
The series recovers a bit in its final episodes. However, it does spin its wheels a bit in the final episode as it lurches to a happy ending. Everyone wants the pair to be a family. That's the point of the shared scenario between the two productions. Call Me Mother is worse for going there. The end of Mother is d-e-v-a-s-t-a-t-i-n-g. I can tear up right now just by bringing it to memory. The end of Call Me Mother is fine: I will never recall it.
The performances and the production are, nevertheless, excellent. Heo Yool deserves the praise she gets. It's unfair to her, however, that Ashida Mana was there first.
You do not have to choose between these two productions: you can watch and enjoy both. But, if you have only seen this one, do yourself a huge favor and watch the original.
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At the center of the series is a sweet love story of the celestially beautiful heir to an ikebana empire (Momo played by Ishihara Satomi) and an older, poor, "ugly" and humble bicycle repairman (Pooh-san played by Mineta Kazunobu). There is no real sexual chemistry between the two actors, and the trope of a beautiful woman falling for a man "far beneath her station" is a tired one indeed. However, the performances of the two actors are superb and are the primary reason to watch this series. This is largely Ishihara's series and she rocks it. Pooh-san is presented as pretty much saintly having never having had a girlfriend because he had to take care of his bed-ridden but now recently deceased mother. He altruistically helps the people in his neighborhood and is presented as a hidden intellectual genius (he never looses on his shogi app!), but that character trait is largely irrelevant in the end though it does come up now and then.
Surrounding the love-story is a bizarre succession drama in a cutthroat world of flower arranging that does not and could not exist in the real world. The people in that world routinely plot and scheme in ways that take this series immediately to soapville and the "villains" are so over-the-top that you will check to see if this was adapted from a manga, but, no, sadly, it's not. Your enjoyment of this series will probably hinge on how much you can ignore the succession drama or appreciate ironically its machinations. There is a heavy metal boy band ikebana troupe managed by the main antagonist, and, honestly, there is probably a better series than this one to be written around the story of that group and the conflict between modern marketing techniques and the traditional business model of this Japanese art form. But this series decidedly does not go there.
The direction of this series and its aesthetic is Lynchian in a good way. The shot-selection, palate, art-direction and song selection are all well above average. The themes of the series are much less dark than Lynch's material but it is similarly populated with a lot of charmingly quirky tertiary characters that do bring a delightful vividness to this otherwise unrealistic world.
In the end, this is a fable of artistic self-discovery for the main character Momo. Ishihara confidently carries the series on her tiny shoulders and is given ample opportunity to display a wide range within the character's journey. She has the hardest job of convincing us that Momo would choose Pooh-san, and she does achieve the goal of reaching that seemingly out of reach flower.
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A Time-Travel Musical About Cultural Change
It's no Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and it's no Back To Future. But Extremely Inappropriate is, indeed, a weekly musical involving a very limited form of time travel. Written by the extremely well-lauded Kankuro Kudo, the series grapples with current social hypersensitivity and conformity which has been intensified in at least some cases by social media. The initial impression of the series is that it's positing the idea that people back in the good old days (1986) would be able to cut through all the woke bullshit and restore some kind of social sanity to the ridiculous limitations imposed of today (2024) by SJWs and their ilk in business and entertainment media. But that position is a bit of strawman that Kankuro attempts to pull apart in the course of the series.And so takes he the most obliviously sexist and abusive archetype he can think of, a high school PE teacher from 1986 (Ogawa Ichiro played by Abe Sadawo) and has him get on a bus to 2024. Simultaneously, a feminist sociologist (Sakae played by Yoshida Yoh) and her teenaged son (Kiyoshi played by Sakamoto Manato) are brought on the same bus from 2024 to 1986. Hijinks ensue in both time periods as the bus runs its route on Saturdays.
In 2024, Ogawa immediately falls upward in the business world by saying things that cannot be said in the current culture and ends up as the counselor in the standards and practices department of a large broadcast television network which allows the series to address various forms of social policing across the episodes. Meanwhile, Sakae and Kiyoshi are confronted by the old-school sexism and systemic repressions of 1986 while living with Ogama's daughter Junko (played by Kawai Yuumi).
If you are put off by musicals, you might still find this series tolerable. Each episode does contain singing and usually a production number, but they last no more than maybe 3 to 5 minutes of the total runtime of the episode. The songs are not terribly memorable, and, indeed, pale in comparison to the maybe two songs in Kankuro's asadora Amachan from 2013. However, the entire cast are surprisingly good singers and seem to relish their chance to use that skillset in this series. I genuinely recommend Abe's turn as a heavy metal singer in the 2018 film Louder!: Can't Hear What You're Singin', Wimp if you find you enjoy his singing as Ogawa in this series.
The time travel here is no more than a narrative device, and there really is no intention to explore paradox or establish any of the usual variants of timelines and their consequences. A handwavy shock occurs between characters if they are about to do something will cause a change in the timeline (except what it really prevents in the one instance that it happens is something else entirely that really does not involve a potential paradox). Characters go back and forth between the two eras in a completely chronological order mostly to see the differences in the culture that have occurred in that 38 years.
And so if it's not a great musical and it's not a great time travel story, why watch this series? The answer is: for the characters. Ogawa has a lovely shift in attitudes and understanding through his adventures in his future. His daughter Junko sees a world of possibility open up for herself when she sees the way the culture will change. The widowed Oagawa's love interest in the future, Nagisa (played by Naka Riisa), learns more about herself and her family. There are a lot of interesting and fun side characters as well as is usual in Kankuro's work including a self-insert of a television writer in a couple of the episodes.
I'm pretty sure the social critique did not work as well as intended, but I did grow to love these characters. I particularly liked Kawai's Junko though it's Naka's Nagisa that gets to do the heavy lifting in the series which she does with a deft comedic flare.
The final song of the series is a plea for tolerance, but, honestly, Kankuro's comedic study of guilt, atonement and forgiveness Saving My Stupid Youth (also currently on Netflix) from 2014 is much more insightful. I rate that and his Story Of My Family from 2021 (and also on Netflix) a bit higher than this series, but I do think this series is still well worth the watch.
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Sayonara Maestro: Chichi to Watashi no Appassionato
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Full of quirk and top of the pops in Classical music
I cannot be objective in my review of this series (and even less so than usual). I can give you eleven reasons why you, a perfectly normal Asian drama watcher, would peg this series as mid even among the usual froth of Japanese dramas. It's series full of quirky characters, fighting the good fight to preserve a community orchestra in a city that could not care less. It's a story of a family broken by an incident 5 years ago that struggles to come back together. It's an episodic series in which almost every episode is structured around a famous, overused piece of the Classical repertoire. It's a tepid romance. It has side plots that resolutely go absolutely nowhere. It has little to say about the realities of orchestral employment and production in the 21st Century. It fetishizes the old masters of the genre presented in a world in which anything composed after the 19th century in Europe does not seem to exist. It accedes a privilege to Classical performers which largely does not and should not be. It promotes stale tropes of following one's dreams and self-discovery. It's Art verses the mundanity of life, man!But ...
I loved it.
And not just for the Manachan of it all.
Of course we in the Cult of Ashida Mana were going to watch it. She has not won an acting award for a whole six months now and we have, naturally, grown anxious. Sadly she will probably not win one for this role even though she brings her usual prodigious strengths to the role of Hibiki, the estranged daughter of the protagonist Shunpei played by Nishijima Hidetoshi. Both of their performances were fine to excellent, and she had her usual moments of reactions to tear at one's heart. But Hibiki is no tragic heroine, and it's actually cool to have the Manachan playing a relatively normal young woman with a few daddy issues who gets to have a smidge of a romantic arc. Angsty, rebellious Manachan is my spirit animal.
Nishijima anchors the series well. His Shunpei is hopeless and clumsy at everything outside of music, but within that sphere his ethics and insights are pretty much spot on. He brings an old, tired community orchestra to life, and injects joy into what had become rote. He inspires people. He challenges people. He reconnects them to the reasons why they love making music. Yes, those are also tired tropes of the genre, but they also result in fun little payoffs throughout the series.
Surrounding the two are over a dozen quirky characters in the two's family and the orchestra. All the actors are promising up-and-comers or polished veterans, and kudos to the production for placing Nishida Toshiyuki in a tasty role as the owner of the local music café despite the fact that the actor clearly has mobility issues even if his character doesn't. I'd give special shout-outs to Miyazawa Hio and Touma Ami for seemingly having genuine musical talents in addition to fulfilling their roles well. Miyazawa sings a jazz standard in English at one point and his American accent is so good that you'll have to click over to his MDL page to learn that he was born in San Francisco. And Touma does really seem to play the violin even if it's just Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: (I'm not crying: you are!).
The writing in this series resolutely avoids having a plot, or, at least, resolutely avoids resolving the mild stakes it sets up in the ways we expect these things to be resolved. And that's a good thing! Will the orchestra be thrown out of its practice space by the evil mayor? Will the evil mayor learn to accept is daughter's love of music? Will the orchestra win the festival that they struggled to get into to convince sponsors to help keep the orchestra going? Will Hibiki and Daiki fall in love? The answers may surprise you, and honestly I found most of payoffs refreshing.
And so if you enjoy Classical music or even dramas about quirky communities coming together to struggle against the usual entropy of living, then you'll likely find the show to be worth your time. As for me, it pretty much hit all the right notes.
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The unfortunate idiot at the center of this bog-standard boy meets girl and pines for her for two years before they decide that they are couple despite having all the sexual chemistry of shower mold - no, I should not select something living since that would be an insult to shower mold, and so let's say all the sexual chemistry of argon - is Itchitaka who likes Iori. He was embarrassingly rejected three years prior to the start of this story by a girl in middle school and as a result cannot ever decide what he wants or say what he means. That's all we know about him. He is unbelievably underwritten. He is not shown having any other interests. We see his father twice, and his mother only serves to tell him various I's are calling or visiting him.
The scenarios, such as they are, are essentially situation comedy set-ups and coincidental climaxes all played for pathos and to insure that the couple never express what they really feel, and, ultimately, to maximize the embarrassment of Ichitaka. It's a world full of sexual harassment, kidnapping, attempted rape, stalking, creeping, up-skirt photography and physical assault all of which apparently might have legal, scholastic and emotional consequences but any of that takes place off screen to make room for more moping.
The acting is, nevertheless, pretty good, and, honestly, Shibata Kyoka does exceedingly well as Itsuki, the witness, childhood friend and supporter of Ichitaka. She has one memorable scene towards the end of her main run on the show which is beautifully moving. Seraishi Sei as Iori has little to do except be passive and gorgeous. I really cannot say anything bad about Okayama Amane's performance as Ichitaka: the character is awful, stupid and occasionally mean and he portrays that as intended, I think.
The original manga ran weekly for nearly three years starting in 1997, and this drama may well be a faithful rendering of the material. It is reputedly a bit on ecchi side of manga, and that fact probably accounts for the many lingering thigh-to-waist shots of the women in this drama. The serialization of the original material undoubtedly also accounts for the lack of any kind of emotional progress in the central relationship until (maybe) the last ten minutes of the final episode.
I will not judge what you like. If you go to the comment thread for this show, you will find several people who were thoroughly invested in this series, and the tone of this series may resonate with you as it did for them. For me, however, I found the series both dull and unrelentingly anticlimactic.
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More Yokai Sharehouse
If you've seen the previous two series, then you know the drill. Mio struggles with self esteem while saving the world with her loyalty and steadfastness and, of course, the support of the monsters in her sharehouse. I strongly disliked S2 because it immediately undid all her character growth from S1, and never even brought her back to the same level of maturity she reached at the end of S1. However, the movie here is somewhere in between the two seasons for me in terms of how much I enjoyed it. It's framed around a topical albeit tepid plot about how AI might reshape our world, and kudos for getting this movie out maybe 9 months after the news about chatGPT and AI art generators were breaking news.All the usual suspects are here in addition to the five principal characters. Many of the major secondary youkai from the series show up for at least a cameo. The acting remains broad and OTT like the prior series, but Koshiba as Mio anchors the chaos as always and has some moments to shine. The new ML for the movie, Mochizuki Ayumu as Aito, does as well as one could expect in the tropey AI learns what it means to be human role.
If you liked either of the previous series, it is worth checking out, IMO. And if you just want to sample the world, it is comparatively standalone, though personally I would recommend the first season over it.
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This review may contain spoilers
A high-concept asadora let down by subpar writing
The grand idea of this series was to have an asadora that would span 100 years of Japanese history through the stories of the lives of three generations of women: Yasuko born in 1925 who is the mother of Rui born in 1941 who is the mother of Hinata born in 1965.Yasuko's story (episodes 1-35) is actually quite good if utterly tragic. She is born into a family of confectioners in Okayama, and at age fourteen falls in love with a rich college student. But, don't worry, she isn't married and pregnant until age 16. All of her blood relations (except her unreliable older brother) as well as her husband are all killed in the war, and her mother-in-law irrationally blames Yasuko for her son's death in combat and chases her out of the household. Yasuko tries to raise Rui alone by selling sweets on the streets of Osaka, but when she breaks an arm in a traffic accident she's forced to return to the mansion of her dead husband. A rather ineptly written love pentagram results in her older brother absconding with her savings and fleeing to Osaka chased separately by Yasuko and, yes, independently 6-yearold Rui. Both return return to the mansion in Okayama where Rui tells Ysauko "I hate you" and so Yasuko flees to America with a tall blond officer from the American occupying forces. No, none of that week's episodes make any sense at all.
Rui's story (episodes 36-77) begins after a time leap to her adulthood where with no motivation given whatsoever she leaves the rich household and cuts off all ties with her family. The generation that chased her and her mother out of the house are now dead and she has a perfectly fine relationship with her uncle who is now the head of the household. In Osaka she finds new joy as a laundress, and falls for customer who is a jazz trumpeter, Joe. He wins a bizarre one-off trumpet competition and lands a recording contract in Tokyo. But, unfortunately, his lips break while recording his debut record (as a former trombone player, I have to say that this plot point is utterly bizarre). He distances himself from Rui, and tries to end his life, but she saves him through the power of Satchmo. They get married, move to Kyoto, obviously, and start a shop that only sells kaiten yaki since that's the only recipe she managed to learn from her mother, and, apparently, it's impossible in the 60s to learn any other recipes. They have Hinata and later her brother Momotaro. Joe is happily unemployed for 20-odd years until he suddenly has the bright idea of trying to play another instrument. No, that does not make any sense at all.
Hinata's story (episodes 78 - 112) has her finding a love of samurai dramas as a child and becoming an employee at a local studio's tourist trap where she is given the mission to "save period dramas" in Japan. She has an extended courtship with a samurai drama extra which does not work out after an 8 year time leap in which nothing changed whatsoever in their relationship. Eventually, an American film company comes to town looking to make a big budget Hollywood film in Japan and so Hinata saves the period drama in Japan by serving snacks like any good office lady and speaking the English she has learned via the same radio show that Yasuko and Rui used to study English. The final two weeks of episodes bring all three of women back together in a way that makes even less sense than the rest of the series.
A "drama that spans a century" seems like a solid concept, but the writing utterly fails the concept throughout this series. Like most asadoras there are many fun and interesting side characters, and the performances of the actors are up to the usual high standards for these productions. But the motivations of the characters for the various plot points are FREQUENTLY incomprehensible or non-existent throughout this asadora, and the necessary time leaps almost always reveal zero change in the characters lives in the intervening years. Much of what happens throughout would make sense if the particular arc took place over a year or two, but absurd plot points are spread out sometimes over decades in ways that truly ruin this series.
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Sakamoto does a shallow dive into the world of AV
Mosaic is a short drama set in the world of AV (adult video) production in Japan, and so of course you can expect a lot of explicit sex, rape scenarios, sexual exploitation, and frank talk about all of those subjects. But the issues with this series have relatively little to do with its subject matter.It begins as a fish out of water story of its antihero protagonist Riichi who has left his job in the world of finance and has returned to his small home town only to discover that it has become a factory town for Galaxyz, a large AV production company. His parents work in post-production applying the mosaics covering the genitals that make AV videos legal in Japan, and Riichi is soon pulled into the company as part of the financial group within the company.
The narrative is conveyed in relatively short vignettes and rapid dialogue, and there is often an intentional confusion between what is meant to be being shown diegetically in Riichi's life and what is being filmed by Galaxyz for release as part of their porn films. At least at the the beginning of the series this ambiguity is meant to reflect Riichi's confusion and disorientation as he returns to find the hometown completely turned upside down by the influence of Galaxyz on the local economy,
As a writer Sakamoto loves to try different things, and here I am guessing that the intention was to write bits of scenes and dialogue that when pieced together would reveal a larger picture. That is, the writing style itself is meant to be a mosaic. Great idea. Does it work? No. Not at all. (In my opinion, of course.) There just is not enough narrative glue to hold this story together. Only two or three of the characters have any kind of back story, and some of the women characters in particular are so poorly limned that it can be hard to tell them apart. And while there is a story here of people being corrupted by money, men being corrupted by readily available sex, and government officials literally getting away with murder, it's one that I think we've all seen before in better and less confusing forms. It also suffers from issues similar that of trying to make a war film with an antiwar message: what you see on screen glorifies the subject no matter what the characters are saying about it.
All that being said, Sakamoto does have things to say that are worth hearing, and if you make it through the first few scenes, I recommend that you stick with it through the final episode: the whole series is shorter than some movies, and Riichi's love interest, Momoko, gets some excellent monologues in episode 5.
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An Uneven Anthology Series
Ano ko no Yume wo Mitan Desu is an anthology series based on a book of fantasy short stories written by manzai comic and tarento Yamasato Ryota who is best known to international viewers as the cynical panelist on the reality show Terrace House. The framework for each episode of this series has a young, pre-fame Yamasato in a coffee shop where he gets annoyed by a customer or a staff member of the shop and escapes by writing a fantasy short story in his notebook. Each short story contains a self-insert character of Yamasato and centers around a different woman conveniently sharing a name with the actress who plays the character that week.The stories cover a number of geeky sci fi and fantasy tropes including fantasy rpgs and Star Wars (Ep. 11 features a an opening title crawl). The tone is intended to be comedic throughout and mostly the humor lands. There is no substantive through-line across the episodes and so feel free to dip in and out of this series based on any stories that strike your fancy. Some of the episodes are entirely too ambitious for the show's budget and 30 minute run-time. In particular, ep. 11 is made largely incoherent by trying to squeeze in Star Wars parody, a tragic back-story and the main plot.
Yamasato overly idealizes the women who center these stories, and he portrays himself in the stories fairly consistently as cynical, dark and an outcast from the popular people. The twist in several of the stories is that sometimes his powers for evil result in good things happening, but just as often his character receives a comeuppance. The only episode I can recommend unreservedly is ep. 10 which has a sweet denouement, but most of the rest are worth watching as well.
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The series faces the same challenges that all biographic asadoras do: most individual lives are not consistently dramatic and the entire life-span of someone who lived for 92 years is difficult to be portrayed by an individual actor. This particular drama works pretty steadily through the war years, but then starts to rely on pretty substantial time-jumps to find periods of interest in Koshino's life. She is portrayed by three actors: Ninomiya Akari for a week's worth of Koshino's life as a child, Ono Michiko who won a best actress award for this role for ages 16 to 60 and the vast majority of episodes and Natsuki Mari for ages 72 on and the last 4 weeks of episodes.
Ono Michiko's performance is well deserving of the accolades she received for it. Itoko was the oldest of three sisters and the daughter of a dry-goods merchant who sold kimono fabric who was physically and emotionally abusive and opposed to the trend towards western fashion which had been building long before the war. And so he sets Itoko the herculean tasks of making three other stores prosperous before relinquishing his own store to Itoko to make western clothing. In the course, of the war Itoko loses her father, her husband and two childhood friends and is left to raise her three daughters. Ono portrays her as obstinate but mercurial and, inevitably, hard-working. We get to see her in the depths of grief and despair in the war years, but also delightfully revitalized in a brief love affair with a married employee.
The story does cover why and how all three of her daughters became successful designers. Like her father, Itoko places challenges in front of her daughters before she accepts that design is truly their path. Ultimately, she treats her daughters as business rivals in the fashion industry, but it's a friendly rivalry. Poor Satoko is not treated well by the teleplay and is characterized as the stupid one of the three, but the real-life Koshino Machiko seems to have a good sense of humor about that characterization (“I thought they did a great and really accurate job. I loved the beginning, learning about my mother’s childhood and my grandmother. I hadn’t heard those stories before. I must also say, Misako Yasuda (who played the character based on Michiko) was amazing. She had really similar mannerisms to me. I had to apologize when I met her though, for her having had to play such a stupid lady!” - https://www.tokyoweekender.com/2013/01/michiko-goes-it-alone/)
The transition to Natsuki's portrayal of Itoko is a bit awkward. Ono can play 60 but not 72? I'm betting she would have even handled 92 with no real issue. Which is not to say Natsuki's performance is wanting in any sense at all - she matches many of the mannerisms of Ono's version of the character in a deft and professional way. It's just we go so far with Ono's Itoko that it's hard to understand why the entire span was not left to her superb acting ability.
It's an NHK asdora, and so the production values are excellent as usual aided by the fact that Koshino was born, lived her entire life and, essentially, died in the same two-story shop. Thus, most of the nearly 90-year span of the story can be conveyed through the costuming and relatively minor changes to the fittings and fixtures on the set.
If you are interested in the fashion of the three daughters, sadly, you will not get to see much of it. The show does visit one of Junko/Naoko's shows, but other than that we only get to see their work on the sisters themselves and tangentially in moments at their businesses.
In the end, the show is a bit uneven. Itoko/Ayako lived a life in which she consistently set herself challenges and then ... met them, and while that fact is wholly admirable, it does make it difficult to build a consistently compelling 151 episode drama around that life. The show is, nevertheless, worth watching for Ono's solid performance through the majority of the series.
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A fantastic tale of the life of a singer
Boogie Woogie is the fictionalized biography of Kasagi Shizuko who was a popular jazz singer from the early 30s through the 50s who was a major muse for the songwriter Hattori Ryouchi. The production made the wise decision to focus on her career as a singer, but Kasagi continued to work as an actress through the early 80s. And so we get to see the life of "Hanada Suzuko" from middle school through her early 40s when she decide to retire from singing and focus on acting instead.Suzuko is deftly played by Shuri who pretty much nails the acting, singing and dancing that the role demands. The series concludes almost every week's episodes with a production number of one of the actual songs of Hattori. As you can imagine, a Japanese woman singing an American subgenre of jazz had to face some challenges when Japanese nationalism hit its heights during the wars in China and the Pacific. However, her brother was killed in battle, and one of the most moving moments of the series occurs when she sings a song written by Hattori about her brother's service which had been presumed lost until a few years before this production started. More central to her story is the love affair she had with her life partner who fathered her daughter but died of an illness during the war.
Hattori is played by Kusanagi Tsuyoshi, and is one of the more persistent characters in her life. However, like most asadoras the cast is huge, and so we also get to meet many others of Suzuko's family and friends (and at least one frenemy) along the way.
Most biographical asadoras have a hard time with the fact that most lives are not uniformly interesting throughout their span, and so often the series have to resort to significant time leaps to get to the juicy parts. There are indeed a few such leaps in this series as well, but the series does a better job than most at maintaining its pacing throughout the series and limiting this series to Kasagi's career as a singer helped to do so.
If you enjoy boogie woogie as a genre or asadoras in general, then this series is almost certainly for you. I think Japanese drama watchers in general would enjoy the acting of Shuri, and I would place it fairly high in the rankings of assdoras in general. It is certainly well worth watching despite being quite a time investment (like all asadora).
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