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.

Tree in the River
(動物系戀人啊 / Dong Wu Xi Lian Ren A / Animal Lovers)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi there! 🙂 I just finished another drama so here’s my new review! First of all, I want to say that the format of this series was really nice. Chinese or Taiwanese dramas tend to have a lot of episodes and the episodes are usually quite lengthy, but this series only has 20 episodes and each episode is about 30 minutes long. I went through it quite quickly, also because the content of the series wasn’t too heavy or emotionally draining. I liked it!

I feel like it’s been a while since I watched a Taiwanese drama. Honestly, I think this is the first Taiwanese drama I’ll be writing a review about. I’ve only written reviews for Chinese dramas before, never Taiwanese. Interesting. Anyways, I put this drama on my list because I remember seeing the trailer and thinking it looked good. This was a long time ago, but when I watched the trailer again just before starting it, I still thought it looked interesting. Also, I thought the thing about comparing humans to animals and identifying animal characteristics within human behavior was a quite unique idea.

To give a summary, the story of Tree in the River is about Chu Zhi He (played by Gillian Chung), a young woman nearing her thirties who isn’t married yet, as one of the few people in her circle. However, when she goes to an old friend’s wedding, she is suddenly reunited with a guy whom she used to get along with very well in elementary school. This guy, Wang Da Shu (played by Mike He), has had a crush on her since then, and has actually been trying to get to meet her again. They reconnect, get familiarized quite quickly and Zhi He moves in with him within a couple of months (before they start dating, she just needs a place closer to work). However, within four months, they are already so close and fond of each other that Da Shu proposes to her. They get married within the first three episodes of the drama. From then on, it goes downhill. It starts with their honeymoon. Da Shu has this whole romantic getaway planned where they’ll stay in a hotel where they have actual African animals walking around as an attraction (Zhi He loves safari animals), but Zhi He has to go on a business trip just before and when she comes back exhausted, Da Shu basically drags her along with him without considering how tired she is and that she wants to rest first. When Zhi He is called back by her office when they’re still on their honeymoon, Da Shu gets annoyed because he wanted them to be away together and she ends up prioritizing her work.
After this first tense situation, it gets worse. Da Shu gets more busy with work as well, to the point where he comes home late every single night and starts (unconsciously, maybe) neglecting his wife. He forgets her birthday, their wedding anniversary, he starts acting really tactless toward her and doesn’t understand it when she gets mad at him, apologizes for the wrong reasons, etcetera. When her ex-boyfriend suddenly reappears and starts making things even more tense, Zhi He decides she can’t take it anymore. The love and affection they felt for each other in the first three episodes was already gone and she files for a divorce. After this, the two gradually need to get their stuff together, find out what it is they both want, explore some other options in life and relationships, and then see if they can really live without each other.
On the other side, we have a second couple going through something complicated as well. Lu Fen Ni (played by Sonia Sui) is a powerful and independent business woman who is the embodiment of ‘I don’t need a man’. She’s the director of the company Zhi He works at and has created a little social club among her subordinates called the ‘Single Animals Club’, for people who, like her, are single and celebrate that. When suddenly a new handsome director, Qin Hao, nicknamed House (played by Zhang Rui Jia) appears, it brings up some old wounds. When they were 16, Fen Ni and Qin Hao used to be together. But they were separated because of Qin Hao’s father’s influence and due to a couple of misunderstandings, they never heard from each other again for 18 years. To make matters even more awkward, Fen Ni has an 18-year old daughter and Qin Hao is the father, even though he never knew she was pregnant when they were separated.
So when this truth comes out it brings another tense situation with it.
In the end, we follow the relationships of these four people, the two couples separately, but they also get involved with each other.
At one point it looks like Qin Hao is going after Zhi He, Da Shu gets dragged into what actually happened between Fen Ni and Qin Hao in the past, etcetera.

I recently re-read a couple of my old reviews and I noticed that at some point I made a comment about dramas depicting an idealistic image of marriage. I believe it was in my review for Go Back Couple or something. I wrote that I found it refreshing that Korean dramas were starting to get more critical on the whole concept of marriage being the final destination in life. Well, if I was already appreciating that in Korean dramas, I definitely appreciated it in a Taiwanese drama. I don’t know, I always feel like Chinese or Taiwanese dramas have an even more conservative view on marriage and that there is a lot more pressure on women getting married there. I saw a documentary once where parents would literally go to some kind of market where they could advertise their daughters for marriage, because in these countries, when you’re a woman of a certain age and you’re still not married, you become useless to society. A ridiculous concept, I think. But I really liked that this drama dealed with that concept and showed some truly inspirational and independent female characters who rebelled against that notion. I mean, Zhi He herself starts doubting everything as soon as she gets married. When Da Shu starts acting like that, she keeps thinking like, should I be okay with this? Should I keep going like this? And she chooses her own sanity, her own peace of mind by deciding to put an end to it. I think, certainly in that kind of society, that’s a bold step to take. But I really liked it, it was really refreshing to see this kind of feminism in a Taiwanese drama. Because it’s usually the case that the woman just keeps chasing after the man. But Zhi He took it upon herself to search for her own kind of happiness.

I’d like to talk about the format of the series for a bit. I thought it was very nice and refreshing, as I mentioned before.
First of all, the whole romance between Zhi He and Da Shu builds up in just the first three episodes. After these three episodes, I was swooning so hard, I thought they were the cutest ever. Also, from the moment they meet, there’s a counter that appears regularly on the screen that counts down the days until they get married. We see that, as soon as they meet, the counter already shows that they’ll get married within the year.
However, just when you think everything’s good and well when they walk out of the marriage register office, a new counter appears, showing that they’ll get divorced one year later (‘Days until divorce: 365 days’).
So we are already warned that things are going to turn bad and we’re forced to see the days literally count down until the situation between them just gets painful to watch.
What I also liked was that the series worked with steps or bullet points. In the beginning, when her friends are convincing Zhi He that Da Shu is the one for her, they show her an article by some relationship coach that consists of 20 points (or something) – if your partner checks all 20 boxes, that means he is the one. Following that, each episode title (or subtitle) is written in the format of such a point. Each episode starts with a ‘Fear of Marriage Symptom #1 (#2, #3, etcetera until #20, also following the number of episodes) and ends with a ‘Tip for Reigniting Love #1 (#2, #3~#20).
In each episode, they cover one point. Fear of marriage symptoms include questions such as ‘Will we keep the same feelings of love after we get married?’, ‘Will we be able to share both joy and sorrow after getting married?’, ‘What if after getting married, someone else appears?’ etc. And these are exactly the points that were covered. So, in that sense, the series’ structure followed a bullet point list, and every episode gave an answer to the question asked in the beginning, followed by a tip for reigniting love.
In the last episode, Zhi He and Da Shu are reunited, they both took the time to think about their feelings, and they both reflected, they both discovered something about the other they hadn’t considered before. The last tip for reigniting love was to ‘Say “I love you” again’. Which they do.

Okay, so about the theme of animal behavior. It’s established from the get-go what kind of animal each character represents. Zhi He is a squirrel, Da Shu is a giraffe, Fen Ni is a jaguar/leopard and Qin Hao is a wolf.
I really liked the idea of that, and also because it’s shown so clearly on the poster and in the opening theme and in the trailer, I thought this was going to be a big part of the series. I wasn’t sure how they were going to show it, but that it would be the main theme. However, I found that it remained in the background for quite some time. The theme appears very clearly in the beginning, when they even add some CGI animals in the background as a nice metaphorical extra. When Fen Ni bursts in and breaks up the wedding of Zhi He’s friend in episode 1, she releases a bunch of farm animals and comments to Zhi He that she’s interested in how people can turn into animals when things get hectic, referencing to the wedding ceremony that ‘it’s a zoo in there right now’. Also, the fact that Zhi He has always had a love for African safari animals and she talks about how she likes giraffes because they can only see each other above the leaves. She also talks a bit with Da Shu about what kind of animal he thinks he’d be on their honeymoon.
But after things get bad between them, the focus kind of shifts away in my opinion. Or maybe it shifts away from Zhi He and Da Shu to Fen Ni and Qin Hao. (By the way, forgive me for calling him Qin Hao and not House; I just can’t take the nickname seriously enough to start using it as well.) Because it’s around that time that we get more insight of Fen Ni and Qin Hao’s history together and when things get emotional between them, they show more vulnerable sides and these also help bring out the resemblances they have to their animal counterparts. When he’s distraught about Fen Ni and the fact that she had his daughter and he never knew about anything and he feels really guilty, Qin Hao is compared to a ‘wounded wolf’ by Zhi He, who is with him at that time.
But I think that’s actually the only time they are explicitly mentioning the animals they’re supposed to represent. Even though Zhi He is the main character, there’s not a single word or image in the entire series of a squirrel, except in the opening theme and the poster. She says she’d like to be a giraffe because of the previously mentioned reason. When she asks Da Shu on her honeymoon what animal he’d like to be, he says ‘a wolf’. They never say anything about the animals they’re supposed to have characteristics of.
But I think this might also be a metaphorical thing. Zhi He speaks about her admiration for giraffes (like Da Shu). Da Shu says he’d like to be a wolf (like Qin Hao, who at some point seems to become Zhi He’s new love interest after himself). So maybe it also has to do with preferences or ideals. What they would like to be like instead of what they are.
I didn’t need any explanation when it came to Fen Ni and the leopard. She didn’t need any words mentioning it, she just exuded it. The confidence, the alertness, but also the vulnerability and the sharpness.
So that made me wonder in what ways they were thinking of including the animal characteristic feature – where there things I missed? I mean, the literal Chinese title of this series is ‘Animal Type Lovers’, so I reckoned they’d do more with it. Not that it bothered me, but at some point I realized I didn’t quite feel the theme as strongly as I did in the beginning of the series. But it’s still nice how to kept making tiny references to it.
Fen Ni’s social club is called the ‘Single Animal Club’, the other side of Zhi He’s friends (the ones that are married and keep pushing her to strive for marriage life as well), led by another female manager from her company, is called the ‘Pet Club’. During the series I suddenly started looking at all the characters, wondering what kind of animals they would be, haha.

Let’s talk a bit about the 18-year old daughter. When Xiao Yu (played by Mu Yi) suddenly appears at Fen Ni’s apartment, I first thought it was her problematic younger sister or something. But it became quite obvious that it was her daughter. And since it was already established that Fen Ni and Qin Hao hadn’t seen each other in 18 years and Fen Ni was still very bitter about him, looking at this seemingly 18-year old kid made me figure out quickly that she had to be Qin Hao’s kid.
I really liked Xiao Yu. I would definitely see her as a leopard’s cub, haha. She was feisty, coping with independence from a young age on, not having a real parental figure to rely on. But she was so adorable! It took some time for her to forgive her mom, but when she eventually found out the whole truth about what happened between her parents, she really tried to help bringing them back together. When Qin Hao was confessing to her how much guilt he felt towards her mother, she kept her mom on the line in the meantime so she could listen in on their conversation.
Also, when she confessed to that boy from the convenience store (who had a crush on her mom, by the way, which was kind of weird), she was so cute! Even though it wasn’t mutual, she just kept her confidence, never doubted herself, just stated her feelings, no regrets. She felt very real to me, I’m glad they didn’t turn her into a typical stereotype of a rebellious teenager.

All in all, every character was very real. I enjoyed how humane everyone was. How logically everyone could think about society and relationships and how everyone was able to reflect on themselves in the end.
In Korean dramas like Go Back Couple and Familiar Wife, the couples got a fictional back-in-time adventure to take a break from their marriage and figure out their stuff. This drama, while it dealed with the same kind of situation, remained non-fictional. It was a really nice way to show that it is possible to handle these kind of situations without having to go back in time to get some perspective. After getting a divorce, Zhi He kept being aware of how much Da Shu still cared for her and her family in the background, even though they weren’t together anymore. She became aware of how caring he had always been and I think that this is one of the reasons she decided to get back with him in the end. She’d never find anyone as caring as him again.
By the way, the English title for this series, Tree in the River, was very cleverly found because it’s a wordpun on the Chinese names of Zhi He (river) and Da Shu (big tree). I think it references to the way in which, just like a squirrel and a giraffe, a tree and a river are two very different beings/creations, but they do help each other grow. There were a couple of more of these nice wordplays. For example, Zhi He’s father was called Da Hai (which means ‘ocean’). It’s shown at some point that he told her that he’d named her Zhi He because no matter where she would go, ‘the river would always be connected to and come back to the ocean’. Also that, when her father passed away, Da Shu comforts Zhi He’s mother by saying that Da Hai would want to be buried at sea because he knew that he (the sea) would always keep enveloping the land where she’d be. I really loved these.

Zhi He’s mom (played by Wang Yue) was amazing. She was so funny in the beginning when she tried to get Zhi He and Da Shu to get started on having a baby, she actually poked holes in the condoms. But when things got more seriously and we see Zhi He’s parents together, and then afterwards when the dad dies, she was such a beautiful actress. She portrayed the grief of suddenly being left alone, her outbursts and simultaneously her numbness so beautifully. I feel like from that point on, her acting became super realistic and undecorated and it really felt like she was showing a different side of herself as an actress. I loved her. Also when she came to Zhi He and Da Shu’s house, all ‘grieving and getting drunk’ and the next morning she said to her husband’s portrait like ‘Honey, I finally succeeded, they’re in bed together!!’ it was so cute because she and her husband would be excited together about having a grandchild and they would keep on thinking of ways to bring Zhi He and Da Shu together for that.
I don’t know, there were a lot of cute little things and gestures in this drama.

One more thing regarding this drama criticizing the social construct of a woman only finding happiness when she gets married: Zhi He’s friend Tong Xin. Tong Xin (played by Lin Yu Pin) is a friend and colleague of Zhi He’s and she’s almost always pregnant. She’s pregnant when we meet her for the first time, after giving birth she gets pregnant again a month later (although I’m not sure, at a certain point the time jumps became a bit unclear).
Anyways, she then gives birth to her fifth (!!) child. When Zhi He asks her why she keeps doing this, she basically says that she’s had to keep going until she got a son (she’s had four daughters). As if she were some kind of breeding machine. I found this a very conservative construct. I mean, are they not thinking about the physical limitations of a woman’s body? They can’t just be like ‘ah, a girl again, next try!’ ?!
And then! She turns up at Zhi He’s family home all crying because her husband cheated on her?! Like?! DUDE. You force your wife to give birth to 5 children and then you CHEAT on her?! I was really hoping for Tong Xin to stand up for herself there. It finally seemed as if she was getting that she didn’t deserve this and that she should be happy in her marriage and all that, and then she still only bluffed when telling her husband she wanted a divorce. I was SO proud of her at that moment where she confronted him and he was just begging and making stupid excuses.
(Because of course, when a man cheats, it’s just a mistake that can be reversed, he just wasn’t thinking straight for one moment and he actually really loves his wife if she can just forgive him this once. When a woman cheats she’s a slut and trash and she’s defiled herself for life.)
And then he left and she was like ‘Uhhh I was just bluffing, I’m too scared to get a divorce, I wonder how much time and effort it’ll take for us to get over this’. So I really believe Tong Xin is supposed to represent women who are stuck in the conservative ways and views on marriage. She’s too concerned about how society will look at her when she gets a divorce, and she’s willing to keep going for her children even though her husband may be scum.
So I pitied her a little. Compared to Zhi He and Fen Ni, she made a really big contrast.

But looking at it from a different perspective, one thing that made this series so enjoyable and refreshing was exactly that: the balance between conservative and modern, and between people’s way of thinking.
When they were just married, Da Shu acted as a male chauvinist, almost forcing Zhi He to stay inside the conservative ways: his work should be more important, she should be ‘resting’ at home. I got really nauseous when he actually made a schedule to decide at when exact day and time they could try conceiving a child (like, literally ‘around this time you’re ovulating, so it would be best if on this day, we have sex for 10 minutes and hopefully we can make a baby’). Like, treating her like a machine. He was treating her really badly at that time. He forgot about her birthday and then ordered her a vacuum cleaner as a present 10 days later. All the while saying ‘I wrote your birthday in my agenda but I forgot to look at it’. ‘I ordered a supersonic anti-dust vacuum cleaner because it’s super practical and we can both use it’. On their wedding anniversary, when she tells him she’ll cook him dinner and wait until he gets home, he not only goes for drinks with his colleagues after work, but he even brings back home his super drunk colleague friend Jason (played by Ken Hung) and LAYS HIM DOWN on the bed next to Zhi He. So not only does Zhi He wake up depressed because her husband stood her up, she also wakes up with a hungover stranger in her bed.
When after all these reasons to get mad at him, Da Shu still didn’t understand what he did wrong, I couldn’t blame Zhi He for calling it quits. But he was sooooo precious in the beginning, he loved her so much, heck he even CRIED when he proposed to her. I found it so weird why he would lose sight of her so suddenly.

On Da Shu’s side, there’s another girl/colleague who’s interested in him. Ke Fang (played by Allison Lin) is kind of a tomboy but she’s had a crush on Da Shu ever since high school (when he was already infatuated with Zhi He). She was the friendzoned girl who had to watch him chase after Zhi He all this time, never looking at her that way. Since she’s on Da Shu’s side, she naturally sides with him and blames Zhi He for their broken marriage even though she doesn’t know exactly what happened between them, she’s just a bit biased. When they are broken up, she does make an attempt on winning Da Shu’s attention for romance, but he makes it clear from the start that he’s not interested in her that way. I did feel a little sorry for her, but I also liked her character. She was a really loyal friend to Da Shu and she knew when to give up, but not before allowing herself to take a chance. She was really strong and brave in my opinion. In the end, she warmed up a little more to Jason, whom she was always bickering with before.

Overall, I enjoyed this drama. It was light, but still covered an important social construct and shone some light on it. I think we’re the only ones to decide for ourselves what makes us happy, and I think we can all agree that while marriage certainly should be a happy thing, it’s not a guarantee for happiness either. It’s like Into the Woods, all’s well until the happy ending, but what happens after that? Watching other series that also make a big deal out of marriage, I’ve started to really think about it. Why has this become a thing that people are striving for in life? When the women from the Pet Club were talking about it, I was completely the same as Zhi He, just listening but really sceptical and not really sure if she should believe in this kind of idealistic fairytale. And she experiences for herself how things can go downward after putting on the rings. Careers, families, other people, situations, anything can happen. Even marriage is fluctatious, everything changes. It was really nice to also see a Taiwanese drama cover the theme of marriage and whether it’s the true final destination of a person’s happiness. In the end, both couples get together again. Zhi He and Da Shu decide to get married again after reconfirming their feelings for each other and Zhi He also suddenly is pregnant(?). I’m kind of confused about this, because the scene where this is revealed felt like it was literally the day after they reconnected (after they got drunk and woke up in bed together the next morning). Only now I’m realizing that there might have been a time jump here because when else did she become pregnant? It must be that. Because otherwise the last time they had sex was before they got divorced. The time jumps were really unclear to me. Anyways, because this scene felt like an overnight turn for me, their decision to get married again felt really sudden as well. But yeah, maybe it was just an unclear time jump.
Anyways, Fen Ni, Qin Hao and Xiao Yu also became a cute little family, although I don’t think they’d get married for it. Fen Ni just doesn’t seem like the person to get married, even after reuniting with Qin Hao. It’s enough for them to know that they are Xiao Yu’s biological parents, that they are an actual family.

The only actor I knew from this drama was Mike He, but it was nice to see him as a grown-up in a much more mature role. I’ve only seen super old stuff with him in which he was still this young devilish hunk (Devil Beside You, Bullfighting etc. where he was in his early twenties) In this drama his looks reminded me a little of Beppu-san from the Japanese drama ‘Quartet’. I found him really sweet here, it definitely showed another more mature side of his acting (but I guess that’s to be expected since he’s 36 now lol). He even has a wife and child already in real life.

Also, all the women in this drama were so stunning? Gillian Chung, Sonia Sui, even Allison Lin? I really loved all their portrayals of strong independent women who went against the idea that marriage was a necessity to become happy but they never threw away their own feelings.
I’d have to say that Fen Ni was probably my favorite characters because of the different sides of her personality. She wouldn’t be pushed around, she wasn’t afraid to show her teeth, but she was still vulnerable as heck.
Zhi He showed this kind of quirky ballsiness and stood up for herself in her own way, which took a lot of courage and energy.
Qin Hao may look like a predator, a strong and influential guy, but in the end he is loyal to his family. Even when he pursued Zhi He for a while, when he found out about Xiao Yu, he felt like he needed to go back to Fen Ni and his feelings for her came back as well – he literally returned to his pack, his family.

One thing I also really liked (I’ll sum it up soon enough), was that we are shown all the different sides to what happened between Qin Hao and Fen Ni in the past. We see Qin Hao’s side and the part where he misunderstood, we see Fen Ni’s side and the part where she misunderstood.
When Xiao Yu finds Da Shu and he and Ke Fang go to Singapore to gather information about what happened, they are literally watching the situation as if it’s happening in front of them. They see how Fen Ni misinterprets him cheating on her (he is drunk and a female friend of his kisses him just to make the people around them stop talking about him). They finish the story that went on after Fen Ni turned around and left after ‘having seen enough’. I’m not sure how they would be able to do that, but it was a nice trick. Also when Qin Hao and Fen Ni were reminiscing when they were in Singapore together, they were literally walking along their young selves and commenting on those flashbacks. That was a funny way to make them discuss the past and literally go back and comment on themselves from long ago. It just shows that there are always multiple perspectives and the most important thing is to come eye-to-eye and solve misunderstandings by listening to each other and reflecting. In the end, that’s how both couples’ problems got fixed. They finally came eye-to-eye, talked, listened, and reflected.

I liked this drama. It’s one of the more enjoyable Taiwanese dramas I’ve watched. It’s good to keep thinking and discussing these kind of social constructs and standards and I really like to see this reflect in more and more Asian dramas recently. I hope to see even more themes like this in the future!

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.

Unnatural
(アンナチュラル / Annachuraru)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Yay, it’s review time again! I finished this one very quickly again, haha. It feels like it’s been a while since I watched an engaging Japanese drama.

Sometimes, Japanese dramas can be such a breath of fresh air in-between Korean ones, because they usually have about 10 episodes and you go through them super fast. This drama was recommended to me by a friend about 3 years ago and it’s been on my list ever since. I finally got around to watch it! My main reason for wanting to watch it is because Ishihara Satomi is my absolute favorite Japanese actress and I’ll watch everything she makes. It was nice to see yet another side of her, more calm and mysterious, compared to her more eccentric performances in for example ‘Dear Sister’, ‘5-ji Kara 9-ji Made’ and ‘Jimi ni Sugoi!’.
Let’s get to the summary of this interesting drama.

Unnatural is a 10-episode Japanese drama about the forensic pathology department at a university hospital. The title of the series is derived from the name of the team, the UDI (which stands for Unnatural Death Investigation), and from the fact that what this team does is perform autopsies on bodies that are supposed to have passed away due to ‘unnatural’ circumstances. With this, there is always a link to a mysterious accident or even a murder case. However, it’s not up to the UDI to play detective – that is, until one of the members of the team is revealed to have been chasing a trail leading to the murder case of this girlfriend 8 years ago.
Misumi Mikoto (played by Ishihara Satomi) is a promising forensic pathologist, who was a victim of a forced family suicide when she was really young. She was the only survivor because she spit out the sleeping pill that her mother forced her to swallow that would keep her unconscious while the carbon dioxide did its work.
She was adopted by the Misumi family and worked her way up to becoming a forensic pathologist, even researching her own family’s suicide case. She can be described as a little mysterious, very calm and collected at moments you wouldn’t expect, but with a firm sense of justice towards right and wrong. Her team consists of Department Head Kamikura Yasuo (played by Matsushige Yutaka), her friend Shoji Yuko (Ichikawa Mikako), part-timer and originally a medical student Kube Rokuro (Kubota Masataka) and her grumpy and anti-social ‘rival’, Nakado Kei (played by Iura Arata). In the beginning, the rivalry between Mikoto and Nakado’s position as being the main pathologist of the team is revealed, because Mikoto has performed 1500 autopsies whereas Nakado has performed around 3000. However, when it is revealed that Nakado is secretly searching for the serial killer that killed his girlfriend 8 years ago, the team steps in to help him.

The structure of the series is really quite easy to follow. In every episode, they receive a new body, and during the autopsy they find something ‘unnatural’ that leads them to investigate about the cause of death. Even though it is mentioned multiple times that they’re not detectives, it does kind of seem like it in some way. But I think in the last episode, Mikoto describes it really well: their job as the UDI is simply to record the autopsy of the body and determine the exact cause of death. To determine with certainty that that person’s life was taken from him/her/them.
Anyways, each episode shows a different case, and the red thread of the story is the serial murder case that Nakado is tracing. This involves his girlfriend, who was brought into his autopsy room 8 years before. What he found in her mouth, and in several other deceased young women’s mouths after that, was the imprint of a goldfish-shaped spot. Consequently, he calls this ‘the red goldfish’. At the end of the series, they find another body of a young woman with this same imprint in her mouth, and this leads to the whole team actively searching for the culprit. All in all, everything fit together really well, especially because the culprit turned out to be the survivor from one of the cases in one of the earlier episodes.

One other thing I really appreciate in Japanese dramas is that, (in contrast to Korean dramas, often) they don’t make things overcomplicated. They usually have a small cast of important characters and focus on the interaction between that small group, instead of pulling in all sorts of side-side characters and sub-subplots. In the case of Unnatural, this is also the case. We have a small group of characters, the UDI team, and only a few of them have some background story and background characters. Mikoto has her adoptive mother and brother and her traumatic backstory is only revealed as information that’s necessary to give her character more depth. Shoji doesn’t really have any baggage, except that in one episode, she and three people she knows from a go-kon get involved in a case. Nakado has the situation with his girlfriend. Other than that, the only person left to talk about is Rokuro.

Rokuro starts out as a part-timer at the UDI, he’s originally a medical student (his father owns a hospital) and he initially doesn’t really see how important the work of a forensic pathologist is. On the side, he is in cohorts of a slightly shady magazine called the Weekly Journal, and he initially provides intel from the UDI to this journal to write interesting stories. However, as he grows fonder of the UDI and Mikoto and starts taking his part-time job more seriously, he starts getting less motivated to deal with the Weekly Journal and eventually quits. Especially since one of the WJ’s shadiest reporters, Shishido Riichi (played by Kitamura Rikiya) is getting closer to the UDI’s cases and also seems to be familiar with the case Nakado is tracing. There is a moment where Rokuro suspects Shishido to be the culprit and improvidently provides some information from the UDI to him – information that is later used to aid in the defense of the actual culprit. When this is revealed, Rokuro is forced to come clean to the UDI and confirm that he has betrayed everyone’s trust from the beginning.
However, you can’t help but feel sympathy for him. We see a lot of scenes through the eyes of Rokuro and we can see that he’s not a bad guy. That’s why we know the UDI is going to take him back at the end, because I think everyone knew that he regretted his actions.

Another thing that, I think, is typical for Japanese dramas, is that when it gets angsty or when the theme gets dark, it gets REALLY angsty and REALLY dark. When they’re dealing with a serial killer, the guy is almost ALWAYS a psychopath. The last time I felt this was in Repeat, but it’s kind of a returning thing. So it wasn’t a surprise that when the culprit Takase (played by Onoue Hiroyuki) was revealed and it turned out that he killed 26 people in total, and he used the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet as the way in which he killed them (for example, A for Asunder -aka dismemberment-, F for Formaldehyde, etcetera), the guy was a complete sociopath. And of course, he denies killing anyone and claims they just all dropped dead in front of him and he only performed all these ways on them after they had already died (worst explanation ever). But I just find it so typical that, when dealing with themes such as death and stuff, Japanese dramas can get really dark and people also get really intense.

What I liked was that in-between, it also dealt with some major themes such as the undervaluation of women in the medical field. One time, Mikoto is asked to stand as a witness in a court case since she found something during the autopsy that made her question the cause of death. However, against the prosecution and some ‘experts with more experience’ who all happened to be male, everything she said was turned against her just because she was a woman. This was one of the most frustrating episodes to watch, because she just wasn’t given a chance and they manipulated her into getting emotional – which again, was ‘why women weren’t considered to be credible enough; they get to emotional and attached’. In the end, Nakado was forced to step in to make her case merely because he was a guy and they’d listen to him. I found it very interesting that they decided to show this part of the medical world, especially since Mikoto was accepted by her team as the leader without any prejudices from the start. It still proves that there is a bias in any kind of society. There was this old guy who had performed over 10,000 autopsies, but who was undeniably old-fashioned and stuck in his ways – and he also probably was never told that he was wrong, certainly not by a woman half his age – and they just wouldn’t accept Mikoto’s new findings. They kept comparing their finished cases as if that was the only thing that mattered in proving that the old guy had to be right. In the end, of course, Mikoto was proved to be right.
After all, having more years of experience doesn’t exempt you from making a mistake or overseeing something. That’s only human. Some people should really keep this in mind.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I started this drama, I only heard from my friend it was about forensics and I just assumed it would be good because Satomi-chan was in it (biased much), but it was still somehow different from what I expected. Not in a bad way, though.
When I started the first episode right after finishing my previous review (because that’s what I usually do, can’t wait, won’t wait), I actually closed the episode off again after 10 minutes and forced myself to wait until the next day. Because it’s not a drama that you can just start when you’re coming right out of something else. From second 1, you have to pay attention because the pace of the dialogues and the humor is extremely fast. I had to rewatch the first episode because I wasn’t able to follow it the first time. This is what you get when you don’t watch a lot of Japanese dramas, they have a certain kind of humor (or tsukkomi) that you have to get used to. Jokes and responses follow up on each other super fast. I was exposed to this when I did a year at a theatre club in Japan myself, the first play I was in also dealt with this kind of humor and the protagonist had to respond extremely fast to everything that was thrown at him. To me, this drama felt a bit like that in the beginning, and especially with all the medical and forensical jargon and terminology, it’s not something you can just put on in the background while you draw or do something else (some series are like that). You had to pay attention to all the dialogues and all the explanations, otherwise it was really hard to follow. I mean, even with paying attention I wasn’t able to understand all the medical terms they used, since not all of them were explained. Apart from that, I enjoyed it very much. It was a simple story with a simple and clear storyline and as it progressed, I found that the pace that started off so fast, started to gradually slow down until I was able to follow it better and could also get into the pace of the jokes.

I really liked the interaction within the UDI. You could tell they worked really well together, even with Nakado at the end. But even Nakado had his fun parts, the bits where one of his subordinates quit after three days because he couldn’t stand hearing Nakado curse so many times a day, and when he came back at the end he just made fun of him by starting to copy his cursing. I liked the friendship between Mikoto and Shoji (Yuko) a lot, and also how they treated Rokuro as their youngest team member.
You could see that Rokuro build up some interest in Mikoto, but it never became anything romantic as such and I didn’t mind because that wasn’t what the series was about. I think they balanced very well what they were going to add and where they didn’t need to go.
I also really liked police detective Mouri (played by Ohkura Koji) and his partner, they always added some humor and he just had this ‘done with shit’ facial expression. I especially loved it when he questioned the serial killer and he denied killing anyone and he just looked at him like ‘dude, you crazy, we all know you did it, don’t waste my time’.
AND, the funeral guy, Kibayashi (played by Ryusei Ryo) who helped Nakado in his case and occasionally helped with illegally transporting bodies to the UDI even though there was no approval for that. He was always so eerily cheerful, haha.

Lastly, I really want to share Mikoto’s monologue during the final trial. Because it was so clever how she got Takase to confess. They found out that he stuffed this toy ball with goldfish shapes into his victim’s mouths (hence the red goldfish imprints), because his mother used to do the same to him to make him behave when he was a child. They tied the fact that he had been abused as a child to his actions, and this is what made him snap because he didn’t want his mother or his childhood abuse to be the reason for this killings. He was sincerely proud of what he’d done and claimed no one had killed 26 people before the way he had.

Mikoto’s words before this truth came out of him were,
‘Our job as forensic pathologist is to examine and test the body, understand the exact cause of death, and record the facts in our report. Naturally, the perpetrator’s emotions and feelings aren’t recorded there. The only thing we have to show in front of the body is the irreparable fact that a life was taken. There’s no way we’d know the perpetrator’s feelings, nor is there any need for us to understand you. We’re not interested in your unfortunate upbringing, nor do we care about your motive.’ (The way she glared at him during this last sentence was SO powerful it almost gave me goosebumps.)
‘However, I do have sympathy for this pitiful defendant. The defendant is being tormented even now by the vision of his deceased mother. Even now when he’s over 30, he hasn’t grown up at all. No one was able to save him. You, too, were unable to save yourself. I sympathize with your loneliness from the bottom of my heart.’ After which she bows to him, and he starts arguing that his mother had nothing to do with it and he killed them because he wanted to. The reactions of everyone in the courtroom that follow were really powerful. We see Nakado slightly breaking apart, finally hearing the perpretrator that killed his girlfriend confess, we see Shoji’s triumphant expression and most importantly, Mikoto’s tiny smile when she lifts her head. You could just see her think, WE DID IT.
That last scene in the courtroom was definitely one of my favorite parts of the drama, along with the scene that followed in which Shishido was arrested (because he did aid Takase in a certain way, he’d known about his crimes for a while).

Overall, I really enjoyed the series, I thought it was pretty good. It kept me engaged with what was happening, there was enough suspense, enough thrill, and enough humor at the same time to keep it interesting. The individual stories were interesting and dealt with all sorts of themes, from loss to revenge to healing. It was nice that they covered many different ways people dealt with the grief of losing someone. I also liked that they broke with some stereotypes, characters that were first assumed to have been the perpretrators but turned out to be the saviors. I thought this was a nice plot twist in the episode about the bullied students, and also in the fire incident case where this former maffia guy actually tried saving everyone in the building.
Once again I was really impressed by Ishihara Satomi’s acting, and I really want to watch more of her work. I discovered I’ve really only seen 4 dramas of her even though she’s been active as an actress since 2002.
As the final part of this review, I’d like to comment briefly on some cast members in more depth, skipping Satomi-chan because I think I’ve already made it clear enough how much I love her, haha.

I’ve seen Iura Arata act alongside Satomi-chan before in Rich Man, Poor Woman, and when I checked their TV shows I found one more show in which they acted together. I liked seeing a completely different side of his acting, the grumpy and seemingly arrogant Nakado, who was just suffering from a broken heart. I do sometimes find his acting a bit animated, like he was really trying to be this stoic, cursing grumpy guy. But in the last couple of episodes I think his emotional range as an actor really came through.

I keep wondering where I know Ichikawa Mikako from, because her face seems really familiar to me, but even after checking DramaWiki I can’t find anything that I might have seen of her. Anyways, I really liked her character. She was kind of the moodmaker of the UDI, even though she always kept her professionalism in her work. As I mentioned, I really liked how she and Satomi acted out Shoji and Mikoto’s friendship/comradery. She was one of the characters that didn’t get a lot of background story, but she was still, in my opinion, one of the most interesting people to watch.

Kubota Masataka is a really well-known actor, I may not have seen a lot of dramas with him but I think everyone knows his face. I think he was typecasted really well for Rokuro, and the integrity of his acting was really good. I heard he recently got married to actress Mizukawa Asami (who I’ve seen in Watashi wo Hanasanaide), so it’s nice they’re keeping the actor’s gene alive, haha. I am curious to see more of this acting!

I really loved the Team Leader, Kamikura-san. He was such a nice old man! And I discovered I knew from being the butler in Kizoku Tantei! (< this is a really fun drama, I recommend it). I’ve probably also seen more dramas with him. Anyways, he was such a great boss. He had a kind of observing role, mostly, watching over his team and jumping in when necessary. He also aided Mikoto when she couldn’t hand in a false report, even though the truthful report might have helped Takase’s case. And in-between, he was just super funny in being a silly guy. He was the kind of chief who acted all great and awesome and then when he got back to the team he would cower in how nervous he was and whether he actually did the right thing.

I’m glad I finally watched this series – sometimes dramas with the most simple plots and stories relay the more powerful messages. It was very interesting to watch.
Also, I’d like to take this moment to congratulate Satomi-chan on her upcoming marriage as well! I just read about a couple of days ago.

I’ll be continuing my original list now, so stay tuned for more! ^^