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.

Dying Eye
(ダイイング・アイ / Daiingu Ai)
MyDramaList rating: 5.0/10

I finished this series within one week because it only has six episodes and I was in a hurry to finish it as I will explain in a moment.
It was probably on my list because of Miura Haruma and it looked thrilling, but it ended up being a lot more angsty than I expected.
If I had to categorize it, I would probably put it on the same shelf as Switched and Repeat, only with higher levels of obscenity and maturity.
This will probably not be a very long review, since the series isn’t that long, but I definitely have some critical comments about it.

I’d like to start with something serious.
Many drama fans will undoubtedly know that actor Miura Haruma, also the main protagonist in this show, committed suicide last year, about one year after this drama aired.
I was really shocked when I read the news, not only because I’ve had the biggest celebrity crush on him ever since Last Cinderella and I was just as heartbroken as everyone else that admired him for the great actor that he was. But also because he was only 30 and presumably hanged himself as a result of depression. It seemed like no one knew he was going through anything, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about how someone as famous and popular and seemingly fine like him had to go through such despair and loneliness all by himself.
Depression is not a joke. I feel like lately the number of famous people in the Asian entertainment industry (and anywhere else for that matter) taking their own lives because of mental health issues is increasing and there are still people who don’t take it seriously. People are still like ‘you just need to get over it’. But this keeps proving the point that depression is lethal. It can destroy people from inside out. It’s not just something you can ‘get over’ if you just change your way of thinking.
I just wanted to make a mention of this before starting to comment on his performance in this drama, because I definitely watched it with mixed feelings because of this.
My thoughts are with you, Miura-san. You were one of my favorite actors and I will miss you. Rest in peace.

Dying Eye starts with the introduction of Kishinaka Minae (played by Takahashi Maryjun), a piano teacher. After supervising one of her young students, she cycles home in the rain and we learn through her narration that she’s pregnant. A moment later, we see her get into a fatal accident where a car crashes into her and smashes her into another car, killing her almost instantly.
We then switch to about half a year later and we meet Amemura Shinsuke (played by Miura Haruma), a bartender who works in a bar called Myoga. One night, his last customer is a slightly melancholic looking man. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, he reminisces a bit about his late wife, has a drink and leaves. However, when Shinsuke locks up and leaves the bar, he is attacked from behind by this same man, who hits him hard in the head with a fire extinguisher.
Shinsuke has head surgery and when he wakes up, he has lost part of his memory. The only person by his bedside is Murakami Narumi (played by Matsumoto Marika), Shinsuke’s girlfriend whom he also lives with. She works as a hostess in another bar.
Slightly later, two detectives show up to tell him that the guy who attacked him killed himself. The man turns out to be Kishinaka Reiji (played by Kakizawa Hayato), husband to Kishinaka Minae, the woman who died in that accident. It is then revealed that Shinsuke was involved in this accident half a year ago, but because of his amnesia he can’t remember the accident.
As he slowly recovers, Shinsuke finds himself curious about that accident and attempts to regain his memories, even though everyone around him seems to advise against this for some reason.
Not only Narumi, but also his former boss Ejima (played by Namase Katsuhisa) and his current boss, nicknamed ‘Mama’ (played by Horiuchi Keiko). They all seem to have some knowledge or information that they don’t want Shinsuke to remember or know about.
Then, one night, a mysterious woman in dark clothes and heavy make-up appears at Myoga, and Shinsuke finds himself weirdly attracted to her.
After this, more weird things keep happening and Shinsuke finds himself in a really confusing situation as the enigmatic woman keeps appearing in front of him and the people around him all start to act increasingly suspicious as well. Will he be able to completely remember what happened during that accident and uncover everyone’s mysteries?

I discovered afterwards that this story was written by Higashino Keiji, a very popular mystery writer in Japan. I also watched Higashino Keigo Mysteries a couple of years ago, which is a collection of short murder/detective stories written by him. Miura Haruma also acted as the lead in one of those episodes.
From the first episode on, I felt confused. After it was revealed that Shinsuke was involved in that car accident it seemed like a legit motive for Kishinaka to attack him, as a revenge plan. But why did he kill himself afterwards? And what is up with that strange woman who, as can be noticed immediately, looks exactly like Minae (and who is also played by the same actress, Maryjun).
After kissing Shinsuke once after their first meeting, she appears again only to get more intimate with him (first time in the bar, second time in a bed). And from the start this felt really weird to me. Besides the fact that she creeped me out with her eyes doing the flickery thing, she felt really predatory from the get-go and I wasn’t able to watch the intimate scenes continuously because it made me super uncomfortable. There was no build-up in their mutual attraction, it was like she hypnotized him and he wasn’t able to resist, so it almost felt like she was taking advantage of him. I don’t know, it just felt wrong and super awkward, especially the time when they were in the bar and she got on top of him and went all orgasm-y while they weren’t even having real sex, like, they were both still wearing their clothes and she was basically dry-humping him. Seeing that made me feel a little nauseous.
The second time she invites him to her apartment (or AN apartment) and they really ‘sleep’ together, as in, clothes off, in bed. That’s when her real intentions finally start to show. She suddenly starts saying things like ‘We’re going to live in this house together’, ‘We’ll always be together’ and even ‘I want to give birth to your child’. As far as suspicious goes, Shinsuke finally realizes something is really not right with her, especially when he finds himself cuffed to a chain when he wakes up. She keeps him locked up in this strange apartment, until Shinsuke is finally able to get to his phone and he calls the police.

So at this point, looking at just Shinsuke’s point of view, apart from the fact that Ruriko, as the woman calls herself, looks exactly like Minae, we don’t know what any of this means, what any of this has to do with the accident or even IF it has anything to do with the accident. Shinsuke doesn’t even recognize her, he never saw Minae’s face during the accident and he only recognizes Ruriko after being shown a picture of Minae by the police during a hearing. So why is there a woman who looks like Minae still walking around? Literally, she’s following people around. Don’t get me started on the mannequins in the shop windows – stuff of nightmares.

During all this, whilst Shinsuke is being seduced by Ruriko, Narumi suddenly disappears. We don’t know why, we only see in-between shots of her desperately searching for something and getting super anxious whenever Ejima calls her.

The two detectives that showed up at Shinsuke’s hospital bed after his surgery, Detective Kozuka (played by Kimura Yuichi) and his subordinate Enoki (Yoshida Kengo), end up helping him with his case. Shinsuke has regular meetings with Kozuka, who has also heard rumors about this strange woman, as a neighbor kid even described her as ‘Minae-sensei’s ghost’. I found it quite peculiar that Kozuka immediately took this so seriously, I kind of expected they would just disregard the little girl’s words, but he kept thinking about the ghost story and even reported it to his superior as a serious case.
Detective Kozuka is also the one who rescues Shinsuke from that apartment, and when they start investigating all the rooms, they find one completely filled with mannequins, and some closely resembling Minae. There’s drawings and designs on the wall, and they find diaries belonging to Minae’s husband. Through this, they discover that Kishinaka, a mannequin designer by the way, was working on a mannequin that looked exactly like his wife.

When Shinsuke files a missing person’s report for Narumi, he passes by the Trafficking Department to get more info on his own case from the accident and that’s when he finds out he was actually not the person who hit Minae. He made her dodge, and then she was hit by another car coming from the opposite direction.
Honestly, seeing the fragmented flashback he had, I was already wondering how we was able to crash into her even though he was driving behind her. The car he was in only alarmed her from behind, which made her falter and then she was hit by the other car. With some help from former colleagues, he finds out the identity of the person in the other car: Kiuchi Haruhiko (played by Fuchikami Yasushi).

I really want to get to the point and explain everything, because up to this point in the series I was really frustrated and impatient.
I just wanted to know what was going on, but all they did was give you crumbs until finally, in the last two episodes, the truth about the accident and Ruriko’s existence are revealed.
Everything leading up to that, all the tiny plots and happenings, all just added to the list of things that I wanted explained. I just wanted to know who Ruriko was and what her deal was and what the hell was up with those eyes.
You know that feeling of frustration you get when you’re asking someone something and they just look at you with this self-righteous look on their face but they don’t answer you? It was like that every time with Ruriko.
I was like, if you’re going to act so mysterious and creepy, just explain yourself already. Don’t just be so creepy. In the end, everything about her is revealed by Kiuchi, she never utters a single word of truth or explanation by herself. The only things she says are shrouded in riddle.

Okay, so here’s the deal, I’ll cut right to the chase and give away the entire plot.
Shinsuke wasn’t the one driving the night of the accident, it was Ejima. They had just dropped off Ejima’s young wife who was drunk and they were on the way back. Ejima tried to light a cigarette while driving, took his eyes off the road for a moment, spotted Minae and dodged. Minae dodged as well, alarmed by the car’s headlights behind her.
Then, from the other side of the road, another car approached, containing Kiuchi and his fiancée, Uehara Midori (played by Mizusawa Elena). They got distracted as they were planning their wedding and Midori was driving, even though she’d had some drinks. She spotted the other car suddenly dodging, panicked, dodged, and crashed right into Minae. As Kiuchi immediately got out of the car and spoke to Ejima, who did the same, Midori had a short moment where she looked right into Minae’s eyes. Right before collapsing, Minae’s eyes exuded some kind of terrible power, all the emotions she was going through, both from dying and from losing her unborn child, and these emotions quite literally ‘pierced’ Midori.
Meanwhile, outside, Kiuchi tells Ejima that he will take the blame, and he asks Ejima to state that Midori wasn’t in the car with him, it was just him who had been driving under influence. He thought that, by doing that, he would be able to protect his fiancée and solve everything.
However, by saying this, he gives Ejima the same idea. Ejima goes to Shinsuke and asks him to trade places with him. He says he will give him 10 million yen if he will say that he was the one driving and Ejima wasn’t even in the car. He ends up agreeing to it for 30 million yen.

The fact that all of them were just standing there talking about money while a woman was literally dying in front of them and they were too busy worrying about themselves to even call an ambulance just made me question the humanity of every single character in the series.
Especially from Shinsuke, I just couldn’t understand how he, the only person present that was even remotely concerned with Minae, at that moment still shifted his thoughts to ‘actually I’ve been dreaming about my own bar and I could really use the money’.
Another important difference is that Kiuchi made the decision to swap places out of concern and love for his fiancée, while Ejima did it purely to protect himself and get away with it more easily.

Anyways, so both Shinsuke and Kiuchi become ‘replacements’ for the two people actually responsible for the accident. Shinsuke serves three years in prison (seriously though, 3 years prison and 2 years suspension for killing someone?), and gets his 30 million yen, which he hides in his apartment.

After being attacked by Kishinaka and losing part of his memory, Ejima thinks ‘Ah! Now he probably also won’t remember the money I gave him, so I’ll just get it back’. Ejima contacts Narumi and orders her to find the money and bring it to him. However, Narumi happens to have a lot of debt. She borrowed a lot of money from her workplace and some other places as well, so when she finds the 30 million, her greed jumps in and she runs away with the money – her disappearance is explained. Ejima, however, manages to find her with the help of Mama (who pretends to care for Narumi but just as well sells her out to Ejima). And then he kills her, supposedly.

On the other side of the story, Kiuchi and Midori face a lot of problems as Midori is haunted daily by the vision of Minae. They end up visiting Kishinaka to ‘apologize’ to Minae.
As Kiuchi waits outside, Midori discovers the mannequin that Kishinaka is making in his wife’s image. She starts frequenting his house, and eventually even helps him get a bigger atelier (the one in the apartment where Shinsuke gets locked up in) and a weird relationship is born between them.
When Kishinaka makes a mistake and goes crazy because he has to start all over again, Midori takes it upon herself to undergo plastic surgery – she literally changes her entire face and body to Minae’s.
By then, the engagement between her and Kiuchi is already cancelled since she became so estranged from him. After changing into a completely different person, she seems to have completely lost her mind.
When Kishinaka commits suicide the night after attacking Shinsuke, she finds him at his home. From this point on, she decides to become Ruriko and starts appearing in front of Shinsuke.
So actually, Ruriko only comes into being after Kishinaka kills himself, and her actions towards Shinsuke are completely based on the warped idea that he was the one responsible for killing her (Minae, probably, as she by then believes she herself to be Minae) and for making Kishinaka kill himself.

In the end, Kiuchi tells the whole story to Detective Kozuka.
At home, Shinsuke is first attacked by Ejima, and just as Ejima is declaring how he drove the car that night, Ruriko appears and she hears this confession, finally finding out that Ejima was the one responsible. She goes after him instead, but he ends up strangling her and she falls over backwards from the balcony (which looked super weird, by the way. She was standing with her back to it as she was being choked, and then suddenly, like a rag doll, she made this backward flip over the railing.)
Ejima is locked up, but, like Midori, is also haunted by Minae’s eyes and ends up gauging his own eyes out.
Shinsuke is sent to jail to serve his rightful sentence for involvement in the car accident and not reporting it. In the last scene he meets up with Mama, who once again advises him to forget everything that’s happened, but he says that this time, he won’t forget. So many people have died, so many things have happened, and it will be his punishment to remember, out of judgment for them.

Okay, so. There’s a lot of intense storylines crammed into those six episodes.
Even though some of the mysteries were explained, I still think there are a lot of loose ends and weak plot solutions at the end. It didn’t leave me with the feeling that everything was wrapped up, in any case.
First of all, because the whole thing with Ruriko targeting Shinsuke and taking sexual advantage of him turned out to be based on a complete misunderstanding from her side. She completely forgot about her own identity as Midori and that she herself was the one who directly killed Minae – not only had she convinced herself to be the person she took everything from, she started going after the wrong person as well. So basically the whole beginning plot of her appearing and being all seductive was thereby debunked.
Not even having a legit and true motive for stalking someone and going after their body, this just weakened the entire thing for me even more. Also the whole, ‘I want to have your baby’ thing, as messed up as that was, was just a result of her cognitive dysfunction – she wanted to punish the person who took ‘her’ unborn child from her by forcing him to literally give her back a child.

Secondly, I wish to disagree with the murders of Narumi and Enoki. I’ve mentioned Narumi being supposedly murdered by Ejima, but in Enoki’s case it was just really unfair and also irrelevant to the story.
When Shinsuke and Detective Kozuka discover the hidden room with all the mannequins, Kozuka calls Enoki to come help him and leaves him alone in the apartment while he goes to follow another lead. Enoki has no idea what’s going on, he is ordered to stay and take pictures of everything in a creepy room full of life-like dolls. It struck as me unbelievable that Kuzoka didn’t even think about the possibility of Ruriko returning to the house at any moment.
Anyways, she does, she returns while Enoki is there by himself. She sees Shinsuke has escaped and the secret room is open. She goes in while Enoki hides behind the door and we don’t get to see her discovering him, but we can assume that Enoki is not able to escape without noticing. Anyways, after that, he disappears as well.
The next time Kuzoka returns to the house, it’s been completely cleaned out.
They only find Enoki’s body in some abandoned warehouse in the last episode and it’s revealed that Ruriko has said that ‘she couldn’t let that detective live after he had broken into her sanctuary’ or something.
Anyways, in both Narumi’s and Enoki’s cases, I found the decision to kill them off really extreme and unnecessary. They could’ve just let Narumi live, Ejima could’ve taken the money from her and let her flee to a faraway place. She kept talking about going to a place where no one knew her, so they could’ve just let her do that, after making her swear not to talk about anything. And for Enoki as well, he didn’t have anything to do with the case, he just followed an order, but I’m mostly mad at Kozuka for just leaving him there, especially because Enoki was already hesitant to remain in that house all by himself. It just didn’t make sense.

Furthermore, in my opinion, they could’ve done more with Mama, especially since they made her out to be such a double-sided character. At first you think she’s this nice lady who stands up for Shinsuke and Narumi, but then she’s revealed to have an affair with Ejima – at least, they’re shown in bed together one time. The true relationship between them is never fully established and she also doesn’t seem to be very concerned with what happens to him at the end. She doesn’t really seem to care about anyone. Even after it’s suggested that Ejima got rid of Narumi, she’s just like ‘well, since Narumi has gone to a far away place now, there’s no use in worrying about her’. And I mean, I really believe she was in on a lot of stuff happening. She knew Ejima killed Narumi, first of all, and who knows what other scandals she was aware of – she was a bar owner, after all.
It just felt a little weird and unfair that she wasn’t suspected of anything and that she just got to go on with her life by herself in the end while every single other character in the series had to suffer in one way or another.

I’d like to mention a couple of minor critical points, because I was just generally very critical about this drama. Apart from the series itself and the story, I noticed some continuity inconsistencies in the filming.
When Kozuka and Shinsuke return to the apartment with Kiuchi and find it completely empty, Kiuchi says something like ‘There wasn’t anything here to begin with’ (at this point he’s still denying any knowledge of anything). When he says this the first time this scene is shown, they are in the kitchen. In the next episode, when showing the scene again, he says it while standing in the doorway of the room itself.
Later, when he finally confesses the whole story about the accident and Midori to Shinsuke, in the original first scene he is standing up and faces Shinsuke at the end (dramatic close-up). When showing this same scene again in the next episode, he is sitting in a chair with his back to Shinsuke.
Minor things, maybe, but little slips like this always contribute to my criticism ^^”

I also found it weird that, even though Kiuchi and Midori were engaged and seemingly really relaxed and in love with each other, she still called him ‘Kiuchi-san’. I don’t know, that created a very weird contrast.

Slightly irrelevant and nothing to do with the drama itself, but I still wanted to mention it: I watched this series on Dramacool and I spotted a lot of translation errors in the subtitles. Sometimes the subber had even added notes like ‘I’m actually not sure what he’s saying here’.
Doesn’t Dramacool check the quality of the subs before posting them? If even the subber doesn’t understand what’s being said, it doesn’t do the viewers any good either. Sorry if that sounds strict, but I was just surprised that these subs were published.
That being said, if anyone has any recommendations on websites with good quality subs and dramas, please let me know! I tend to switch whenever I find a site with faster streaming or better video quality, but it never hurts to have some backup sites 🙂

Back to the drama contents, it made excessive use of repetitive flashbacks. The scene of Minae getting squashed against that car and blood spatting on the car window was shown about 50 times, and it never got any more pleasant to watch. Also, during the final ending credits in the last episode, they showed an entire recap of the series, as if we needed to be reminded of the story we’d just finished following. So that wasn’t very necessary in my opinion.

The last thing that I wonder about regarding the ending is, of course, did Ruriko really die? Because as we see Shinsuke walking through the city at night, new determination in his eyes, we get one last close-up of a shop window mannequin, and its eyes still move to follow him. The whole thing about the eyes never really became clear to me, and also how she was using the mannequins to keep an eye on people.
(Mannequins creep me the hell out in general, so when they entered that room filled with them, I definitely shivered. Also, when Enoki was there by himself taking pictures, one time you could see the doll behind him follow him with her eyes and oh my god I hope I won’t dream about this.)
The only thing I gathered in the end is that Minae’s eyes started doing something when she was dying, they exuded some kind of power, and suddenly her gaze was able to stun people or hypnotize them in some way. Every time her eyes changed color, it looked like it was some sort of magic trick, but in the end I think it wasn’t really a ‘power’ but more like a really intense, paralyzing gaze. And I’m also confused how Midori/Ruriko was able to take over this gaze, except if she literally had Minae’s eyes implanted when she changed her appearance (disturbing idea number #8474). And also how this gaze was able to drive people (Midori, Ejima) crazy, that made sure they kept seeing her. Because with the introduction we get of Minae, I don’t know if she would’ve wanted any of this aftermath to happen.
Of course, it was a very tragic accident and, as Shinsuke also mentions at some point, all the people involved in it eventually suffered. But the most ironic thing was that the one person who wasn’t present during the accident, Kishinaka, was the only one to follow the victim in death. I thought this was an interesting perspective.
Ejima had this whole theory about being either lucky or unlucky. If you get into an accident, you were just unlucky. If you aren’t, you’re lucky. And that’s how he’s lived his life, making sure that luck remained on his side, and even use power to get his hands on that luck. But I don’t think it’s like that. I mean, you can think whatever you want, of course, but it’s not so black and white in my opinion.

Before I conclude, I’ll make some comments about the cast. It has ultimately become quite a long review after all.
Again, I will stress the mixed feelings I had while watching Miura Haruma. In this drama, his character was quite modest, he wasn’t the type to talk about himself that much, but he still had a raw edge and he had enough pride to stand up for himself. When he finds out there was another car and he meets Kiuchi, he immediately confronts him to ask if he too was attacked by Kishinaka. He immediately feels wronged for being the only one who was attacked, especially when it becomes clear he wasn’t the only one involved.
I found his relationship with Narumi quite interesting, because at some moments it felt like they were just friends with benefits, like, they lived together and were close, and they occasionally had sex, but then when she wouldn’t come home he would just be like ‘Could she be with a guy? Well, not that it matters’, and then I was like Oh? When she disappears, he worries, but it doesn’t keep him up at night. When he finds out Ejima killed her, he gets sad, I think he gets a little emotional at one point, but he’s not heartbroken.
Okay, anyway, Shinsuke has an interesting personality, because he’s a victim, but he doesn’t become pathetic and even though I didn’t always find him super sympathetic, I did feel for him.
I think I’ve seen about 5 or 6 dramas/movies with him, most of them in which he played a high schooler or something, so this was one of the dramas (probably together with Watashi wo Hanasanaide) where he got to show some very mature acting. And I don’t just mean the kissing/sex scenes (this series was quite mature in that area but still not explicit enough to show any body parts, the breasts were always covered and we never see anything below the waist, not even butts), but just in general.
All in all maybe not the most amazing performance I’ve seen of him, but it wasn’t because of his acting, I just think Shinsuke is a very mellow character and he portrayed him as modestly as possible.

I know Takahashi Maryjun by name and I’ve mainly seen her as a guest appearance or side character, but this is the first time I’ve seen her in a main role. The way they made her look like a doll/mannequin in this series (or how they made the mannequin look like her) was impressively creepy. I have to say I was a little too intimidated by Ruriko to remain objective about her performance, but she definitely had to portray some heavy stuff, she had all these intimate scenes as Ruriko, she had the car accident scene as Minae. I think I’ll have to see more of her acting to make more comments about her, but this time I was just a bit too scared of her character, haha. Minae seemed to be a really nice person, though. She definitely showed versatility.

I hadn’t seen Matsumoto Marika before, but she was cast perfectly for Narumi’s type character. Cute hostess material with a high pitched voice, but also the tenderness of Shinsuke’s best friend who really cared for him. My only issue with her was that she made so much noise, haha. Whether it was when she was snuggling up to Shinsuke, or when she was running for her life, she was constantly panting and exhaling so loudly. I’ll stop my nitpicking now, haha.

The only other actors that I knew/was familiar with were Namase Katsuhisa, Horiuchi Keiko and Fuchikami Yasushi, I’ve seen them in multiple dramas. For the rest I don’t think I knew any of the actors, which was also nice and refreshing in a way.

So, to conclude, this was without a doubt one of the most confusing, disturbing and frustrating Japanese dramas I’ve ever watched. In the end there are still so many loose ends, Narumi and Enoki’s deaths were completely unnecessary and Ruriko’s obsession with Shinsuke was completely based on a misunderstanding. She thought Shinsuke killed Minae and therefore wanted to punish him and make him give her back what she lost, but in the last episode she finds out it was actually Ejima who caused the accident and literally everything is debunked.
As I said in the first paragraph of this review, I would probably put this drama in the same category as Switched or Repeat in the sense that it’s another dark and angsty Japanese drama with some random graphic moments, a lot of spilled blood and nudity. It’s just not really my thing, I actually looked away a couple of times because I was too uncomfortable.

Then again, it’s good to be familiar with different types of drama, in this way I can also start categorizing what genres I like better than others.
Next up on my list is another K-Drama that I’ve also been looking forward to for a while now and I’m going to watch it on Netflix so I’m curious as to how fast I’ll go through it.
Until my next review, bye-bye!!