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.

Kimi ha Petto
(きみはペット / Kimi ha Petto / You’re My Pet)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

When I first heard of this story, I wasn’t sure whether to watch it because it sounded kind of weird – a woman keeping a younger man as a ‘pet’… I mean, what should I be imagining there?
However, this drama was recommended to me by a friend who is a huge MatsuJun fan and she told I just HAD to watch it so I guess that’s why it was on my list. I was a bit anxious for it to be really old and cringy because it’s from 2003… but it actually gave me the real golden oldie good J-Drama feeling. I finished it in two days, because as the usual J-Drama goes, it was only 10 episodes.

Let’s start with a summary. The story is about 29-year old journalist Iwaya Sumire (played by Matsuyama Koyuki), a career woman with a cold exterior. She hasn’t loved anyone as much as she loved the dog she owned when she was a kid, and her length and her focus on career rather than expressing her emotions has led many of her boyfriends feeling inferior to her. The drama starts with Sumire talking to a psychologist about her lack of emotions and the fact that her boyfriend cheated on her – actually he also knocked up the girl with whom he was cheating on her. After this, she also gets degraded to another department at work.
When she comes home one night, she finds a cardboard box in front of the mansion she lives in. When she peeks inside, she sees a young boy curled up, pretty beaten up. Not sure what she should do, she drags the cardboard box up to her apartment and takes care of the boy, fully expecting him to be gone the next day when she comes home from work. Yet, he is still there, in front of the TV, saying he has nowhere else to go and needs a place to stay. And he’s willing to do anything. In an attempt to scare him off, Sumire suggests then she’ll take him in as her pet; and treat him like an actual pet. To her astonishment, he instantly agrees. She decides to call him Momo, after her old dog, not aware of who he really is at all.
His real name is Goda Takeshi (played by Matsumoto Jun), 21 years old and actually a talented ballet dancer striving to go to Germany for an education in dance. He’s currently involved in a modern dance group where he volunteers as a kind of special guest performer.
‘Momo’ and Sumire find a special kind of comfort in one another, without it leading to a romantic relationship, but how long will this last? And when Sumire suddenly meets her old crush and senpai Hasumi Shigehito (played by Tanabe Seiichi) and things start developing quickly, how will they keep their peculiar companionship a secret? How do you explain something that feels good for the two of you but will definitely sound crazy to other people?

In the end, the story is about two people that are pulled to one another but can’t really pinpoint what their connection is and set off on a whole new kind of relationship. It was really nice to see a different kind of intimate relationship that wasn’t purely based on romance or lust.
It certainly is a peculiar relationship. The only one on Sumire’s side who knows about it is her best (and only) friend Shirotae Yuri (played by Suzuki Sarina), a stay-at-home mom with a young daughter. She constantly tries to encourage Sumire to put herself out there, but Sumire is too withdrawn to ever take the leap.

Let me say something about the casting and the characters first before I go on in more detail about what I thought about the story and the deeper meanings.
I had never seen Koyuki in any drama before (when searching I found that she’s married to Matsuyama Kenichi whom I do know), but I think she was a good choice for the role. She fit the role description really well, she was this tall, beautiful person but at the same time her personality can’t be more different from her looks. She might look like all that, but she’s actually very socially awkward. When people are nice to her, she freezes and it looks like she’s really upset but actually she just doesn’t know how to respond to compliments. I think she nailed the combination of the way Sumire wants to look to the outside versus how she really is inside. I think her character is very interesting because of these layers. She’s not like the typical drama heroine who has her act together and stands up for the weak and knows exactly what she wants. Her awkwardness makes her really humane. She can’t express herself well, when it comes to people she likes she tends to become the person others want her to be rather than accepting who she is on the inside. She’s called things like ‘android’, ‘Noh-mask’ and ‘kokeshi’ (google it) because she can’t express her emotions in front of other people. Home is the only place she feels safe and after she meets Momo, he becomes part of that safe place. After she starts to keep Momo, she realizes how much she misses coming home to someone. Having someone wait for her at home, someone saying ‘welcome home’ who is genuinely happy she’s back. Momo becomes the one Sumire comes home to and that brings her a lot of happiness and strength. She’s always happy to come home to him, because at home with Momo she doesn’t have to hold herself back anymore.
Honestly, I’ve not seen Matsumoto Jun in any other role than Domyouji in Hana Yori Dango, so I always feel a bit weird watching him play any other role. However, seeing him as Momo in this drama really surprised me in a good way. He performed really well. He created a great balance between ‘Momo’, the happy but selfish pet that always flew towards Sumire as soon as she came home, and ‘Takeshi’, the whimsical young boy who wasn’t used to staying in one place for long and had a bit of a mysterious vibe around him. Most of the time he would act cheerful, but you could always feel there was something behind it. And he played out those layers really well.
While Sumire gets her kicks out of having someone at home waiting for her to return, Momo on the other hand gets a feeling of value and necessity from Sumire. He grew up in a rich family so he didn’t actually get to properly live in a house by himself (he usually crashes at people’s places and lives off them for a while until he moves out to find someplace else). He’s clumsy at household chores, he can’t cook, he can’t even properly wash his own hair in the bath – and with Sumire, that’s all okay and taken care of without judgement. He’s happy that Sumire only cries in front of him, that he’s the only one to see that side of her and more. But of course this starts to get in the way at some point, when his feelings become more than just affection as a pet towards its owner (it feels weird even writing this about two humans). In any case, he’s not used to being relied on or providing someone with a feeling of need, and he gets hooked on this feeling.

Initially, Sumire can’t be happier that her senpai whom she’s had a crush on since years before finally returns to her company and shows interest in her from the get-go. Their relationship progresses quite fast, all within less than two months (because I think when Momo eventually leaves Sumire thanks him for the ‘last one and a half month’? So it happens in-between there?), and Hasumi-senpai is so eager he even proposes to her before the end of the series, so convinced is he in their relationship. By this time, Sumire is kind of confused because she’s had multiple situations in which Momo has ‘misbehaved’ and even kissed her, so she feels like she can’t say yes without any mixed feelings. Even though she does like him a lot, it didn’t seem to me like it was completely mutual. It was very obvious from Hasumi-senpai’s side, but Sumire was still really stiff around him, constantly apologizing and still not able to fully express herself. She couldn’t even bring herself to tell him she liked him to his face – whereas in the case of Momo, she could say it like it was no issue at all.
Of course, the main thing we learn from dramas is that people are eventually drawn to the person they feel most comfortable with and with whom they can feel like themselves the most. It’s quite obvious that Sumire feels more at ease around Momo, but she still won’t admit to her feelings for him. Even at the very end of the series, she won’t define it as a romantic relationship. She won’t define herself and Momo as ‘lovers’, because it’s still a bit different from that.

What I liked about their relationship is the fact that it’s different. People around them might need an explanation, it needs to be defined as something, but for the two of them it’s enough to just be together and care for each other. It’s something that makes sense to just the two of them and I think it’s admirable to have something that might make no sense to others but it doesn’t matter because all that matters is how the two people in the relationship experience it. Asian dramas are always such sticklers to ‘proper relationships’, so I think it’s actually a nice change. I like to watch a relationship that kind of boils under the surface for a long time until it bursts out in one way or another and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation for it. There’s always too much talking about ‘why’ and ‘how’, while sometimes feelings can’t be categorized. Everyone feels differently. Although this drama is from 2003, I think the idea behind it is quite contemporary to current times. Nowadays there are so many different kind of relationships, I mean, just simple dating isn’t even mainstream anymore. And while of course in the beginning I couldn’t help but frown while watching Momo be treated like a dog, but soon after I just smiled whenever they were spending time together at home. Watching it, it didn’t feel weird at all. Something only becomes weird when people make it weird themselves. I just felt like dropping that here for a moment.

Of course, as is usual in dramas, there is always an evil female bitch character that tries to screw up everyone’s relationships for her own greed. In this case, this was Fukushima Shiori (played by Sakai Wakana), one of Sumire’s colleagues at work. She’s the typical acts-cute-at-the-office-but-will-spit-in-your-coffee-behind-your-back kind of girl. Talking in an annoyingly fake high-pitched voice, her true nature only came out to Sumire when they met in the bathroom to powder their noses. Shiori is after Hasumi-senpai and – pretty much like Nomura-san in Minami-kun no Koibito – repeatedly tries to force herself on him, luckily to no effect whatsoever. She can’t take a hint even after Hasumi-senpai tells her like three times that he likes Sumire. One thing I really couldn’t understand was that she later asks Momo for help and she literally says ‘I don’t want anything serious, I just want Hasumi-senpai right now’. As in, you’re willing to get yourself involved in people’s relationships and break people apart for something you’re not even serious about? What the hell is your problem? This is the kind of female character that I dislike the most in drama series; the kind that seems to have no self-worth at all since she only wants to have sex with the guy and still tries to butt into everybody’s business for no reason. Even when she told her background story that explained her greed for attention (something about being the last child in her family and never getting any attention, so now she would do anything to get what she wanted), I didn’t feel anything for her but dislike.
She literally says to Hasumi-senpai ‘I don’t care that you don’t like me, I can’t give up on you so please just one time, sleep with me’. Like, ho? Do you want people to think you’re cheap? You’re actually asking him to sleep with you because you want him to feel sorry for you? In the end she even stalks him all the way to Rio de Janeiro. Poor Hasumi-senpai.

It was a real mature choice of Sumire to finally tell Hasumi the truth. It took a lot of courage, she knew the outcome and did it anyway because she couldn’t just get married to him without letting him know. He reacted like any outsider would – confused and kind of disgusted – but in the end he still came back to her to make amends. However, during their talk he changes his mind after all. He didn’t have the intention of breaking up with her, but he still realized she cared a lot about Momo and this relationship was not something he could get in-between. I couldn’t dislike his character, even though sometimes I was a bit thrown off by how he semi-forced himself onto Sumire a couple of times. In the end he was a good guy, a bit dense (especially when it came to Shiori’s attempts to get into his pants), but a good guy. And he genuinely liked Sumire, even her awkward sides. But the fact that she never fully opened up to him was a problem.
The thing is, it’s not easy to just open up to people when they ask you to. It’s something that happens automatically when you’re surrounded by the right people, sometimes you can’t control that. You can’t fake feeling comfortable around someone you don’t truly feel comfortable with. And I’ve seen it in many dramas before, there’s a difference between the feelings you get with a person you’re crushing on like crazy (you become stiff, you don’t what to say etc.) and a person that feels like family and with whom you don’t feel any boundaries to be yourself around.
Momo felt like home. Even though he is a complete stranger, from day one on she’s able to cuddle him and pet him and press him to her chest as if he’s her own child because she is reflecting her feelings for her old dog onto him. I don’t know how she does it, but she seems able to ignore the fact that he’s a random stranger she doesn’t know anything about.
For Momo at first it’s just a good opportunity since he needs a place to stay until he has to leave for Germany, but he starts to get greedy. Greedy for the feeling to be needed. Greedy for the fact that only he knows the true Sumire. And he eventually lets that part of his feelings out, causing new strains on this already unusual relationship.

One character that ultimately was pretty important I think, even though he started out as a kind of comical character, was the psychologist Sumire was seeing. He ends up working as an office psych at Sumire’s office and they occasionally meet in the elevator where he gives her some speech about the relationship between humans compared to humans’ relationship with their pets. He carries a little dog with him all the time which he gives another name every day. He claims that he is only able to love his pet, not any other person, and when Sumire visits him to talk about her ‘pet’ Momo-chan (and he naturally thinks she’s talking about a dog), he starts feeling like he and Sumire share a common ground. However, he too grows, as he gets closer to a girl from the coffee house downstairs. Their relationship is also peculiar in its own way, because we don’t really see what happens between them, but they still really seem to connect.
In the end, Momo is about to leave for Germany and the psych and his girlfriend also happen to be at the airport. Through something Momo carries with his luggage (a Noh-mask) and something he says in passing, Mr. psych suddenly realizes that he is the Momo Sumire has been talking about and he calls out to him and gives him a speech that makes Momo realize his home is with Sumire and he decides to stay anyway.
Through all of his weird speeches, the psych is finally able to connect the dots and encourage the right person to do the right thing.

One thing I can’t forget to mention is that I had no idea that Satomi-chan was in this drama!! Ishihara Satomi is my favorite Japanese actress and to see her here as a 16-year old girl was so amazing! She played Takeshi’s ex-girlfriend and fellow dance group member Shibusawa Rumi, the typical jealous ex-girlfriend who was still really in love with Takeshi. Looking at her roles nowadays, I’d say she’s advanced a lot. Takeshi’s other friend and fellow dance member Horibe Junpei was played by Eita, whom I also like. It was really cool to see some familiar actors that I know from more recent dramas who looked really young here! That was a nice extra for me, haha.

Honestly, after watching Minami-kun no Koibito before this I started doubting why I ever liked Japanese dramas, (my Arashi fan friend told me that the old version of Minami-kun no Koibito -the one with Nino- is way better than the 2015 version, so maybe I’ll try and watch it sometime to feel better. I hope I just watched the wrong version), but after watching this I realized. This. This is why.
It had the nostalgic J-Drama feel to it, the nostalgic Hana Yori Dango type drama feeling. The acting was natural, the characters were all well-layered and fun to watch and it portrayed an unusual but still mature and interesting relationship.
Although the whole keeping-a-human-as-a-pet-thing was a bit weird, but the story still played out really realistically. The main characters dealt with their embarassment about the situation and came to a conclusion about their relationship together as adults.
This drama finally made me realize that it’s not that I don’t like Japanese dramas anymore. I LOVE Japanese dramas that are about adults facing social problems and relationships. I’m just really over high school dramas with wannabe cute girls and awkward boys and ‘relationships’ that don’t go further than holding hands because both parties are too embarrassed. Thank you for this! I really enjoyed it and I found new motivation to keep watching Japanese dramas in the future.