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.
Ito-kun A to E
(伊藤くん A to E / The Many Faces of Ito)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10
Hiya! I bet you thought I was done for this month – and then I wasn’t! No but seriously, I didn’t know beforehand this show would be so short and easy to digest that I would get to finish it within a couple of days and write a proper review about it. Actually, I even got the chance to use this particular watch for a homework assignment since I had to watch a movie and write a little synopsis about it. This review is a bit special in the sense that this story consists of two parts, an 8-episode drama series and a movie. Sometimes, a movie adaptation is made of a formerly released drama series as a recap or a remake, but in this case, it’s actually a complimentary movie – I would highly recommend watching it after finishing the drama because a lot of things will make much more sense. I don’t think I’ll lose much time on the story itself, so I think I’ll devote a special part of this review to putting the drama and the movie side by side and see how they balance each other out, because I personally found that really interesting to think about.
To start with the drama series, Ito-kun A to E is a Netflix J-Drama released in 2017 with 8 episodes of about 25 minutes – not that lengthy. It tells the story of thirtysomething screenwriter Yazaki Rio (played by Kimura Fumino) who had a major hit with a certain drama series (‘Tokyo Doll House’) a number of years ago and is still profiting from that show’s popularity and success. However, she hasn’t exactly been keeping up the successful work after that. On the contrary, she’s only written one book in which she gives young women advice on relationships, and that’s it. She wants to keep writing, and the drama producer she worked with on Tokyo Doll House, Tamura Shinya (played by Tanaka Kei), wants her to keep writing, but for some reason Rio has been in a slump for a while now. To fill up the emptiness she finished this relationship advice book and the story starts with her giving a little information session about her book to interested young women who are struggling with relationships. At the end of the session, the participants are encouraged to ask Rio for personal advice through submitting a form in which they share their struggles. While Rio initially has no interest in personally answering the questions of these ‘pathetic’ women, her interest is piqued when she discovers that four participants have submitted their form with a story about a man named ‘Ito’. After sharing this with Tamura, Rio decides to call on these four women to come for interviews at her house, thinking that she might hear them out and give advice while simultaneously use their stories for her new drama proposal, something that will surpass Tokyo Doll House. Four women and one man named Ito… what exciting story could come out of this chanceful discovery?
I think it’s important to know from the get-go that while Rio is undeniably the main character, she is not a very empathic person. Even as the main character, we don’t really get to see through her, we only see how she is now, bitter and skeptical while she looks down on all those women who get played by the men in their lives. Her decision to start interviewing these four women is by no means a genuine gesture to help them – she means to just sit there and nod and smile and fake-empathize with them, only to harshly judge them and scoff at their stupidity the second they leave. Rio is not a very ‘kind’ person in that aspect. Which makes her all the more interesting as a character, in my opinion.
Let’s look at the four women and their connection to this mysterious Ito. Rio hears the four women out and visualizes their encounters with Ito based on their stories. As the scenes are all visualized through Rio, we don’t actually get to see the real Ito, as Rio doesn’t know what he looks like. She visualizes him in turn for different men she personally knows in order to get an understanding of what he must be like. As she visualizes the women’s stories, we see their encounters with Ito played out with Rio being in the same room with them, watching their conversations and giving snarky comments while she continuously judges the women for being so naïve.
The drama basically divides the episodes as two per woman (A, B, C, D) like a kind of case file, so I’m going to follow that order and system.
Woman A is Shimahara Tomomi (played by Sasaki Nozomi). Tomomi allegedly has been in a relationship with ‘Ito-kun’ for five years, but they’ve never had sex. She wants to, but for some reason it hasn’t happened so far. When she tells her story, Rio visualizes Woman A’s Ito as her producer Tamura, after getting the image of him being quite conceited. She ultimately puts Tomomi down as ‘the ultimate doormat’; while Tomomi herself consistently romanticizes and idealizes her relationship with Ito, it turns out that Ito actually treats her very badly and keeps her at arm’s length to actually progress in their ‘relationship’. He just calls out to her from time to time to get some dinner or a drink, vents about his work and takes her genuine care for him for granted. No matter how many times it happens, no matter how many times Tomomi decides to let it go, whenever he reaches out she’s right back to square one, answering to his every need. During one situation she describes, Ito casually tells her he’s fallen in love with a girl from the tutoring school he works part-time at, and that he wants to remain loyal to her and refuses to sleep with Tomomi. For Tomomi, this comes completely out of the blue as the way she saw their relationship apparently was not how it’d been for him all this time. She got him expensive sweets only to find out he gave them to his crush, she got him 200,000 yen to join a seminar he was interested in only to be judged for being too pushy, and when she still went when he texted her to go to a concert, she only arrived there to find out he just wanted to get rid of his ticket because his crush refused to go. For Ito, Tomomi has always been nothing but a convenience, someone he could just call when he was bored or needed to kill some time.
In-between the stories, we meet another screenwriter who’s signed by Tamura’s agency, Kuzumi Kentaro, nicknamed ‘Kuzuken’ (played by Nakamura Tomoya). We learn about him through Tamura, who tells Rio that Kuzuken’s new proposal was rejected and that the producer agency even cut ties with him. Kuzuken is in a bit of a slump as well, just like Rio, as he doesn’t have anything new and inspiring to write, and he sometimes just hangs out at Rio’s place as they’re on good terms with each other. He refers to Rio as ‘sensei’, from which we learn that he regards her as a respectable senior in their field of work. Apart from his position as a fellow screenwriter, Kuzuken also turns out to play an unexpected part in the stories of Women C and D, particularly in the latter’s. But first of all he appears as Rio’s visualization of Ito in Woman B’s story.
Woman B is Nose Shuuko (played by Shida Mirai). While it’s revealed that Shuuko is the girl Ito dumped Tomomi for, her relationship with him is different from what you’d initially expect after hearing what Ito tells Tomomi. Shuuko happens to work part-time at the same tutoring school as Ito, where he is actually the boss’ nephew, and Ito’s crush on her doesn’t exactly include a cute and polite approach. Ito stalks Shuuko. He forces himself on her by giving her gifts and ambushing her after work to walk home together. Shuuko, unlike any of the typical women who participate in Rio’s briefing, doesn’t have any interest in relationships and even claims she ‘doesn’t want to be treated as a woman’ by a man. She’s never asked for Ito’s attention, so to her it just comes across as a bother that he’s suddenly all over her, even to the point of coming to her house after finding out where she lives. Despite her clear disdain with the situation, her passive attitude eventually even gets her roommate and bestie Miyata Maki (played by Yamashita Rio) involved. Maki takes over the concert tickets Ito got for Shuuko and himself, ends up going to the concert together with Tomomi and they even have a pretty good time until Maki starts badmouthing Ito and gets reprimanded for it by Tomomi. After that she becomes a bit pissed at Shuuko for not dealing with her own stuff better. In the end, Shuuko and Ito meet one more time at the orientation meeting of a seminar they’re both interested in (admittedly, this time they met by coincidence as Ito didn’t know Shuuko was also interested in it), but then Shuuko basically judges him for believing in something like that to get him to change his ways, again leaving Ito more inspired than dejected.
After establishing that the Ito from both Woman A and B’s stories are the same person since their stories line up so much, Rio starts to get even more interested in working this case out as a new drama plot, encouraged by Tamura. She initially believes that it’s just a coincidence that these two women have gotten involved with the same guy, and there’s no way that Woman C and D’s stories are also about the same Ito. What are the odds, right?
Woman C & D’s stories are connected from the start, simply because they are best friends. To start with Woman C, Aida Satoko (played by Ikeda Elaiza) is a girl who’s never had a problem attracting men’s attention. She’s basically a butterfly that flies from one guy to the next, but her ‘relationships’ are never serious and always end quickly. While she may have a half-hearted attitude towards finding ‘real love’, one person she does care about is her best friend, Woman D, Jinbo Miki (played by Kaho). The complete opposite of Satoko, Miki is the most pure and innocent girl you can imagine. She’s had a crush on her senpai from university, Ito, for three years and he’s shown interest in her too, but they’ve never been really intimate with each other. Miki cares a lot about being intimate with the person she loves and she is willing to ‘give’ her virginity to Ito. She talks about him a lot to Satoko who seems to be really supportive of her. Honestly, Satoko’s care for Miki seems to be boundless: she even took up a part-time job at Miki’s favorite tart shop (despite personally disliking sweets) so she could buy and gift her her favorite cherry tart for her birthday every year. Despite this seemingly devoted friendship from Satoko’s side, we find out that there’s something else behind her display of wanting to protect her sweet friend from the vileness of men – Rio identifies it as being jealous that her innocent friend now suddenly has a real love story of her own, while she’s only ever gotten used to waking up in empty beds the next morning.
All in all, I’d say there is a certain toxicity in Satoko and Miki’s friendship, because it remains a little vague what exactly Satoko’s intentions are. In any case, after a failed attempt in which Miki was planning on sleeping with Ito but ended up not going through with it, Satoko decides to seduce Ito herself and sleep with him, which she actually does. Ito is here visualized by Rio as the male lead character from Tokyo Doll House, Okita (played by Yamada Yuki). This is when she finds out that Ito himself is also still a virgin, even after Miki told her he made a fuss about her still being a virgin. In any case, sleeping with him once and hearing how he talks about Miki seems to be enough for Satoko, as she herself holds up the excuse that she is just protecting her innocent friend from this douchebag. After this night, she even breaks down crying in the street, presumably out of guilt towards betraying Miki, but she also admits to Rio that she’s always been jealous of Miki. I personally found her true intentions a bit hard to gauge.
When Miki assumes she’s been dumped by Ito after that disastrous night, she decides to make an effort toward him and lose her virginity just to get it over with, so that he’ll want her again. As it happens, Miki and Ito both went to Sophia University at the same time as Kuzuken did, and Kuzuken and Miki are actually on pretty good terms. Because Kuzuken has an image of being quite open-minded and casual, Miki calls on him to ask if he wants to help her out – with losing her virginity, that is. Unaware of the fact that Kuzuken has actually always had a crush on her and that this request therefore holds more meaning to him than to her, they agree to go with the plan. However, as they are about to get things started in the hotel room, Miki receives a call from Ito, and Ito even comes to their hotel room. Needless to say, the night ends without Miki losing her virginity. Apart from that, her oblivion also ends up hurting Kuzuken’s feelings a lot. Ito, who actually only called Miki after first calling Satoko to tell her he’s fallen in love with her before getting completely shut down by her, makes a big scene about how terrible he feels that he’s complicated things between the two girls, but he also declares to Miki face to face that he slept with Satoko and that he was the one who initiated it. Things get messy, is what I’m saying.
A peculiar thing about this show is that, even after finding out about all the stories these four women have with one and the same guy, there’s not actually a conclusion to their stories. The show is not about Rio starting to feel bad for these women and taking revenge on Ito, or about these women finding closure after having been involved with Ito. Every story has kind of an open ending, there’s not exactly a point they all reach where everything’s ‘all good and well’. On the other hand, I wouldn’t call it a bad ending either, since both Shuuko and Maki and Miki and Satoko make up and Tomomi also comes to terms with letting Ito go. It’s just that life goes on, and everyone just manages to get away from Ito, which I guess is a good thing.
We only find out the true identity of Ito in the final episode of the drama – when Tamura calls Rio to tell her that he’s found out who ite is. Turns out, Ito Seijiro (played by Okada Masaki) is a student in Rio’s drama writing class. Some of the women have mentioned something about him aiming to become a script writer, but it still comes as a big surprise for Rio when she finds out she’s actually had personal conversations and encounters with Ito herself. Not just that, the reason his identity comes out is because he’s just submitted a drama proposal of his own, one that bears an uncanny resemblance to the one Rio is working on, only his version is written from the guy’s perspective – his own. Furthermore, his proposal is called ‘Ito-kun A to E’, including a fifth woman, Woman E, who turns out to be no one other than Rio herself. What exactly Ito’s deal with Rio is remains kind of vague, we do see that he’s drawing her at some point during class, but apart from that it doesn’t seem like he has a crush on her or anything – he probably just sees her as a rival, as he knows that she’s also working on a new drama script and he’s even consulted her before about submitting one of his proposals for a contest at her producer’s agency. He’s based his story on his own experiences with these four women, with himself at the center of it. Ito Seijiro is the Ito.
Before I go on to adding the movie to this review, I first briefly want to introduce the topic of Rio’s personal backstory and in particular, her history with Tamura. It’s revealed that Rio and Tamura were actually together for a while, when Tamura was first put in charge of Rio’s script writing for Tokyo Doll House. We aren’t told what exactly their relationship was and how serious it got, but there were definitely some very cozy moments between them and they also slept together at hotels and stuff. At some point, Tamura suddenly announced that he was getting married and their personal relationship ended, even after Tokyo Doll House became such a big success. They still maintain a professional relationship, but it’s pretty clear to see in their scenes together -even before we find out anything happened between them- that there’s some tension there. In the way he leans into her while nudging her shoulder when asking her to work with him again, in the way she keeps brushing him off, acting all coy. In the drama, this aspect of Rio’s background is the only ‘private’ information we learn about her, and she also acts very casual and ignorant about it, although it does seem like she wants to keep working with Tamura too. In the final scene of the drama, Tamura calls Rio to tell her that both her and Ito’s drama proposals were rejected, but that he still wants to work with her on something that’ll surpass Tokyo Doll House, and we can see Rio smiling fondly on the phone as she agrees.
Now, let’s get to the portion of this review I’ve been looking forward to the most: drama VS movie. As I mentioned before, I’ve only ever seen movie adaptations or remakes of dramas – in animations it sometimes happens that a whole season gets ‘recapped’ as a movie with basically the same content. However, in this case, I was really surprised to find that the movie doesn’t just compliment the drama – it actually fleshes it out.
While the drama primarily follows Rio’s gaze and visualization of the events the four women tell her about, the movie focusses on Ito himself, and how he experienced everything that’s happened. While in the drama all the women were ‘treated’ separately as A, B, C and D, the movie follows the chronological timeline of Ito’s affairs with all these women, intertwined. For example, in the first half we basically see him go back and forth between Tomomi and Shuuko, and we get a much clearer sense of cause and effect through this way of storytelling this way. We see more clearly how Ito got Shuuko those sweets and concert tickets, and how they ended up going to Maki and Tomomi, while in the drama it’s only ever discussed rather than shown. We can see Ito’s crush on Shuuko from his own perspective rather than told through Shuuko.
Because of this different perspective, there are also a lot of inconsistencies in the scenes, locations, times and dialogues. The scenes from the movie are not identical to the ones in the drama. However, rather than getting annoyed by those inconsistencies and wondering why they couldn’t synchronize them, I figured that this was all extremely deliberate. After all, the scenes from the drama were all visualized by Rio, who wasn’t even there: that’s just the way she imagined how it must have gone down. A scene that takes place late at night outside Shuuko’s house in Rio’s visualization, takes place in broad daylight in a public place through Ito’s narrative. It’s all very interesting, in my opinion. I find it really clever of the writers to make that distinction between their two stories, because this way it really seems like the drama is Rio’s script proposal and the movie is Ito’s script proposal. They wrote the same story, but from their own perspectives. I thought this concept was really original, because in this way, even though we already know the story from watching the drama first, the movie still gives us new information.
For example, we find out what exactly happened the night Ito and Miki went to that hotel together and failed to have sex. In the drama, we only hear what both of them tell Satoko – Miki tells her that Ito got a bit pushy and when she went to take a shower first he suddenly gave up and they just slept, while Ito tells her that Miki was super excited and asked him to ‘take care of her’ after taking off all her clothes and it just became awkward for him. Through the movie, we find out that neither of these scenarios are the complete truth, because although Miki did take off her clothes and asked Ito to ‘take care of her’, he was definitely willing to give it a shot but got anxious because he was hiding the fact he himself was still a virgin too, and ended up making Miki feel like the bad person for making him feel bad.
It’s also through the movie that we find out that Rio actually planted the idea in Satoko’s head to take concrete action if she wanted to ‘protect her friend’. It isn’t too clear, but she’s definitely more suggestive in the movie than in the drama when she suggests this to Satoko, and it really seems like she’s urging her on to do something, even though from Rio’s perspective this is only to ‘spice up the story’ for her own writing interests. Another example of this is when we find out that what Shuuko says to Ito when they meet at that seminar orientation is a literal repetition of what Rio told her during her last interview. This isn’t clarified in the drama, only in the movie, and then suddenly Shuuko’s determination to walk away from Ito and that seminar gets a different feeling because the words suddenly aren’t just her own – they are words that Rio used to reprimand her, and she in turn uses them to reprimand Ito. So, in this way, she again uses someone else’s help and words to get out of a situation with Ito, rather than coming up with something herself.
There are several of these scenes that just suddenly got a different feeling or layer in the movie, and that convinced me even more that the drama followed Rio’s perspective and displayed feelings. Honestly, the movie gave me much more satisfaction because it was way more transparent and clarifying, also in terms of Rio’s true motivations.
When I say Rio’s true motivations, I mean that the movie clearly elaborates on her lingering feelings for Tamura and her desperation to get his affirmation. While she acts all casual and aloof toward him in the drama series, in the movie she gets way more desperate to get him to support her in her writing, she keeps begging him to let her write the proposal, to believe in her, and one time she even starts yelling and crying when he shows hesitation in whether or not she can pull it off. It just really made me feel like the drama portrayed Rio as she wanted to see herself, as someone who stood above all those pathetic women who were getting manipulated by men, perfectly able to keep a professional distance from Tamura, unimpressed by any advances he made on her. In the movie, we see things differently, and whether this is the truth or the way Ito sees Rio, fact remains that she never completely got over the break-up with Tamura and, most importantly: she realizes that she’s basically the same as those four women – those four women are her. In the movie, she even admits this out loud to Ito in a final confrontation after both their proposals have been rejected. In this aspect, the movie had a much more satisfying conclusion, because Rio finally managed to get to the bottom of her obsession with this script.
Speaking of final closures, I have to talk about Rio’s bath tub for a bit. When Rio first moved into her current, luxurious apartment, back when she was still with Tamura and working on Tokyo Doll House (or just after finishing it – could be that she bought the apartment with the money she got from the show, not sure), we see that she tapes her bath tub shut with red tape. It first seems to be a deliberate decision purely because she’s not going to use that room for the bath and she plans to make it her workroom where she’ll be writing many amazing scripts. The taping of the bath tub symbolizes her determination to become a successful screenwriter, that’s what her own explanation comes down to. However, as we know not much has happened after Tokyo Doll House. Not much happened and the bath tub remains shut. Rio is living her life in that luxurious house with framed posters of Tokyo Doll House everywhere to remind her of her worth, her potential, her talent around every corner, but the bath tub remains taped shut without any new work replacing that first hit.
In the drama, the bath tub is shown sporadically, but we don’t get much clarity on the deeper meaning behind it. For me, it was like I knew it must have had some kind of symbolical meaning but I couldn’t really figure it out at first. It’s clarified much more clearly in the movie, and then it hit me that while it may not have been a literal reference or symbol for one specific thing, it does seem like the bath tub started to define Rio in her entire time during her slump. She kept it closed, unwilling to look back at the feelings she had when she first taped it shut, the hope and excitement and determination she felt when thinking of how many scripts she’d be laying out on that red taped surface. It’s exactly because none of that happened that she’s leaving it the way it is, purely because she doesn’t want to be confronted by how she truly feels, the regrets she truly has, also concerning how her relationship with Tamura ended.
Both in the drama and the movie, she ultimately takes off the tape and opens the bath to find that it’s still completely clean inside, and again in my personal opinion I felt the scene in the movie was way more meaningful than in the drama, where it seemed like kind of a random action. In the movie, Tamura is with her in the room when she un-tapes the tub. After taking the tape off, Rio hesitates and says, ‘Whatever’s in here might be rotten’, to which Tamura asks her, ‘Are you afraid?’, to which she answers, ‘Yes, but I must open it’. Tamura watches her while she takes the lids off and fills the tub with water, and then they are just looking at how it fills up side by side. In this scene, I could feel something from Tamura in the way he looked at her and suddenly called her ‘Rio’ again (he consistently calls her ‘Yazaki-sensei’ throughout the rest of the show). This scene just made much more sense to me in the movie, because it felt like Tamura was actually there to guide her to reopen the bath tub and consequently, metaphorically, open herself up again to the writer she once wanted to be. After that, there’s one final scene of Rio happily sitting on a terrace while writing on her laptop, seemingly having regained her joy in writing again. I thought it made for a very clear and more conclusive ending than the drama did. I liked that the ending of the movie went a bit further than where the drama ended, it had that final important confrontation between Rio and Ito and this bath tub scene which had a completely different feeling to it than in the drama, where she takes off the tape by herself without Tamura being there with her.
Rio remains a quite ambiguous character until the end, but I also thought that was refreshing because it just proved that even to the viewers she consistently kept her feelings to herself. It even takes the perspective of this ‘jerk’ Ito to make her see what she didn’t allow herself to acknowledge, namely that the four women she claimed to look down on actually reminded her of herself. The reason it got this extra layer was purely because of the addition of the movie, and that’s why I would encourage everyone to absolutely watch it in that order: drama, then movie, and definitely not leave the movie out. Watching the movie before the drama is just confusing, because the whole revelation of who Ito is will have less of an impact, and it’s really fun to speculate together with Rio and see Ito performed by in turn Tamura, Kuzuken and Okita.
Despite the less satisfying ending, I have to say that the drama, which I watched in much better quality on Netflix than the movie on Dramacool, has a lot of redeeming features as well. I particularly liked the cinematography, which was really clean and cool and original. I also liked the setting of the scenes where Rio was sitting in on the encounters between the women and Ito, it almost made it feel like a stage play. The way she just sat next to or beside the featured couple and commented on what was being said, continuously smirking and making sassy remarks to the women for being so stupid to fall into this guy’s trap, it gave such a clear insight in Rio’s adaptation of the information these women were giving her. She was unconditionally judging them from the start, and even the advices she gave them were fake. Her only intention was to get these women to stir up some action so she could make her story about them more exciting. It’s pretty awful, and you’d almost think there’d be some sort of conclusion in which all the women found out about Rio’s true motives and moved against her together for taking advantage of their stories and feelings or something. But even that doesn’t happen. Rio’s script isn’t even approved by the producer, it doesn’t come out. All this project does in the end is confront Rio with her own taped-shut and avoided problems, and the conclusion of the story is that she finally finds it in her to open that bath tub again and see how clean it still is on the inside, as clean and hopeful as when she first closed it off with her determination. Now that I (think I) get the reference, I think that it was a really original way to symbolize someone running away from their own problems until they had no choice but to go back there and start anew. Very clever.
One scene that I remember that made an impression on me was the scene when Miki, Kuzuken and Ito (in Miki’s story played out by the real Ito) are in that hotel room together. They made a really interesting cinematographic choice here to feature each character in one shot, so three columns next to each other, almost like a fancam with idols (don’t know why that suddenly popped into my mind, lol). They all maintain their own shot while communicating with each other, and you can see it’s actually all just one take by the way they seamlessly enter each other’s shots as well. Even when they’re not in the correct alignment, and sometimes it’s Kuzuken versus Ito or Ito versus Miki, it somehow worked really well. I thought the way they decided to film this was really unique. Let me add some screenshots to show what I’m talking about.
Although I understand how even the movie can leave some people hanging at the end, all in all I really liked watching the whole thing as kind of a combo deal. To have a movie that’s such an addition to the original drama, not just to make the viewer relive the story but to actually contribute more information to it that keeps us on our toes rather than being a literal repetition of what we’ve seen in those eight episodes before was a really good idea. I’ve honestly never seen something worked out like this, and it definitely beat having to watch a whole new second season just for that extra info. They really made an effort to mirror Rio’s and Ito’s respective stories, to create the same story from two different perspectives, one consisting of eight episodes of 25 minutes and one of a full two-hour sequence.
Before I go onto my cast comments, I just want to mention one more general thing, and that’s that I really enjoy Japanese dramas like this. I’ve actually been reading an originally Japanese novel lately that explores women’s feelings regarding (changes in) their own bodies and attitudes towards sex and pregnancy and things like that, so this story fit well into the mindset that I was already in. I find it really refreshing when topics like this get featured in drama series since they’re usually such a taboo. Romantic relationships are usually so romanticized and idealized that I found it quite relieving to watch a show about how all these women were so innately different in personality and attitude towards their feelings for a man or, in Shuuko’s case, her feelings towards relationships in general and her way of responding to a guy’s feelings toward her. I honestly wasn’t expecting too much from a short show like this, and I honestly also thought there would be some sort of revenge plot against this Ito guy, but the lack of a defining ending destination was also quite charming, in a way, it didn’t bother me. I was just glad Rio reopened the damn bath tub, haha. In the movie, the ending shot is of Ito calling on another girl again – I even believe it’s the girl that got cast in the drama adaptation of the script that won over his and Rio’s – so it seems like he’s definitely not done with whatever he’s doing. But for the rest I thought it was pretty nice how everyone just quietly came to terms with what they’d experienced and started a new life for themselves, free of Ito. It was a surprisingly refreshing ending.
Time for cast comments! The cast in this show was very compact and I knew a couple of the actors already, so that was fun. I was pretty impressed with the acting, overall.
Let’s start with Kimura Fumino. I realize I’ve seen her before in Boku, Unmei no Hito Desu, but it’s been a very long time since I watched that. I might rewatch it and review it someday, as I remember it was pretty funny. With the way her performance of Rio changed from the drama to the movie I realized that Rio must’ve actually been a pretty challenging role to play. While she pulled off the cocky attitude of someone just shaking her head at all these distressed women in front of her, her character got a whole new layer which was explored most successfully in the movie. To see her switch from giving Tamura the cold shoulder to actually clinging onto him, begging him not to give up on her was a big switch, and it just made me wonder all the more who the real Rio was. I also found it refreshing to have a main character who wasn’t actually that friendly. I believe she was a good person, but she’d closed herself off to that bright side just like she closed off the cleanliness of that bath tub with red tape. It’s tricky to gauge Rio’s true nature, although I definitely feel like the movie captured it better, also because that’s where she admits to Ito that she identifies with the four women – then again, the movie was Ito’s perspective so maybe that’s just how he wrote her as Woman E🤯. In any case, it was interesting having such an unfathomable main character for a change. She pulled the role off very well, in my opinion.
Tanaka Kei is one of my favorite Japanese actors, so I was very happy to see him here. I’ve seen him in a bunch of stuff, like Maou, Watashi ga Renai Dekinai Riyuu, Shinigami-kun, 5-ji Kara 9-ji Made, Good Morning Call, Hayako-sensei, Tokyo Tarareba Musume and Koi ga Heta demo Ikitemasu. He just has this natural charm about him, and I like his acting style. I think he was a very nice casting choice for Tamura. We don’t get to know much about Tamura throughout the show, only through a few flashbacks from Rio, and we get a little bit of insight into his workplace through the movie. I was personally very curious what the heck happened that he suddenly thought it was a good idea to announce his upcoming marriage after just sleeping with Rio at a hotel one night. His wife is never mentioned or shown, and we only just see Rio’s closed-off bitterness about it. I kind of liked how Kuzuken was the one who confronted her about her unresolved feelings for Tamura, because otherwise we wouldn’t have known how much it was actually still bothering her.
Rio’s perspective on Tamura in one particular scene was depicted in three different ways: in the first episode they’re at Rio’s house and he stands next to her while she’s looking at a framed Tokyo Doll House poster and he leans in a bit to say that he’d like them to work ‘together’ again. In the repetition of this scene in the second episode, this nudge and lean-in seems to be a little bit closer. In the movie, they’re talking in an office and he’s sitting next to her on a couch and very closely leans in to her while he says it. It just seems like every time this scene is replayed (in Rio’s head, maybe?) he comes a little bit closer, and if that was indeed intentional then I applaud that subtle detail. Honestly, these tiny differences and inconsistencies just made me feel like everything was deliberate and if I’m right about that, then I’m even more impressed by how everything was thought out by the writers. I liked seeing Tanaka Kei in this, and I’m undoubtedly going to see more of his acting again in the future.
I thought I recognized Sasaki Nozomi from something, but from the Japanese dramas I’ve seen so far she’s only appeared in Hayako-sensei, and I don’t actually remember her from there. I think she did a very good job portraying Tomomi, mostly her hopelessness. I don’t mean that in any negative way in terms of her acting, but Tomomi was just a very pitiful lady who didn’t even realize she was being walked all over because she simply refused to see the guy she pledged her heart to as the least trustworthy guy you could imagine. He gaslighted her for being too considerate and desperate to help him whenever she tried to do something nice for him, and still she kept turning up whenever he called for her. It’s scary that some men can have this kind of power over women, all the more when we see he has the exact same effect on Miki. I think deep down Tomomi knew that she wasn’t in the wrong, but his grip on her was just too strong and made her disregard every mean thing he’d ever said. She convinced herself that his mansplaining was truly meant to educate her and make her a better person because he cared for her, etc. It was honestly interesting to see a character like her, a proper doormat, purely because it was so realistic. I liked to see what happened to her character because it stood in such stark contrast with how romantic relationships in dramas are usually romanticized, and that’s exactly what Tomomi was doing, despite everything. Any person with a normal brain would be able to realize that he wasn’t treating her well and that he was using her to his own convenience, but it also made me sympathize with Tomomi because she really got herself stuck in a position she couldn’t get out of. I’m just glad Ito eventually left her alone and she managed to find it in herself to resist seeing him again. I thought she performed a very convincing Tomomi and I liked how she balanced her oblivious naivety with a hidden layer of sad awareness.
I don’t think I’ve seen Shida Mirai in anything before either, although again it feels like I have, lol. Anyways, I found her a really nice casting choice for Shuuko, all the more because appearance-wise you wouldn’t expect her to be the girl Ito would dump Tomomi for. Shuuko is very small and doesn’t dress in a very appealing way – her stylist roomie Maki is often criticizing her for not dressing more fancily – and she has a classic bob cut hairstyle. Looking at all the women Ito dealt with, I found it kind of surprising he developed a crush on Shuuko, of all people. Not to say anything negative about her character though, because it was very refreshing to at least have one woman in there who didn’t want anything to do with relationships, who was even appalled by the idea of being treated like a small, cute thing that needed to be protected by a guy. Despite her tendency to avoid her problems and ask other people to get her out of situations so she could just quietly disappear without facing the consequences – I mean, I can’t say I don’t relate but it’s just not always the best way to deal with stuff – I still thought it was a powerful aspect of her character that she kept following her own path. Yes, Ito bothered her and it annoyed her and she did eventually have to confront him to wipe the idea of getting closer to her out of his head, but after that she got her act together and she even got that super expensive bag to complete her job interview look. I thought she was a very interesting character, very individualistic in contrast to the other three. I liked Shida Mirai’s performance, it was very natural how she portrayed Shuuko’s discomfort with the whole situation.
What is it with familiar-looking Japanese actors that I actually haven’t seen before? Ikeda Elaiza is the same again, I feel like I know her face but there’s not a single show I’ve seen her in before. I found out she’s actually Filipino-Japanese and she’s also a model. I was impressed with how naturally the flirting side of Satoko came out for her. Sometimes when an actress has to flirt it just come across as awkward, but the way she pulled it off really surprised me, I mean, she freaking licked Yamada Yuki’s nose, lol. I found Satoko an interesting character because, as I mentioned, I never fully understood what exactly her intentions were. I wanted to believe she cared about Miki most of all, but what she pulled with Ito was really not it, even if it was just to show Miki that he was the same as any other guy. Rio kept believing that she didn’t want Miki to become happier in love than her, but I think we can establish that Satoko was anything but happy in love. She kept ending up in empty beds after one-night stands and she hadn’t been able to feel real love yet, which made her quite sad in her own way. The way she stood up for Miki and bashed Ito into the ground with that phone call when he called her to say he’d fallen for her definitely seemed to mean something in terms of her prioritizing Miki’s feelings. I just couldn’t help but feel like she felt bad about what she did, after she broke down crying like that. I feel like, encouraged by Rio’s suggestion, she’d temporarily convinced herself that she was sleeping with Ito only to show her best friend what a scumbag he was, but maybe she did feel some sort of rush in the fact that she could steal him from her for a bit? All in all it didn’t seem to me like she was personally interested in Ito whatsoever, in fact she was the one who left the hotel room as soon as he went to take a shower, leaving the empty bed for the other person to wake up in, so to say. The whole thing is just that everything the women told Rio had to be taken with a grain of salt, because none of them were actually completely honest about their own feelings. It made it really tricky to gauge everyone’s true intentions, but I couldn’t help feel that Satoko really cared about Miki. This also showed when Miki came to the tart shop to order two cherry tarts in a way to say, I forgive you, I presume. I thought her performance as Satoko was very convincing.
My favorite girl, Kaho! I’ve seen her before in Otomen, Nobunaga Concerto, Love Song, most recently in First Love: Hatsukoi, and also in the movie Umimachi Diary (Our Little Sister). It feels like I know her from more, though, but maybe it’s just because she’s such a familiar face. I really liked her portrayal of Miki, it’s like I always see a new side of her acting with every project she takes on. In other shows she’s portrayed more confident, casual and shady characters, but Miki really was exactly the way Satoko initially describes her: as pure as can be. On the other hand, she’s also the kind of girl who’s easy to take advantage of, and although I’m not exactly sure of Ito’s true feelings for her (as we’ve established we can’t trust Ito on anything), I’m more than sure that he didn’t care as much about her as Kuzuken did. Honestly, if only she’d chosen Kuzuken. The way he treated her and made her feel at ease right before they were supposed to sleep together was so sweet, and you could feel that Kuzuken really cared about her and wanted to make her feel loved and comfortable, even if she didn’t feel a personal romantic connection with him. The hotel room scene was kind of painful to watch because it was so wry how excited Miki became when she heard Ito was coming, how she just immediately got dressed again and touched up her make-up and Kuzuken was just standing there like, ‘…for real?’ I just rooted so much for Kuzuken at that point that I really felt his gut-wrenching disappointment with him. But I think Kaho portrayed Miki really well, also in the naïve parts where you just wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she saw sense. Instead she kept defending Ito and putting herself down so he wouldn’t feel bad about himself, exactly like Tomomi. It was hard to watch at times, but I really liked Kaho in this, she was super cute. I hope to see much more of her in the near future!
I actually knew Nakamura Tomoya from Hajimete Koi wo Shita Hi ni Yomu Hanashi which I saw not too long ago and I recognized him because I remember he was my favorite guy in that and he also keeps somehow reminding me of Choi Daniel🤔(and I mean that in the best way possible). Maybe he’s just my type, lol. Anyways, I really loved him as Kuzuken. He was that goofy, casual guy that seemed like he was just playing around most of the time, but as soon as the part with Miki came I was like🥺🥺because he was just so sweet with her. I also loved that they fleshed out his character a bit more in the movie, especially through that scene with him and Rio where he confronted her with the fact that she couldn’t write anymore because she never got any closure for her feelings toward Tamura after he ‘tossed her aside’ and how she was now trying to destroy Ito and his proposal only to secure her own position as famous senior screenwriter even though she couldn’t produce anything new. The movie gave his character much more depth and I really appreciated that. Honestly, I’ve only seen him in a show twice now but Nakamura Tomoya is already rising in my favorite Japanese actors list, I thought his acting was really good here.
As everyone in this cast, I thought I knew Yamashita Rio from something, but I don’t. I thought she was a really nice addition to the cast as Shuuko’s bestie Maki and I was glad that her character got a bit more screentime when she went to that concert with Tomomi and they had a nice time together afterwards. She seemed like a really nice and fun-to-hang-out-with person. I also completely understood how, despite the sacrifices she was willing to make, at some point she wanted Shuuko to fix her own stuff and stop relying on others so much, even though in this case she was the one who suggested taking over the concert tickets herself. I completely understood how something that seemed like a simple solution suddenly became such a messy web of people manipulating each other that she wisely chose to step away from it, even though that meant temporarily leaving her friend to fend for herself. Which, I mean, Shuuko definitely needed to do, so no hard feelings to Maki there. I liked her character and performance a lot.
A special mention goes out to Yamada Yuki even though he wasn’t actually an official character in the story. He was the male lead from Tokyo Doll House that was displayed everywhere, but he never actually appeared as himself, only as Rio’s visualization of Woman C’s Ito. Still, I really liked his performance. I’ve only seen Yamada Yuki before in Itazura na Kiss and coincidentally in the movie Strobe Edge the other day. I see he was also in the movie Shoplifters, but I don’t remember him from there (it’s a very good movie, though, sasuga Koreeda-kantoku). I know that lately he’s been gaining more popularity so I’m sure I’ll see more of him in the near future, but for now I just want to say that I really liked his performance of Ito #C, and also how closely his performance mimicked Okada Masaki’s when he got to play the scene with Satoko himself in the movie. The weird excitement about losing his virginity to a more experienced girl, the make-out scenes, they were really good. I liked seeing him in this.
And then, last but certainly not least, Okada Masaki. It’s funny because I’ve always liked him as an actor and thought he was super cute, but here for the first time he really creeped me out, lol. I guess that’s just how good of an actor he is. I remember the first time I saw him was in the original version of HanaKimi (2007 OG crew right here🤟🏻), Otomen (where he and Kaho were the main leads, actually) and I’ve also seen him in the movie adaptation of Boku no Hatsukoi wo Kimi ni Sasagu (which I also referred to in my review of the drama) and the movie Drive My Car which came out not too long ago and I actually got to watch in the cinema. Okada Masaki has such a refreshing versatility about him, I remember in Otomen he was this super sweet and awkward guy, and then as Ito he turned that awkwardness into a completely different, almost manical kind. I had to give it to him that despite the fact that Ito was definitely a douchebag, he did back his own case very well, to the point of it being obnoxious, haha. Anyways, I was glad to see this side of Okada Masaki’s acting, and it was nice to see him flesh out his character even more in the movie. It was just nice to see him in this.
Overall, I liked this one more than I’d expected, especially because the movie was such an unexpected addition to it. It worked really well to start out with the drama from Rio’s point of view and then bring in the movie led by the real Ito and the story as it really happened in chronological order. For that alone it gets bonus points, haha. I guess its only flaw would be that it’s still relatively short and there’s still a lot to uncover about all the characters. I feel that even with the addition of the movie, we’ve only scratched the surface of all the characters. As much as I accepted Rio for as much as we got to know about her, I still would’ve liked to get more insight into her true feelings, and this also went for Tamura. I was happy that the movie at least gave us a couple of flashbacks into how they first met, but there could still have been more. The taped-shut bath tub thing was much bigger than it was made out to be as well, and even though at least that element was overcome at the end, I still felt like there was a lot left to resolve when it came to Rio’s feelings.
It doesn’t happen often that I find every character equally interesting, whether they’re ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but here, every character was written in such a clever and original way and it was cool how all the stories just came together, even though the women all remain oblivious of the fact that they’re all consulting Rio about the same Ito. The writing and the cinematography were original and powerful, and I really liked the cast and the acting. As I watched it I felt like I’d discovered a hidden gem and a very nice surprise of a show! I’m glad I got to watch it, and, as I said, it even contributed to my homework assignment so, two birds with one stone!
Next up is another Netflix J-Drama and I assume it’s going to be pretty short as well, so it’ll probably not take me too long to be back with my next review. Until then, bye-bee! x
