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.

Minami-kun no Koibito
( 南くんの恋人 / Minamikun no Koibito / Minami-kun’s Lover)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hello! Back with another review, this time I watched another short Japanese drama. I watch very few Japanese dramas these days; when you are used to K-Dramas, J-Dramas suddenly seem all the more corny and innocent. This was one of those dramas that made me realize how far I’ve come with watching series. It was probably on my list because it looked cute and I used to love these kind of Japanese romantic innocent love stories, so I was curious.

Let me first start with a summary of the story. Minami-kun no Koibito follows the life of Horikiri Chiyomi (played by Yamamoto Maika), a high school girl that loves dancing and is secretly writing an online novel under the pseudoynym Moon Rabbit Michaela. She used to be really close to her neighbor, Minami Shunichi (played by Nakagawa Taishi), and as kids they even promised to stay together forever. However, when Shunichi’s father left him and his mother he started to distance himself and currently he and Chiyomi are not even on regular speaking terms as they’ve grown apart too much.
Despite this, Chiyomi still regularly thinks about how close they used to be and wonders why Shunichi suddenly started acting so cold to her (she was not aware of the circumstances surrounding his father’s departure).
One day one of Chiyomi’s best friends Takagi Riku (played by Suzuki Mirai) confesses to her and initially she’s happy, but then she sees Shunichi with the most popular girl in school Nomura Sayori (played by Nakayama Erina) and realizes that she’s still in love with him. That same night it gets really stormy and after fighting with both her parents about her future and with Shunichi in the street (he says some horrible things such as that he’s come to hate her and that’s why he ignores her now), she runs away and hides in a cave, wishing to go back to that time when they were little and still close. She passes out when lightning strikes and when she wakes up the next morning, she’s about 10 centimeters tall.
The cave she’s hiding in used to be a place where she and Shunichi used to hang out as kids a lot and Shunichi eventually figures she might’ve gone there. He finds her and keeps her with him as Chiyomi doesn’t know how to go home and explain this to her family.
As what happened to Chiyomi sounds a lot like a story they grew up with, the local legendof the ‘One-inch Princess’, they try to find a solution to get Chiyomi back to her regular size. In the meantime, spending a lot of time together Chiyomi and Shunichi gradually get closer again until eventually they both admit to their lingering feelings to each other.

To start off, I wish to say that I have some admiration for Japanese series like this that portray an utterly fictional and bizarre situation in which the people in the story act like it’s no big deal at all. I had the same feeling with Switched (read my review here); something completely crazy happens and the people deal with it like it’s just another daily obstacle they need to live with. If I were to wake up suddenly 10 cm tall I would be like ‘WTF??!!’ and not like ‘Oh, hey, look, I became the one-inch princess :D’ I mean, she actually SMILED for a second there. Also, Chiyomi handled being small really well and at a certain point I started to wonder whether she even really disliked being small, or if she even understood that what was happening to her wasn’t a joke or a dream and that she had to take some real action to get back to normal rather than get used to wearing doll clothes and dancing around between the flower pots on Shunichi’s balcony.

The story in itself is not to be taken seriously, of course. It’s fiction, it’s a cute little love story and it’s not realistic. But even in these stories I like to look for the messages and lessons that can be taken from it. For example, Chiyomi’s will to achieve her dreams. She loves to dance, she was willing to go all the way to Tokyo for a workshop – the speech she gives to her parents the night she runs away from home about her knowing what she wants was one of the most mature moments of her character. Of course, she’s only a high school student so one can debate on how much she truly already understands about what she wants. But she has the determination.
She helps her parents reconcile through the phone because she has the determination. She doesn’t give up on her feelings for Shunichi because of her determination, which in the end results in him finally opening up to her about his feelings as well. She single-handedly manages to achieve her dreams. She ends up with the guy she loves, and she is able to become a dancer while continuing her online novel writing.

As much as I couldn’t take the story seriously, there were really amusing moments. Chiyomi keeps in touch with her family through Shunichi’s tablet on which she types messages by jumping on the keyboard keys and records video messages with one of Shunichi’s handkerchiefs as the backdrop to fool everyone into thinking she went to the workshop in Tokyo.
Also, personally I loved Shunichi’s grandmother, played by Tsunogae Kazue. She’s the one who told young Chiyomi and Shunichi the story about the One-inch Princess. At the end of the show it’s shown that she’s starting to show symptoms of dementia, mistaking Shunichi for his father and such.

However, I did find the writing of the series really disappointing. The dialogues weren’t entertaining enough for me, the urge to fix the problem was postponed and sometimes even substituted to emphasize the relationship between Chiyomi and Shunichi, even though that was the most obvious thing in the whole series. I mean, we know from episode 1 on that they’re going to end up together and the tension between them is already established sufficiently from the start. I would’ve liked to see more despair from Chiyomi’s side regarding the whole situation. To make the story more realistic, even with a strange thing happening, the character should have reacted more realistically in my opinion. When you suddenly see someone you know turned into a one-inch doll, I don’t think the first thing anyone would say is ‘Oh my god you’re so cute!’ I would be like, ‘What the freck happened to you?!?!’ The lack of realistic response is something that bothered me, because it made it even harder for me to take it seriously.
Besides the writing, the acting also wasn’t that great. This doesn’t count for everyone, because there were enough older experienced actors in it, such as the grandmother I mentioned before, but I really didn’t think Yamamoto Maika’s acting was that great, for example. How she portrayed her emotions was really basic, and as I said before in Chiyomi’s responses there were a lot of moments where I thought… man, she looks relaxed? I would be going crazy at this point? Like constantly making jokes about how she now fitted in tiny places and stuff and how she got to eat tiny plates of leftover food with a spoon. It reminded me of Kero-chan from Cardcaptor Sakura sometimes. Anyways, it didn’t feel natural to me. But that might have also been because of the bad script.

Something that bothered me as well was the sexualization of Nomura Sayori. As mentioned before, she’s the most popular girl at school, her father owns a hospital so she’s rich and her nickname at school is ‘Pheromone’ because of her feminine charms. But it got a bit out of hand in my opinion. She was written as an overbearing sexual female character, someone who’s used to wrapping guys around her finger. She’s probably used to that working, but once she falls for Shunichi, she repeatedly forces herself on to him, even to the point of deciding they’re dating without even asking for his consent. Shunichi is not used to being treated like a dominant girl like this, and she uses his innocence and inability to articulate his feelings continually as a ‘yes’ (toxic femininity?). When he ultimately gets his act together and tells her he likes Chiyomi (in a really decent and polite way) she acts like he’s a jerk who cruelly dumped her and hurt her feelings. I’m sorry, but she didn’t have any right to act pitiful. She even let herself into his house when he was sick and tried to kiss him while he was asleep and tried to kiss him multiple times after driving him into a corner etcetera… I call that sexual harassment and the girl needs to know her boundaries.
One time she lets herself into his house again and starts this whol sob-story about her mom leaving her to Shunichi’s mom and it might have been just her acting, but I didn’t buy it at all. Also, I remember one time she was amused with Shunichi’s behavior and her laughter was so incredibly fake? Like, I honestly didn’t know if this was just bad acting or it was on purpose but it was not good either way.
Nomura’s theme song was this kind of sensual saxophone music, every time she appeared this music started to play. How much of an eroticized female character did they really need in this drama? It would’ve been enough to just identify her as a competent love rival, they didn’t need all this extra seduction stuff to make her a threat to Chiyomi and Shunichi’s relationship. It made me feel really uncomfortable.

Also, Chiyomi’s little sister Asuka (played by Yoshida Riko) was way too eager as well. She kept going after guys that were close to her sister. First she was all ‘I don’t mind if it’s you that touches me, Minami-kun’ to Shunichi, and afterwards she went after Riku for some reason. I don’t know what the writers were thinking with the female characters in this series.

And the last bad thing I’m going to say about the writing is at the end, when Chiyomi tells Shunichi that they shouldn’t be together because she’ll never be able to make him happy and Shunichi is hit by a car. I don’t know how blind the people in the car were, but they could’ve seen Shunichi standing on the middle of the road from a mile away. It was just really weird that they sped on while they could see him right in front of them, and that Shunichi responded so late to the increasingly loud sound of an approaching car. Also, Chiyomi’s mother who was hiding while trying to find out what Shunichi was doing just ‘happened’ to not see or hear the car coming as well. That was just bad. It didn’t make any sense.

I did find it funny that in the end, the most predictable way to lift a spell (true love’s kiss) was actually the way to lift the spell. Chiyomi mentions it once in the beginning as a suggestion (‘I wonder if being kissed by a prince will turn me back to normal?’) and Shunichi brushes the idea off.
In the end, when Shunichi is in the hospital after being hit by the beforementioned car (#dramatropes) Chiyomi kisses him twice: the first time he wakes up from his coma, and the second time she turns back to her regular size.
Come to think of it, there was a lot of kissing for a typical Japanese drama. Also, more than usual, a lot of sexual tension in different situations. Japanese dramas are usually really prude when it comes to expressing these kind of feelings and sensations, so I was a bit surprised. To add this weird kind of maturity to a fantasy children’s story gave me real mixed feelings. I was confused: did they really intend to make it a cute innocent love story while adding in so much sexual innuendos? It was a bit awkward at times. It went from ‘ah it’s like a fairy tale’ to ‘wait she’s sexually assaulting him now’ to ‘ahh true love’s kiss’ to ‘they are way too young to get married’.
It’s shown that they get married right after graduation, one year after the whole incident, so they must be like 18/19 years old. I mean, I get that you made a cute childhood promise about staying together forever that you rediscovered but this… is not realistic. It simply isn’t.

The one person who showed the best acting for me in this drama was Nakagawa Taishi. I hadn’t seen him in any drama before (honestly, when I started watching I thought Fukushi Sota was the male lead). But he showed some versatility, even it was just within Chiyomi’s imaginary scenarios and dreams. Shunichi doesn’t seem to be a very challenging role but he still managed to give him layers.
Despite this, the fact that his attitude changed from ‘I hate you’ to ‘actually I never stopped loving you’ was kind of weird. I mean, it really seemed like he’d come to hate Chiyomi in the beginning, they were so far apart, and in the end he suddenly says ‘I never saw myself marrying anyone else’. And when they get Chiyomi back to her normal size he was like ‘Oh man, restraining myself was a mistake, I should’ve kissed you earlier’. I mean, how did he ACTUALLY feel about her? Did he pretend to hate her in the beginning? Or did all that just disappear once he determined his feelings for Chiyomi? Some things really weren’t written very well.

Of course, there is a big happy ending in which Chiyomi turns back to her normal size, and Shunichi proposes to her in the cave where they also made their childhood promise and they get married and Chiyomi becomes a dancing writer and Shunichi goes to his desired college and they live happily ever after.
Where Korean dramas such as Go Back Couple use a fictional event (going back in time) to let two people figure out how much they love and need each other, Minami-kun no Koibito uses this trope to make Chiyomi and Shunichi rediscover their compatibility and forcing Chiyomi into a position where she needs to stay by Shunichi’s side, they start reconnecting and opening up to each other. It needed Chiyomi turning into the one-inch princess to make them realize they needed to be together.

All in all, if you’re in for some light an comical series, it will probably be entertaining. I might be too far into dramas, I pay too much attention to logic and realisticness and good acting to be able to fully enjoy things that don’t completely. make sense. But I still think the writing wasn’t that good, the dialogues weren’t that good, the characters’ reactions to the situation were all kind of unrealistic… Which is a shame because there are some really good Japanese dramas out there. They just love their innocent love stories too much, I think.
To me it seems like this drama too focussed a lot on casting cute girls rather than talented actors and it showed a lot of stereotypical heteronormative behavior. I usually don’t really mind about that last one too much since in Asia they are not as far in that department yet as in Europe, but in this drama it really bothered me how the women were portrayed in contrast to the men. I hope to see more progressive Japanese dramas in the future.

I wish to end on a positive note: it was a funny drama, and sometimes weird funny dramas are needed. I can keep on nagging about how unrealistic it was, but that’s the whole point of the story. A magical happening resulting in two people reconnecting: that’s the most important thing.

It’s been a while for me since I watched a good Japanese drama, but I will keep adding stuff to my list that seems interesting and the next one on my list is actually also a Japanese drama, so hopefully I won’t lose hope in J-Dramas altogether. It’s kind of interesting to see the differences between J-, K-, and C-dramas and I will keep watching all kinds of series to review so please bear with me!

Until next time!