SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Repeat
(リピート / Ripiito)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hello~! Back with a new review, and although it was a short drama I took some time to finish it. Unlike the previous Japanese drama I watched this series is surprisingly angsty and intense, so I didn’t want to rush it.
I don’t remember why I put it on my list, but it probably had to do with the time travel aspect – as soon as I read something about time travel in a summary, my interest is naturally peaked.

Repeat is a 10-episode Japanese drama about a group of people who are exclusively invited by some mysterious man called Kazama (played by Rokkaku Seiji) to travel back 10 months into the past.
Among them, protagonist Shinozaki Ayumi (played by Kanjiya Shihori), an introvert librarian who prefers books over social contact. She does have a boyfriend and she’s waiting for him to propose to her. One day, she gets an anonymous phone call from Kazama, who announces an earthquake bound to happen later that evening. When the earthquake actually happens, he calls again to ask her if she believes now that he knew this would happen because he has travelled back in time multiple times and knows exactly what happens between February 24, 2017 and January 11, 2018. He tells her that he has picked her at random, and invites her as an exclusive guest to join him on his next trip to the past, or as he calls it, ‘Repeat’.
When she turns up at the meeting point, she finds out 7 other people besides her have also been ‘randomly’ picked by Kazama to join on this mysterious trip. Among them, Mouri Keisuke (played by Hongo Kanata), a young man suffering from debts and involved in a very toxic relationship with his ‘girlfriend’. Another person in the group is Tendo Taro (played by Gori / Teruya Toshiyuki), a single bar owner. The group further consists of completely unrelated people from all ages, from truck driver Takahashi (played by Fukuda Tenkyu) to food scientist Oomori (Adachi Yumi), from salaryman Gohara (Shimizu Kei) to grad school student Tsuboi (Ino Hiroki) and elderly housewife Mrs. Yokozawa (Tezuka Satomi).
Kazama officially invites all of them to join him on his trip to the past, which will allow them to fix any regrets or mistakes they may have made in the past 10 months and find a chance on a better life.
Initially, Ayumi refuses to go because she is content with her life and is positive her boyfriend will soon propose to her. However, when her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her, she changes her mind and joins in on the Repeat.
On January 11, all 8 of them are taken to some secret cave in an unknown location, and are exposed to a mystic light – and Ayumi wakes up again on February 24, 2017. She is able to fix her previous mistake that caused the break-up and her boyfriend proposes to her. Ayumi couldn’t be happier. When the Repeaters meet up again for the first time after the Repeat, everyone seems to look much better and happier. However, one person is missing, the truck driver.
Kazama enters and from the start informs them that the truck driver has sadly passed away in a road accident just after he Repeated.
Though shaken by this first ominous news, everyone starts re-living their lives, making up for old regrets and mistakes – but as it turns out, their new lives aren’t that much better as they would’ve liked and the Repeaters are somehow eliminated one by one, through accidents, incidents, assaults etc.
I realize I’m going into way too much detail already, so I’m going to conclude the summary by saying that everyone, no matter how happy in the beginning, slowly starts realizing that there’s something wrong with the Repeat and Kazama and Ayumi, Keisuke and Tendo-san join forces to find out exactly what’s going on.

Okay, so, I have to say that the story really grabbed me in the beginning. It started off real exciting and interesting and thrilling, although I could’ve predicted that something was bound to go wrong. When the truck driver didn’t show up the first time, I was already like… ‘yeah, he’s definitely dead and they’re probably all going to die one by one, shocker’.
So, while the concept of the story was interesting, there was a lot of predictability in the characters and events. Which made it very Japanese. It was the ultimate type of angst that only Japanese dramas have.
And they only added more and more drama. Some people developed feelings of romance and trust amongst each other, others went a little crazy because having this new kind of control over their lives got to their heads; everyone’s respective motives on why they wanted to Repeat became clear.
Contrarily to what I said about Love Rerun, in Repeat you really get to see everyone’s point of view at some point. It’s not just about Ayumi, you really find out what everyone’s motives are, what everyone is thinking. Which made it nice, because everyone got a proper storyline that way.

There were a lot of heartwarming scenes in this drama. For example, the scene where the elderly housewife, Mrs. Yokozawa, was able to dance with her husband one last time before he would be diagnosed with terminal cancer. She Repeated because they were planning on entering a dance competition together, but then her man got sick and passed away very quickly afterwards.
The other one, of course, is Tendo-san’s story. He was my favorite character in this series. He wanted to Repeat to make sure his 10-year old son wouldn’t die in a bus accident and they managed to save him.
However, apart from the heartwarming parts, most of the happenings were merciless and cruelly ironic.
At the very end, when the few remaining Repeaters have finally worked out what has been going on killing all of them one by one, they confront Kazama. As it turns out, this whole inviting others to join in his Repeat was no generosity or coincidence of any kind.
Kazama chose these particular 8 people because they were destined to die in their original lives. He Repeated 8 times before and each time, the 8 of them died. So the 9th time he decides to prevent their deaths and ask them to join him in Repeat with the idea of a Survival Battle; who would survive the longest after escaping their originally planned death. A sick game, indeed, especially as everyone still ends up dying. That’s why, in the end, the ‘serial killer’ they’re after… turns out to be ‘fate’.

And this is exactly what I believe to be the major theme of this series. Fate, destiny. It comes back in multiple ways, not just the symbolical kind.
‘Fate’ is what keeps chasing the Repeaters, and even though they get another chance on life after escaping it once, it keeps getting back to them.
I believe that the message of this series is that you can’t escape your fate. Even if you temporarily evade it, it will come back in another way, or it will hit someone else instead of you. Some things are bound to happen.
Like with the accident involving Tendo-san’s son, even though they save him, they find out later that another bus that same day was in an accident and another young boy passed away because of it.
They were only postponing their fates, as it turns out. And in other cases, it went in another direction. But it still always came back to them in the end.
I think this was interesting as well, the relativity of fate. It worked in many ways.

Another example is Ayumi’s ‘fate’ with her boyfriend. In the original timeline, her boyfriend breaks up with her. He says that it’s because she couldn’t make it to their date on her birthday when he was planning to propose to her, and when he went to a bar after being stood up, he met another woman. He tells Ayumi he thinks it was ‘fate’ that he met her like that.
When Ayumi Repeats, she makes sure she makes it to the date (originally she missed it because stuff happened at work and a child got injured at the library and her phone died and all of that coming together), and her boyfriend proposes to her like he planned and she was prepared for it. Her boyfriend then calls it ‘fate’ what he and Ayumi have.
However, she later sees him kissing another woman in a car. Screw you and your so-called ‘fate’, Kazuki!! Man, that guy was a jerk. And when Ayumi gathered her courage and broke up with him, he started thrashing on her that she caused him to lose face and stuff like that… honestly, masculinity was very fragile in this series.
The fragile masculinity thing also went for Tsuboi, the grad school student of the group. Before Repeat, he couldn’t get into Tokyo University and was therefore treated as a minority by a lot of people. His parents pressured him, girls didn’t want to go out with him because he wasn’t in TU, stuff like that (it wasn’t actually because he wasn’t in TU, it was because he lied about being in TU while he wasn’t – get your facts straight, bro, girls just don’t like frauds). All of this made him go a little nuts and he created a website called Nemesis in which he would express his darkest thoughts of revenge.
After Repeat, because he knew all the answers to the exams, he gets into TU and instead of bettering his life, he decides to take revenge on the people that would look down on him before. He meets with the girls who rejected him before, drugs them and then records how he threatens and abuses them and posts these videos on his website.
When he’s found out and confronted by Ayumi and Keisuke, Ayumi slaps him and scolds him for abusing Repeat like that.
He couldn’t take that and even kidnaps Ayumi later on to take revenge – he just couldn’t handle being told the truth by a woman; I say fragile.

And then, of course, we cannot skip this one, there was Keisuke’s ‘girlfriend’. I keep putting it in quote signs because for the most part, she made herself believe she was his girlfriend, even after Keisuke broke up with her.
Machida Yuko (played by Shimazaki Haruka) was a young girl with a lot of money – she and Keisuke dated for a while, and one time when Keisuke was in trouble for money, she lent him some on the condition that he would become like her pet and would do as she said. Like this, Keisuke was bound to her by money and was even treated like a dog (she legit put a collar on him in episode 1). After Repeat, he breaks up with her from the bat so that wouldn’t happen. But. Big but.
Machida Yuko ain’t no quitter. She was the scariest person I have seen in a drama in a long time. She made a spare key, one time when he came home she was literally in his kitched holding a butcher knife, sprinkling her own blood from accidentally cutting herself onto a piece of raw meat. She didn’t know where to stop. She’d keep sneaking into his house, heck, she installed a hidden camera in his place so she could spy on him; and this is how she came to know about Ayumi and Tendo-san.
She started showing up at Ayumi’s library, started to befriend her before trying to KILL her, again, with a butcher knife.
But to be honest, Ayumi was really really stupid to trust her so easily. One look at her face and you could see she was creepy – she creeped the hell out of me with her sweet-psycho voice and creep-ass smile.
After making the whole ‘don’t trust anyone’ promise, she not only let Yuko into her house, she even went out leaving Yuko in there alone *facepalm*
Yuko then went through all of Ayumi’s stuff and notebooks and found her notes which she kept about Repeat, including all the events that were supposed to happen and the other people. And then Yuko started to threaten that she would reveal this big secret to the media.
Keisuke found out she was bothering Ayumi and did all those things in his house (he was stupid for believing he got rid of her so easily, he knew how she was for God’s sake).
I know how Ayumi was this super forgiving and sweet person, but it crossed its boundaries. Even after learning the truth about Yuko and how crazy she was, when she turned up at her house crying and asking for forgiveness, she STILL OPENED THE DOOR. I mean, I knew she would, because it was Ayumi and it was predictable because that’s who she was. Blaming everything on herself, forgiving even the psycho-est of people.
But I had a tiny bit of hope she wouldn’t because she should’ve known.
Anyway, she opened the door and Yuko swung a knife at her and Keisuke also showed up and then they accidentally killed Yuko.
And then they started discussing doing Repeat again to bring her back and I genuinely didn’t understand why.
Anyway, that was Yuko.

But let’s get back to the Repeaters.
Although I said before that I found the diversity of the characters and their respective motives interesting, there were a few things I just couldn’t understand/accept and that made it a bit too weirdly dramatic for me. Again, it was a very typical Japanese drama.
Of course, the whole idea of lying to people about giving them a second chance while actually having the motive of watching them unknowingly play a sick game of life and death is inhuman. Kazama most definitely had a god complex to just be playing with people’s lives like that.
The food scientist of the group, Oomori Chie, turns out to be Kazama’s accomplice. She Repeats with him and for the past few times reported to him about the fated deaths of the people in the group.
When Tendo-san, who develops a bit of a bond with her, is talking with her about why she did that, and her motive for wanting to keep doing Repeat, she said something really weird. She only wanted to keep Repeating to watch people struggle with the same things over and over again, not even because she had a will to live herself. I just couldn’t comprehend how people could be so disconnected from life. I mean, she did have a terminal illness so maybe she was already disconnecting herself from other people’s lives in a way, but to assume a role in which she only enjoyed watching other people like puppets in a play… I found it hard to sympathize with that. And in the end she was one of the more interesting characters because you didn’t know what her motives were for a long time.

Let me quickly go through the Repeaters’ original ‘fated’ deaths and how Kazama prevented them from happening.
Takahashi the truck driver was originally destined to die in a self-caused fire – he would smoke before going to sleep and leave a cigarette lit. Kazama calls him before smoking to prevent this.
Yokozawa Sachiko the elderly housewife was supposed to die in a series of arson attacks caused by a high school student. Kazama prevented the student from lighting the fire.
Tsuboi Kaname the grad student was originally killed by a former policeman because of his involvement with an illegal website which he used to post videos of him abusing young women on camera. Gohara the salaryman was also involved with this website and gathered intel for money because he was in so much debt – he was also originally killed by this same policeman for evading punishment.
Tendo-san was also originally meant to be killed by this policeman because he was falsely accused of killing a man (this turned out to be a suicide case). Kazama called the policeman, warning him and thus preventing him to kill these three men.
As mentioned before, Oomori turns out to be an accomplice of Kazama – she has Repeated before as well. Despite her refusal to use Repeat as a chance to live her life to the fullest, her desperation to keep Repeating has two major reasons: 1. she’s working on research that might solve famine and saves hundreds of children of dying, and 2. she has a terminal illness which gravely limits the time she has to finish this research.
In the end, due to Ayumi and Tendo-san, she changes her mind about helping Kazama and accepts that she wants to live the life she has left and will do everything on her research she can within her limited time.
Keisuke was originally destined to be killed by Yuko (what a surprise). He would start dating a new girl from the hostess club he works at and Yuko would find out and kill him in a fit of jealousy. This didn’t happen after Repeat because Keisuke never got involved with the new girl because of everything going on with Repeat, and they ended up killing Yuko themselves.
Ayumi was originally destined to die in a tragic traffic accident along with several young children that were coming to visit the library. Keisuke finds out just in time and warns her – in the end she barely escapes a fatal accident with one child and they survive.
However, and I haven’t come to this part yet because I want to thoroughly build my case yet, she does lose her unborn child in the accident – again, my argument about the ‘fate’ topic, if one destined to die survives, it comes back either to that person later or to someone else. I believe in this case, this baby was not meant to be born.

Which brings me to the relationship between Ayumi and Keisuke. I don’t know if this will be an unpopular opinion, but I strongly disagreed with it. There was no build-up, I didn’t think they fit each other, and in the circumstances it was really unwise to start a relationship like that with a fellow Repeater.
Hear me out. The first thing that bothered me was that Keisuke, or rather his actor, despite being 29(?!), looks like a teenager. Ayumi/Kanjiya Shihori looks like a proper 30-something. I just couldn’t get used to the two of them together. The way it looked, she could’ve been his mom.
And Keisuke was super cold to her in the beginning, then there were maybe 2 occasions where they sort of accidentally touched/embraced/got physically close and there was tension there (though I didn’t feel it), all of a sudden Keisuke was like ‘Ayumi I love you I always want to be with you’ and she was like ‘omg me too’ and they kissed and then suddenly the next morning it turns out that actually slept together and I was like HEY WOAH HOO WHAT THE FRECK–
And then in a random conversation a little later she starts gagging and my head just went ‘oh god no she’s preggo’. It was just very typical.
So, yeah, for a short time she was pregnant with Keisuke’s child. And then she lost it. But the thing is, she was never supposed to end up with Keisuke.
From Keisuke’s perspective we see that after the Repeat, a new girl that wasn’t there before the Repeat, starts working at the hostess club where he works parttime. This girl was supposed to be his new love interest that would ultimately get him killed by Yuko. However, because Keisuke fell in love with Ayumi, this didn’t happen, and the whole thing with Yuko changed as well.
IN SHORT (I gotta stop trailing so much), I was not a fan of the ‘romance’ between Ayumi and Keisuke. And I wasn’t too affected by the accident where the baby was lost (call me heartless) because I just didn’t think it was going to work out anyway. The whole pregnancy thing was a little too much unnecessarily added drama for me.

All in all, it was an interesting drama but I still have mixed feelings. It had an open ending – Ayumi ends up Repeating by herself because Keisuke and Tendo-san don’t make it in the end, and she finds herself in a world where Keisuke doesn’t recognize her because he didn’t Repeat and doesn’t have any of the memories they shared in the Repeated time anymore #sadness.
Ayumi does run into Kazama, whom she thought had died, but despite his discouragement, she still shows determination to save everyone in this new Repeat. And that’s how it ends, with her determined face as the last shot.
So I’m not really sure what message I can take from this story, except that you can’t change your fate. Again, we can’t time travel so we don’t have any scientific proof that ‘fate’ even exists and/or works in a certain way. But it’s fascinating to think about. I think the series is also a little about how people choose to use the (extra) time that’s given to them.
Will they indeed use it to make up for regrets/lost time, or will they be opportunistic and use it to bring other people down?
It’s very relative and different for everyone.

And with this I will end my review. I hope it was enjoyable to read and I will be back with another review when I finish my next drama.
Bye-bye!