Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Todome no Kiss
(トドメの接吻(キス) / Todome no Kisu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

The reason I started watching this drama in-between was -again- because of a gifset on Tumblr. This time it wasn’t a gifset depicting any content of the story, but a simple two-frame gif of Yamazaki Kento making a funny face. That was the initial reason I looked up the drama and started watching it. I watched this in-between because the other drama I’m currently watching is longer than I expected and I needed some light J-drama humor in the meantime.

When I started watching the first episode, I was torn by two different emotions. On the one hand it starts off really intense and angsty and creepy, but on the other hand I also found it hilarious and couldn’t really take it seriously.

The story is about a male host, ‘Eight’ – real name Dojima Otaro (played by Yamazaki Kento), who seems to be the most superficial host there can be. His acting performance is on point, he is the most popular host in his club and he has many female customers he occasionally sleeps with and meets up with outside of work. He only takes the richest customers because of his obsession with money, and apart from that he doesn’t care about the women’s feelings at all. He’s repeatedly called ‘scum’ by both his customers as other people who know him.
However, one time during his job when he is alone in the host dressing rooms, a strange-looking girl suddenly appears behind him, telling him that he will die, and she kisses him. As she kisses him, Otaro feels his heart stop and he falls down dead to the floor.
The next moment, he wakes up 7 days earlier in the past.

Now up until this point, I was like ‘okay what the heck is going on here’. I have to say the first episode immediately piqued my interest because from the start there were already so many questions I wanted answers to. Who is that woman? Why does she want Otaro dead? Why is he going back in time? It gave me some serious Re:zero vibes as well, as he goes back in time every time he gets killed, gaining more information along the way.
Even though in the beginning Otaro is super confused and scared and tries to change the situation so he won’t encounter the ‘kiss woman’ again, she keeps on finding him and kissing him and he keeps dying and going back to the past. After a while, though, he starts getting the hang of it and learns from it and uses the information from each time leap to his advantage.

Otaro has a tragic background story which has led him to become such a snob. When he was a young child, he and his little brother Kouta snuck on board of a cruise ship of which their father was the captain. At that moment, a rich family was holding a special party on that boat. Somewhere in the night, a terrible accident happened and the ship capsized, causing a great scandal and catastrophe. Otaro and Kouta, who had just managed to save a little girl that had fainted, also got caught within the crisis and little Kouta was swept away by a sudden wave of water.
After that, Otaro’s father got the blame for the whole accident and Otaro was bullied for being a ‘murderer’s son’ and when financial problems and loan sharks started targetting them as well, his father left his mother and him. His mother, struck by grief and unable to let go of Kouta, kept saying she believed he was still alive and even kept searching for him. Otaro got enough of his broken family and started working jobs, getting abused, until he got himself into selling his body. He uses the money from his host work to pay off his household’s debts.
‘His advantage’ here including seducing a certain socialite’s daughter whose heritage is about 10 billion yen – the other story line in the series.

During the series, it turns out that the ‘kiss woman’ whom he thought was targeting him for some reason, is actually trying to save him. The girl, named Sato Saiko (Kadowaki Mugi), somehow gained the power to kill someone by kissing them and whenever that happens, she too dies and goes back in time. It is later revealed that she was the little girl Otaro and Kouta saved on the ship 12 years ago, and she gained this power after surviving the incident.
She manages to save him from an obsessive stalker colleague at the host club called Kazuma (Shison Jun), using her power to bring him back to life rather than kill him. After using her power several times, and continually getting closer to his 10 billion-prize, Otaro offers Saiko to make a deal with him: she will agree to kissing him when he wants to go back to change something again, and in return with every kiss he will grant one of her wishes. Saiko agrees, and they proceed with the ‘no-emotions-attached-kissing contract’. However, as they experience many personal and emotional things together (including saving his own mother’s life and giving Saiko the chance to say goodbye to her grandmother before she passes), a bond of trust begins to grow between the two and before long Otaro doesn’t treat her the same way as the other girls.

In the meantime, to go a little bit further into the second storyline, there is the plot of the Namiki Family, the socialite family Otaro is targeting. As it happens, it’s the same rich family aboard the cruise ship at the time of the accident.
Their daughter Mikoto (Araki Yuko) is supposed to take over the family business, but the board won’t let her do it alone -because she’s a woman I suppose. She needs to marry first. She has an older brother, Takauji (Arata Mackenyu), but he is adopted and not officially allowed to take over the group. To complicate matters even more, Mikoto and Takauji are secretly in love with each other.
When Otaro sets his eyes on Mikoto, he unlocks way more than just the suspicion of the Namiki group, he comes across a secret that is way bigger than that: the fact that Takauji was actually responsible for the cruise ship accident and the fact that his uncle is using the evidence to manipulate him into taking over Namiki Group by forcibly marrying Mikoto. He doesn’t want to at first, but as things get more intense and Otaro starts butting in more, Takauji is overwhelmed by feelings of greed and his desire to protect Mikoto at all costs, so he becomes a bad guy.

The series is only 10 episodes, so to make a long story short: Otaro goes back in time a lot of times (while everything together adds up to six months in real time he only spends two months in time-leap time) and in the end everything checks out and they are able to catch all the bad guys and lock Takauji up and he is able to marry Mikoto and his dream finally seems to come true. The 10 billion is about to be within his grasp…
And then Takauji escapes from prison and attempts to assault Otaro at the wedding and Saiko jumps in front of him and gets killed. And that is the moment that Otaro realizes he is actually in love with Saiko. But now that she is killed, kissing her doesn’t work anymore. And then he is left alone feeling anything but happy.

One of the things I liked about the drama is that the ending was actually really interesting. They didn’t go for a standard ‘happily-ever-after’ ending. The whole ending was based on Otaro’s character development. We could see how much he’s grown from that snobby host into this person who’s seen and experienced death and was able to go back and even in a certain way gain control over life and death for a while. We see that he slowly but surely starts reflecting on his actions and becomes a better person to Saiko (and because of Saiko). And then, when Saiko dies in front of him, we see him fall apart and that was some amazing acting (well done, YamaKen).

Throughout the story, as a seemingly comic relief kind of character, there is a homeless person called Harumi (played by the impeccable Suda Masaki) who, always surrounded by his homeless friends, sings songs and comments on Otaro and Saiko as they pass and sometimes even seems to know things about what’s going on. Something also feels off when he kisses Saiko and nothing happens.
In the end, after Saiko’s death, he comes to Otaro’s house and reveals that he – just like Saiko – is someone who can go back in time by kissing someone. He also survived a near-death experience through which he gained this power. He gives Otaro the idea of going back again, but warns him that through him, Otaro would go back not 7 days but 3 months. Which means that when he goes back, Saiko won’t even know his name yet and everything they have built up in the past 3 months will be wiped clean.
My first thought was: isn’t it better then to wait 3 months and then go back to save her at the right moment? That way she’ll still remember everything.
But Otaro chooses to go back anyway and go for a clean slate. Starting off with his pursuing of Namiki Mikoto. When he returns in time, he just deals with everything from the get-go: he urges Mikoto and Takauji to just tell each other how they feel, he takes the evidence tape from Takauji’s uncle and destroys it on the spot, he tells everyone what they need to change and do and so creates a future in which everything he fought so hard for the previous 3 months will never even start happening. Takauji comes clean to Mikoto about the accident and everything and they decide to get married. Otaro deals with Kazuma before he can get too obsessive and makes sure he gets fired from the host club.
Otaro meets Saiko but, as Harumi predicted, she doesn’t know anything about him yet and it leaves him heart-broken but still relatively okay.

There is a 15-minute special following 1 year after the end of the last episode, in which Saiko -her interest piqued by what Otaro told her- visits Otaro and he tells her about his ‘dreams’ (the things they went through together). In the end, she tells him she can’t give up on searching for their memories together and that’s she’s interested in getting to know him better. So you could say it’s still a happy ending for them.

One of the main interesting points in this series (imo) was that in the beginning, our main character -and thus the character perspective that we follow- is an unsympathetic person. Otaro initially acts like a real scumbag, not caring about anything or anyone but himself and his own happiness: obtaining 10 billion yen even if that means marrying a woman he doesn’t even love. Lots of times I was just shaking my head at him, mumbling ‘you jerk’, along with the rest of the characters. It was kind of typical that Saiko would be able to change that part of him and then he would turn into a good person, but it all happened very naturally. It wasn’t like from one episode onto the other he was suddenly a softy or anything. But we can see him slowly get less excited about the 10 billion and even though he goes through with the marriage, we already see he’s not really okay with it. It really took seeing Saiko die for him to fully realize what was important to him – and then it was too late. But as the audience, we still don’t feel a 100% affection for him (at least I didn’t). Of course, he changes and he does become a better person in the end.
But I find it interesting when the main perspective we follow as watchers is one that we can’t fully empathize with.

I learned that there would be a second season called Todome no Parallel, which tells every episode from the original series from a different point of view. The most interesting thing – and I really hope I can explain it well – is that in the last episode Harumi tells Otaro that whenever he goes back in time, the timeline that he leaves at that point doesn’t disappear, it goes on. So in that timeline he will still die and with that that world will go on. So they made an episode for everytime that Otaro went back in time, showing what happens after he time leaps. The happenings that he ‘erased’ still happened in parallel timelines. I’m a scifi/time travel geek so I’m kind of psyched about this and I really want to watch it.

Okay, so that’s most of it for the story. I want to point out a few actors that particularly stood out to me. First of all, Yamazaki Kento himself. I know he’s super popular and in the last couple of years has appeared in a LOT of dramas and movies, most of them also anime-adapted movies like Chihayafuru, Shigatsu ha Kimi no Uso and Orange and now even Saiki Kusuo no Sainan. I personally have only seen two things, Suki na Hito ga Iru Koto and Orange and in both of those he played a very subdued character, someone who doesn’t talk much, and is even a bit aloof. So it was really interesting for me to see him play such a charai host character, including the smirks, the touching his bottom lip with his finger, the hairwax, everything. It was really refreshing to see another side of his acting. I’ll probably watch more of him, see if there’s still more he can deliver.
Then there was Kadowaki Mugi. I didn’t know her, I saw she played in Tantei no Tantei but I didn’t recognize her from that. But she immediately piqued my interest. In the beginning of the series you think she’s a very creepy woman since she keeps appearing to ‘kill’ Otaro, but when it becomes clear she means to save him she becomes this super cute awkward little person and even though maybe some people might think she’s not that pretty or something, her acting compensated that well enough. I actually thought she was really cute, especially because she wasn’t a standard pretty girl. I actually thought she was prettier than the actress playing Mikoto, who was supposed to play a beautiful rich girl.
Also, Takauji. From the first appearance on, I was already kind of interested (excuse my menkui). When he loses control he gets these dead-killer eyes which made him look very scary… But it was really funny to see, when Otaro goes back 3 months in the end, that at that point he was still the puppy Takauji who wasn’t being manipulated yet. At a certain point, in his madness phase, he has a monologue about his love for Mikoto which was so. freaking. good. I don’t know the actor from anything else but well done!

I wasn’t really sure about what to think of the ending. On the one hand it felt legit that Otaro wanted to see Saiko again and I can’t disagree that everything that happened and the reason why she died wouldn’t have existed if he hadn’t insisted on pursuing Mikoto. In the end, he also sees that his greed for the 10 billion wasn’t worth losing Saiko for, and that is probably the most important message of the series.
On the other hand, it felt like everything that had happened, the whole content of the drama, was annulled. Because he went back and made sure everything was solved on the spot so none of the drama afterwards would happen. I feel like that is how we feel too at many moments; ‘If only I could go back and make sure that didn’t happen in the first place’, ‘If I’d known that before, I would’ve done something about it earlier’.
This drama clearly played with that, and Otaro keeps on finding a way back. I liked that both he and Saiko died for real at a certain point and each time they would still find a way to reverse it, even though in those cases it meant kissing another person.
Right, I want to give Japan a big applause for allowing this: a woman kissing a woman and a man kissing a man. On national television. And not modestly, no, full mouth-on-mouth. I was kind of surprised because normally they don’t do this in Asian dramas. But the moments I actually cried out ‘oh hell yes’ were when Saiko resorted to kissing Mikoto to go back, and Otaro having no choice but to kiss Harumi. I can only imagine how this must have been for Yamazaki Kento and Suda Masaki, I can’t help but laugh just by thinking about it.

In the end, it was a funny fiction story, but there was an important message in it as well. I think it has a lot to do with making the right choices, thinking about what is most important. It isn’t always something you can see from the start – and of course in reality we don’t get the chances Otaro gets to go back in time to save people and change happenings. So it’s important to set our priorities straight and be aware of what we hold dear. It might take a while, and we might need other people to show us the way, but if it can save you from opening up other wounds, it will be worth it.
I’m looking forward to watching the sequel.