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

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! ^^