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.

Love Rerun
(ラブリラン / Rabu Riran)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10
Hello! It’s been a while (or at least it feels like it’s been a while), but I’m back with another review! It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, I’ve been taking interviews for a new job and then suddenly there were a few deaths/accidents in the family and I also had a holiday planned – I went to South-Korea for a week (yes, way too short and my jetlag is insane). I never really have jetlag, but I think it really had to do with that it was such a long journey for such a short trip – I definitely want to go back for a longer time in the future. Anyways, I just got back a couple of days ago and I’m still not quite getting used to going back to normal life, so I’m just going to watch some dramas until I settle down again (always the best medicine).
This time I watched another short Japanese romantic comedy, I probably put it on my list because the story sounded interesting. It’s a really simple story, so the summary won’t take too long.
Love Rerun is about 30-year old Minami Sayaka (played by Nakamura Anne) who doesn’t have any experience with men because she’s had an unfailing one-sided crush on her childhood friend Sagisawa Ryosuke (played by Otani Ryohei) for 15 years. They agree to meet up on her birthday and full of determination to finally confess her feelings the next day, Sayaka goes to bed.
When she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a strange house, wearing really fashionable clothes (unlike her normal style) and there’s a strange man walking around claiming they live together. This guy, Machida Shohei (played by Furukawa Yuki), tells her that they’ve been going out for the last three months but are now broken up.
Completely confused, Sayaka checks her calender and finds out that three months have passed and she has lost her memories of these past three months.
Her new lifestyle and the fact that she apparently got a boyfriend in such a short time and doesn’t remember any of it puzzle her so much she decides to try her hardest to remember everything that happened. After all, it turns out she has even slept with Shohei and not remembering that freaks the hell out of her, as she still feels like the 30-year old virgin she remembers herself to be.
However, whenever she remembers fragments, it only seems to make things more complicated.
The feelings she forgot she had for Shohei come back while Ryosuke comes back on his rejection of her confession, but Sayaka needs to ‘rerun’ through her lost memories to recall whom she really loved before she forgot.
Okay, so most of all, even though acute amnesia is a way too common theme in dramas, it’s always caused by some sort of accident (usually an actual (car) accident where they hit their head or something). But in Sayaka’s case, it seems to not have been caused by anything at all, except maybe stress about her situation. It’s only explained as temporary amnesia in the beginning, but the actual cause remains ambiguous. A few people in the series suggest that maybe ‘she lost her memories to gain a second chance’ with whoever she really likes, either Shohei or Ryosuke.
I think that in the end this could have been the case, because there seemed to be some misunderstandings concerning her break-up with Shohei and she managed to fix that by eventually remembering everything (even the truths that Shohei didn’t know), causing them to get back together.
Other than that, it felt like they could’ve used more plot to build the story. It feels like they dragged on the miscommunications for longer than necessary, because now the happy ending seemed very sudden and although it was ‘happy’, it wasn’t completely ‘satisfying’.
To be honest, I was all Team Ryo-chan in the beginning. I thought he was way better, sweeter, and more good-looking than Shohei (sorry bro). He was the best childhood friend crush guy ever – he just realized his feelings too late. He seemed like the obvious option for her to end up with, but of course in dramas the girl usually doesn’t end up with the guy she likes in the beginning – however, I thought it was a pity.
Shohei is really stiff and standoff-ish, he rarely smiles and has a slightly harsh way of speaking (is what I thought). In the end it made sense why he treated Sayaka that way, because he was angry with her and had all the right to be. But before we find out the truth it was really hard for me to understand what she found so attractive about him.
On a side note, as far as Furukawa Yuki goes, I find it a pity that they type-casted him into another Irie-kun. His face naturally doesn’t have a lot of emotion, but he can absolutely do it, I’ve seen it before, most recently in Erased. But he was literally Irie-kun in this drama, and they could’ve given him a few more layers.
There are two more characters that I need to discuss, first of all Ogasawara Kyoko (played by Oomasa Aya). She is a top model and Shohei’s ex-girlfriend who is determined to get back together with him. In the end, it turns out that she is also indirectly responsible for Shohei and Sayaka’s break-up. But she isn’t all bad and bitchy, because she does reflect on her behavior. She does realize that what she’s done to them is wrong and she still wants Shohei to follow his heart.
I knew this actress from other series, such as Yamato Nadeshiko Shichihenge – I always thought this was Toda Erika for some reason but it’s her, lol. I mixed up their names and faces, I guess.
The other person is Aoyama Mizuki (played by Katase Nana). She is Ryosuke’s love interest before he realizes his true feelings for Sayaka. Mizuki is a really kind character. Even though she loves Ryosuke and has some selfish characteristics, she is really mature and when she sees that he really is in love with Sayaka, she sees she’s fighting a lost game and lets him go. I really liked her character, she was in every way very supportive of the people around her but was still strong enough to keep going her own way.
I really like Nakamura Anne. Not only is she gorgeous, this was the first time I saw her as the protagonist in her own drama and the ‘old’ Sayaka she portrayed looked so different from her usual look! You can see the difference in the poster above, I think she did a very good job. I mean, of course, the story wasn’t that powerful or special and Sayaka’s character didn’t exactly stand out that much from other female protagonists in other dramas, but I was positively surprised because I hadn’t seen this side of her before. That’s why I’m praising her. I’ve only ever seen her as cameo/guest actors in other series and she is always kind of the same pretty fashionable woman, so it was nice to see her versatility in acting as well. It reminded me a bit of the girl from Fated to Love You (her ‘old’ look reminded me a bit of the girl from the Taiwanese version).
As it turns out, Sayaka changed her appearance because she wanted to move on from Ryosuke’s rejection and she desperately wanted to change herself. Shohei helped her in this determination and in the process he fell in love with her when he saw how much she thrived when she did.
Two side characters that I also liked were Sayaka’s friend Yumi (played by Satsukawa Aimi) and Shohei’s junior Hayato (played by Ichikawa Tomohiro). I liked how chill Yumi was in the whole situation and she always remained loyal to Sayaka. I liked how she was a loyal friend and still kept out of the drama herself (that’s also difficult to do sometimes when a friend is in trouble). What I liked the most about Hayato is that they broke the cliche with him. In the beginning we are fooled into thinking that he played around with Sayaka, but in the end he tried to take revenge on her because HE WAS IN LOVE WITH SHOHEI. Like, I have never seen any Japanese drama cover such a natural case of homosexuality. No-one had any freak comments or anything about it, no one reacted weirdly about it – I thought that was really great.
I didn’t like Sayaka’s mom. She only appeared in one episode and in the end I guess she was okay, but I just couldn’t get over the fact how rude and tactless she was when they had that dinner with Ryosuke and Mizuki. She was just poking around other people’s business, asking everyone about marriage even though it was a sensitive subject for literally everyone in the room. That really ticked me off. Don’t just go telling people ‘shouldn’t you get married soon, you’re not that young anymore’ when you don’t know their circumstances? Isn’t that common sense? Mind your own business please? Sorry, that was just really a no-no for me.
The main issue in this drama for me was that it took me a very long time to warm up to Shohei, mostly because the miscommunications between Shohei and Sayaka dragged on for so long. The reasons why she didn’t stick with Ryosuke were fair enough but I still found it hard to accept it because of my personal opinion. And because it personally took me so long to sympathize with Shohei, I didn’t really feel their chemistry until the end and then it was suddenly happy ending and done.
So they could’ve built a little more in their chemistry to make it more believable. We only see Sayaka’s part of the story, and it would’ve really helped for me to see more of Shohei’s part to at least get more confirmation how he truly felt about her, because we only learn about this from other people and not directly from him himself.
In the end, Sayaka and Shohei’s relationship of the missing three months is fragmentarily pieced together, until the part where the misunderstanding surrounding their break-up occurred and Sayaka lost her memories.
But when you find out the truth, Shohei’s behavior and hesitation to start over with her is very logical, I mean, she may have forgotten but he still has all the painful memories – it makes perfect sense that he wouldn’t be thrilled to start over as if nothing had happened. In that sense, Sayaka was a little selfish because she only cared about her own. She thought ‘it doesn’t matter if I regain my memories, we can just start over and it doesn’t have to be the same’, but she really did have to recall what happened first.
Because she broke up with Shohei with the lie that she was still in love with Ryosuke, but in truth Kyoko had manipulated her by telling her about Shohei’s big chance to work in London. Sayaka didn’t want to stand in the way of his career, so she decided to break his heart and let him go where he was supposed to go.
Sayaka remembers this just as Shohei is about to go to London, while Shohei hears it directly from Kyoko, who finally comes clean about what she knows and what she’s done.
This vital piece of information was what was needed to fix their relationship – because she needed to re-live her love for Shohei from the beginning and re-evaluate what happened to see that she’d made a mistake. And in a way, it was good for her. Because she literally learned new things about herself and learning about those things she gained more confidence to do it again and better.
It wasn’t the best drama I’ve ever seen, but certainly not the worst either. It’s a simple love story in which some things needed to be re-evaluated to make the love between two people even stronger. You could see growth in the characters, and even though there could’ve been a little more depth, it was entertaining enough.
As I’ve realized, Japanese dramas usually don’t have as much depth as Korean dramas. In Korean dramas, there’s always these hundred side plots tying a lot of people together from childhood or acquaintances or whatever, and the relationships in Japanese dramas are usually way more one-dimensional. It has its charm, but in this drama I really missed a little more intrige.
I’m going to watch another Japanese drama now, very curious. Since coming back from Korea I really want to get into K-dramas again, but I’m obediently going down my list now.
Sorry for the short review (it’s partly jetlag), and I hope to be able to come back into better shape writing-wise. Until next time!
