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

Saiai
(最愛 / Dearest)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello! I want to say ‘Happy start of autumn season!’, but it’s still like mid-summer where I am, with temperatures of around 30 degrees Celsius, so it feels weird to say it’s already September. Anyways, to start on my end-of-year batch of watch items, I would like to share this review with you. I took a bit longer to finish this show compared to the past couple of series I watched. I’m about to start a new semester AND a new part-time job next week, so from now on it’ll also probably take me longer to finish shows and reviews, sorry in advance. I liked watching this show because it really made me feel like I was watching it as I would on Japanese TV. The type of story and the pace of it was different than Japanese dramas I usually watch, and that was interesting for me. I have to say in advance that, although I thought the build-up and storytelling was pretty good and it kept me guessing what the real truth behind everything was until the very end, it still lacked a certain spark for me to get really excited about it. I was interested, but not invested, per se. Nevertheless, I want to make this a worthwhile review as always, so please bear with me!

Saiai is a 10-episode Japanese drama that I personally watched on my local Netflix, but which was originally broadcasted on the TBS network (the Tokyo Broadcasting System). Each episode has a duration of about 45 minutes. The perspective of the show is interesting in itself, because although you could say the story is mainly about Sanada Rio (played by Yoshitaka Yuriko) and her drive to develop a medicine that can cure her younger half-brother’s cognitive condition, you could also say that we follow her through the lens of her hometown friend/crush Miyazaki Daiki (played by Matsushita Kouhei). That’s how the story starts anyway, with Daiki’s narration about how things turned out so messed up with Rio, his teenage crush. I’d say it follows both of their perspectives, but as they both don’t have all pieces of the truth, there’s a lot to fill in. In any case, the story in itself spans over 15 years, from 2006 to 2021, and it includes a couple of crime cases to which the main characters, especially Rio’s family, seem to be related.

I have to say from the start that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I’d only seen part of the trailer on Netflix and just assumed that it would be another dramatic romance story. I certainly didn’t expect it to be a police detective drama, so that was an interesting surprise.
The story goes back and forth between three different years: 2006, 2012 and 2021. The first inciting incident happens in 2006, when Rio is still living as Asamiya Rio with her father Tatsuo (Mitsuishi Ken) and her -at the time- nine-year-old half-brother Yuu (Hiiragi Hinata) in the prefecture Gifu. Her father runs a dormitory for the athletic track team of the local Shiroyama University, to which Daiki also belongs. As Rio and Yuu are constantly around at the dormitory, helping their father out there, they’re basically ‘part of the team’ and they always eat together with the college students and get along with them.
An important thing to note is that Yuu suffers from a condition where he loses his memory after intense events or emotional outbursts. This condition was caused by a nasty fall on the head at the playground, which caused a diffuse axonal injury. Sometimes, when Yuu gets worked up or gets into a fight with a classmate, he ends up forgetting about what happened afterwards. Rio, who partly blames herself because she just happened to be looking the other way when he fell, has become determined to study medicine in Tokyo and develop a cure for Yuu’s condition.
At the same time, there is something going on between Rio and Daiki, as well. It’s like they both know that they like each other, but they keep putting off the moment when they’ll actually tell each other how they feel. Rio plans on telling Daiki after she passes her entry exam to study in Tokyo, but then Daiki says he wants to be the first to tell her, and so it keeps getting postponed, even though there is undeniably something there.
The inciting incident in question takes place in September 2006, when father Tatsuo has given Daiki a ride in his truck to Osaka so he can attend his sister’s wedding there. That night, a typhoon strikes and while most of the college students are secretly getting high on weed upstairs, Rio is cornered in the dorm kitchen by a guy named Watanabe Kousuke (Asai Daichi). When she wakes up later that night, she doesn’t have any memory of what happened, but her father is already back and acting strange and she even finds her own sweater tucked away somewhere, covered in blood. No one wants to tell her what’s going on, she has no memory of anything and Watanabe Kousuke has vanished from the face of the earth. He’s reported missing and his father, Watanabe Akira (Sakou Yoshi), even comes to the dormitory desperate to get answers about what happened to his son, but no one knows about his whereabouts. Not long after that, right on the day of Rio’s entrance exam, her father Tatsuo suddenly passes away from a subarachnoidal haemorrhage. After her father’s funeral, a man named Kase Kenichiro (played by Iura Arata) suddenly turns up, with the intention of taking Rio with him to Tokyo, to reunite her with her mother and the rest of the Sanada family. She decides to go with him and bid Daiki and her hometown farewell. She leaves Yuu behind with their grandmother but they keep in close contact.

As Rio joins her mother’s family and becomes Sanada Rio, her life changes completely. While her mother Azusa (Yakushimaru Hiroko) seems most happy to see her again, her older brother Masanobu (Okuno Eita) doesn’t want anything to do with her. Her mother wants her to start working for her company, Sanada Group, and Rio eventually becomes the CEO for Sanada Group’s medical care branch, Sanada Wellness, where she finally gets to work on the medicine for Yuu’s condition. She manages to keep her chin up since she’s still in close contact with Yuu and -occasionally- Daiki in Gifu, and when she finds a way to deal with Masanobu, things get a little easier on Rio’s side.

But then something happens that turns her world upside down. When she’s back in Gifu one time for a visit, Yuu tells her that he found a ‘scary video’ on his cellphone. He doesn’t remember recording it, and he asks Rio to watch it for him and delete it if it’s too scary. Turns out, this video contains shocking evidence of what happened during that stormy night in 2006 and it also allows Rio to recall some things that she’d rather not have remembered.
On that night in September 2006, the night of the typhoon, Rio was drugged by Watanabe Kousuke, and just when he was about to lay his hands on her while she was lying unconscious on the dorm kitchen floor, Yuu stumbled upon them while he was filming with his cellphone. In the struggle that followed, Yuu grabbed a random pipe to defend himself and accidentally stabbed Watanabe with it. Due to his condition Yuu lost all of his memories of it, and Rio realizes their father must’ve known about it, since he’d been holding onto Yuu’s phone after the incident, and he kept telling Rio not to worry about anything when she talked to him that night. Rio deletes the video and promises Yuu that she’ll always protect him.
Yuu ultimately comes over to Tokyo in 2012 when he’s 15, after their grandmother passes away. He stays with the Sanada family for a while, but then one day he disappears, leaving only an alarming note that he’s ‘remembered everything’. It doesn’t take long for Kase to reassure Rio that Yuu is safe and that her mother has made sure he’s in good hands, but that he doesn’t want to see her for a while. Rio still gets monthly postcards from him, but that’s it. Meanwhile she keeps working on the medicine, which is called SND-580.

Then, in 2021, fifteen years after Typhoon Night and the disappearance of Watanabe Kousuke, Watanabe Sr. is suddenly found dead in a pond in Shibaike Park. The marks on his body suggest a crime, and Daiki, who is now part of the Komazawa police force in Tokyo, is set on the case with his partner Kuwata Hitomi (Sakuma Yui). The case inevitably brings him back to Rio, and they meet again when Daiki goes in to ask her some questions because she was caught on CCTV having an encounter with Watanabe Sr. shortly before his body was found. As they reunite, questions start popping up again about both cases. While Rio is reunited with a now 24-year old Yuu (now played by Takahashi Fumiya), several hidden agendas within Sanada Group are revealed, Rio is being threatened by a journalist accusing her family’s company of fraud, and the police keeps tracing lead after lead to get to the bottom of both Watanabes’ cases, everyone continues to try to hold on to what’s most important to them, their own individual ‘saiai’.

One thing I liked about this show is that it came pretty much full-circle with the ‘saiai’ element, both as the title and the main theme of the story. I really felt that everything that happened was to protect Rio and Yuu, to make sure they would be able to live happily together and for Yuu to get the chance to be cured. Everything that was done came from a devotion to protect what the ‘culprits’ held dearest. I say ‘culprits’ but I’m not just referring to the people who were directly responsible for a murder. I’m also referring to the people who were compliant in hushing things up. Everyone was guilty in a way, be it directly or indirectly. Some people took the blame to protect others, some hid the truth to protect others, some directly silenced people to protect others. I really found myself judging each ‘crime’ in terms of whether I really saw it as such. A couple of the deaths were actually accidents, but the involved people still became ‘criminals’ because they never spoke up about the truth, or actively hushed it up, even if it was to protect someone. Watanabe Kousuke was revealed to be a scumbag who’d already taken advantage of multiple young women by drugging them, so I couldn’t even feel bad about his death, and to hear his father say that he’d just been ‘joking around’ and the women ‘probably asked for it’ also made it hard for me to blame Kase for what he did to him. There were a lot of grey areas and I found it interesting to get such a different perspective on a police investigation case.
In hindsight, even with only ten episodes, I realize that there’s a LOT happening in this show, but the way they paced everything never gave me anxiety. I never felt like too much was happening at the same time, so that was good. I also liked that basically every episode ended with a little plottwist or the revelation of someone unexpected being involved in one of the cases. It kept me on my toes, so to say, even though I wasn’t as invested as I would’ve liked to be. They still managed to keep it engaging and thrilling whenever they found a new lead or introduced a new piece of evidence.

Let’s just get to the different cases and characters that are introduced in this show. I strive to at least cover all the people that are featured on the flyer above. Fun fact by the way, I learned about this in a class the other day, but has it occurred to anyone else before that Japanese flyers usually feature the main cast? Apparently that’s because in Japan, showcasing the main cast is the primary method to promote a drama series. People base their decision of whether or not to watch it on the main cast, and that’s why on Japanese drama flyers and posters, you’re bound to see at least part of the main cast introduced. In this case, the focus is undeniably on the main cast as well, but it also features some minor characters. Maybe they needed to fill up the space and therefore inserted some supporting characters? Who knows.
Anyways, on the poster we’ve got from top to bottom left to right: Watanabe Akira, Goto, Tachibana Shiori, Sanada Azusa, Rio, Kase, Yamao, Daiki, Tatsuo, Kuwata, Masanobu and Yuu.
As I’ve already talked about the Watanabe Kousuke case, let’s just start with talking about Sanada Group and the Sanada family. Just to clarify the family tree: Rio’s parents are Asamiya Tatsuo and Sanada Azusa, they are divorced. She shares the same mother with Masanobu and the same father with Yuu. We don’t learn anything about Masanobu’s and Yuu’s different mother and father, Rio sees them as her direct siblings without fussing too much about it.
Sanada Azusa is Sanada Group’s CEO. I honestly don’t really know what kind of group company it is, but it contains a lot of branches and companies and it’s a very influential corporation. One of the Group’s most loyal employees is Goto Shinsuke (played by Oikawa Mitsuhiro), and he was even in the running to take over the Group when Azusa’s husband was still running it. In any case, Goto is a very dedicated employee, Sanada Group is his home and he wants to protect it by all costs, so imagine his surprise when suddenly the inexperienced daughter of the CEO appears out of nowhere and gets promoted to the job he was supposed to get after so many years of loyal service. His loyalty to Azusa goes as far as that he’s actually been aiding her in some illegal donation fraud business, something that’s partly uncovered by a persistent female reporter named Tachibana Shiori (played by Tanaka Minami). Shiori is later indentified as another past victim of Watanabe Kousuke, the only victim who reported him to the police but got no response. Now she’s poking her nose around Sanada Group and even threatens Rio a couple of times by publishing articles in which she questions the credibility of the medicine she’s working on.
In the meantime, Rio is reunited with her now grown-up little brother Yuu, who even briefly worked as an informant for Goto only to make sure Rio was doing alright. When they reunite, he is initially reluctant to come back to her because he claims to also have been responsible for Watanabe Akira’s death – he has a video of strangling the old man and pushing him into the water, even though he himself doesn’t remember this. In Gifu, they find a video of their father Tatsuo confessing to the murder on Watanabe Kousuke, and giving instructions on where he buried the body. Yuu is taken in for questioning, but as he doesn’t remember his own actions, they can’t find any concrete proof. When new evidence pops up of Watanabe Sr. being seen alive after Yuu allegedly strangled him, the charges against Yuu are dropped and he goes to live with Rio and even agrees (after some debate) to undergo the trials for the SND-580 medicine. Rio couldn’t be happier as she’s approaching her dream of finally curing Yuu.
In the police office, captain Yamao Atsushi (played by Tsuda Kenjiro) takes issue with Daiki’s personal relationship with Rio, and wants him to use his connection to her for his work, without being distracted by his personal feelings for her. Daiki ultimately gets demoted because Kuwata reports his personal involvement with Rio and Yuu to the police force. Still, even after being demoted, Kuwata keeps asking Daiki for help in the case as she’s bent on solving it and they are not making much progress without him.
And then there are some other minor characters who are not on the poster, like Nagashima who was part of the Shiroyama track team and got caught for being in possession of weed the day after the typhoon, Aoki who was the track team’s manager and who had also been a victim of Watanabe Kousuke, and Fujii, a former friend of Daiki’s who also works in investigation (I believe?) and who is also doing his own research about the 2006 case. To be fair, I would’ve probably switched Yamao with Fujii on the poster, because despite being a minor character, I think in the end Fujii had a slightly more significant role than Yamao did. But hey, that’s just my opinion.

Now that I try to summarize it all I realize how many things were actually going on at the same time, and I apologize if it’s not written down very coherently – I might get back to it later and polish it up a bit. Let’s just say there is a lot of controversy about Rio, about her alleged involvement in a disappearance/murder case, how she’s making an advanced new medicine and how her family’s company is involved in fraudulous business. It becomes increasingly hard for her to determine who she can trust, and she even starts doubting her own mother at some point. The only people she feels like she can trust are Yuu, Daiki and Kase, but the end of the show reveals that, despite his genuine care for Rio and her family, Kase also definitely has more skeletons in his closet than he lets on.

Let’s do some brief character analyses, because there are a lot of complicated feelings between many of the characters and I think the series established a couple of interesting points of view for everyone.
Rio has always been very bright, smart and cheerful. When we first meet her through Daiki’s eyes, we see her charm immediately. She’s always in good spirits and she does everything for her little brother Yuu. It’s not easy for her to leave Gifu, the track team, Yuu and Daiki behind to move to Tokyo, but her determination to make a difference and help others like Yuu with cognitive conditions is stronger than anything. Even through all the events that happen in the story, she always ends up going back to the lab to keep working, and when they finally get the green light for the completed medicine in the final episode, I was personally also really happy for her, because this is what she’s working on the entire time. When I first saw how she changed after becoming the Sanada Wellness CEO, when Daiki meets her again as an adult, I was a bit scared that she’d put on a mask – she initially pretends she doesn’t recognize Daiki, she’s acting a bit tough saying she doesn’t know anything and has never seen Watanabe Kousuke before. But I’m glad she got back to him afterwards like, ‘sorry about how I acted earlier, I’m not in a position to just freely chat like friends’. As in, she explained her situation to him to make it up to him. Even though she’d definitely become more rigid and careful, the old Rio was still in there, and her feelings for Daiki remained unchanged as well. I really liked the scene where they basically tough-confessed to each other that they never pictured anyone else to have a future with, that was really sweet. There isn’t any physical intimacy between them except for the hand holding, they never even kiss, but the scenes in which they’re chatting and snacking together made it more than clear how they felt about each other. I was scared she’d push Daiki away and keep rejecting his advances, but it was nice how despite her occasionally distanced attitude she was still like, ‘I feel the same way, you know’, in such a matter-of-factly way.
I’m also really happy that they didn’t create any funny chemistry between her and Kase. At some point I felt like they might’ve headed in that direction, where Kase’s brotherly feelings actually became something more, but luckily it never went there.

We first meet Kase as a sort of ‘mystery man’ at the funeral of Rio’s father. Once in Tokyo, mother Azusa introduces him to Rio as ‘part of the family’ and ‘someone she can entrust with anything’. He’s basically the Sanada Group lawyer, but he also becomes like a kind of personal bodyguard to Rio. While he remains a bit mysterious throughout the series, his genuine heart for Rio and Yuu is undeniable and he does whatever he can to bring them together and make sure they are safe. After Rio he’s probably the person who is the happiest when the news reaches him that the medicine has been approved. He goes after everyone who might endanger or bring harm to them. To negotiate, not threaten. Even when the things he’s done are revealed, I couldn’t bring myself to dislike him because it was so clear that he had a good heart and only wanted to help the people placed under his protection.
In the end, just when the police realize his involvement in all the crime cases, he disappears and escapes the judicial consequences of his ‘criminal’ involvement. I say ‘criminal’ because, as I mentioned before, Kase was one of those people who made me really question what ‘being involved in a crime’ entailed, exactly. We ultimately find out that father Tatsuo met up with him on the night of the typhoon in 2006 to ask him to take care of Rio’s college fees, and they went back to Gifu together after they received nine-year-old Yuu’s panic-call that he’d stabbed someone. Back at the dormitory, Tatsuo stopped Kase from calling an ambulance and he ended up helping him bury Watanabe Kousuke’s body and hush the whole thing up. In that, he may have been an accomplice in hiding evidence from the police, but he wasn’t actually directly involved in the crime.
Now Watanabe Sr.’s case is different because Kase did actually murder him. He wasn’t going to, he was actually going to call him an ambulance and take him to the police station as he asked, but then the old man let slip that he knew Yuu had killed his son and he started saying all those things about how Kousuke had no fault in anything, he was just playing games with those women and they had it coming, etcetera, and then Kase was like, ‘welp now you’ve changed my mind’. Of course it’s still not good to commit murder even if the victim is a scumbag, but it just plays with your perspective in a tricky way because after hearing that I was also like, ‘wow, well, you can swim around in that pond for a while longer for all I care’. Thirdly, he confronted Tachibana Shiori and tried to convince her not to publish the article about the donation fraud, not right before the approval of SND-580, and in an attempt to grab the pamphlets from her hand, she tumbled backwards over the railing. Shiori’s death was definitely a tragic accident, but Kase was guilty of not calling 911 and just leaving her there. When you look at these three deeds, and think about how he did everything to protect Rio from getting her medicine project taken away from her and Yuu from being convicted of second-degree murder as a child, how ‘guilty’ does that truly make him? I think it’s tricky. It can’t be denied that he broke the law and that’s still something to be convicted for. But I don’t know, I just couldn’t see him as a bad guy or a criminal, for some reason.

Seeing Rio’s unconventional family tree, one might think that Azusa may have had other intentions of bringing Rio over to Tokyo, because why would she suddenly be interested in keeping her daughter by her side whom she hadn’t contacted for years? Especially when introduced to Masanobu, my first thought was whether this was really a joint decision from the Sanada family, because he certainly didn’t seem happy about it. Azusa, on the other hand, seemed very happy to have Rio back and immediately trusted her enough to take on part of her company. During all the events, Azusa is often depicted as a spectator, someone who keeps an eye on Rio and how she reacts to certain things, but she always manages to stay relatively calm about everything. She maintains good relations with Goto, with Kase, with everyone. When the truth about the donation fraud slush fund comes out, she suddenly surprises everyone by sacrificing her own position and making a public announcement that she alone is responsible for committing fraud, but that no member of her family has ever been involved in any murder case. With this, she tries to get the bad publicity off of Rio, to enable her to keep developing the medicine, even if it costs her her own career. I think that, despite Azusa’s much-left-to-be-desired behavior as a mother in Rio’s life, this definitely proved how much she trusted her daughter. I liked Azusa because she had a bit of a mysterious edge about her, and though I initially thought she was kind of an unexpected baddy, being all like, ‘we donated that slush fund money to charity, it’s all ever been for a good cause’, in the end I did feel like she was also just trying to do what she could to protect her family.

As one of the people most effected by Azusa’s sacrifice, I found Goto’s character development very interesting, although I have to say he became a bit too dramatic for me at some point. He starts out as this typical, almost anime-like villain, with the slanted eyes, the tight mouth, the cold behavior and the evil smirk when he gets his way at Rio’s expense. But once Shiori starts getting on his case about the fraud, he suddenly becomes super shifty and even tries to run away. Despite having played an active role in the donation fraud business alongside Azusa, Goto is truly dedicated to his work at Sanada Group, he sees the company as the only place he’ll ever belong. At first he’s suspected of being involved in Shiori’s death, but as he so aptly says to Rio in the final episode, ‘I’m capable of hiding iniquities, but not of murder.’ Though he seems to be a bit of a cold opportunist in the beginning, throughout the show his devotion to Azusa and the company becomes more apparent and in a way, that redeemed him for me a little bit.

I found it a real pity that Shiori had to die, because she just came clean to Rio, they just had a good talk and it’s not even like her death stopped the article from coming out, because that still got published by her colleague afterwards. It feels weird to say because it was sad either way, but I was strangely relieved that she wasn’t murdered, at least. This series had a lot of events made out to be crimes that turned out to be (partly) accidents, and I found that an interesting approach.
Of course you can’t keep out the press and the media in cases like this, certainly when the plots keep thickening. Shiori really seemed to be a bit of a reckless reporter in that she didn’t show any fear and just poked her nose where it didn’t belong. She even got assaulted and tied up in the back of a car once before being rescued by Goto (of all people).
The flashback of her at that training camp when she tried to reach out to Rio for help while Watanabe Kousuke was dragging her drugged body away was heartbreaking, and yet that’s the most fragile we ever see her in the entire show. She was a tough cookie who, like Aoki also, refused to see herself as a victim and who just wanted to do some good in the world and be praised for that.
I remember the scene in the final episode when Daiki was talking to Shiori’s mother after Shiori’s funeral had passed. Her mother expressed her regret of informing the police of her daughter’s single suicide attempt in college, because now they immediately went ‘well, she did try to commit suicide before…’ and tried to brush it off as that. It was just really sad what happened to Shiori, she was really just trying to find her place in the world.

Daiki is the kind of guy who’ll never show his soft side to anyone, not even to the people he’s close with. Even with Rio, though it’s obvious how much he loves her, when he tries to talk sweetly to her it’s just super tsundere and I loved it, haha. But what I found really characteristic of him, and that’s something that’s pointed out to him by others a couple of times as well, is that he just can’t help himself digging into something. Even when the 2006 case should’ve already been closed and finalized, he couldn’t help himself to still visit old acquaintances and ask them questions. It’s just a thing he does, something he has inside him, and that’s what makes him very suitable for the police detective work. It makes him very dedicated and reliable. I get that it was tricky for his team to let him stay on the case after discovering what his (past) connection to Rio and Yuu was, though. Isn’t there an actual rule for that? That you can’t be linked to cases you have some sort of connection with because it can cloud your judgement? In any case, I found it brave of him to just keep doing his own research even after being demoted, because he was not going to give up.
I really liked his dynamic with Kuwata too, and her running gags of using hand cream and the way everyone kept saying her name wrong. Kuwata was also very humane in that no matter how much she understood Daiki’s position and his feelings towards Rio, she still couldn’t condone it from a professional perspective, and it was the right thing to do to report that. Daiki himself didn’t even blame her for it, and I think that also showed how close they were as partners. Kuwata just couldn’t stand how Yamao was dealing with the case and that he even at some point got promoted and just left it unfinished. I loved how Kuwata just straight-out declared she would never do something like that and how she’d see the case through until the end, even if she had to do it all by herself.

I also liked how they didn’t end up making Yuu a complete victim in everything. From my perspective, he was not accountable for the murder on Watanabe Kousuke, first of all because it was an accident and second of all because it was self-defense and he didn’t even remember what he’d done afterwards. He only kept pleading guilty because he’d seen himself on that video, and in the case of Watanabe Sr., even this video turned out to be inconclusive evidence, because the old man turned out to be alive after that footage. I think it was really sad but also really brave of Yuu that he was willing to turn himself in. He was convinced he’d done those things and he needed to be punished for them, and he was willing to face the consequences. Rio always treated him like her little brother, but he became so mature. He even decided to become a lawyer like Kase so that he could also start protecting people. When the charges against him were dropped for the Watanabe Sr. case, the way they started living together so peacefully and happily was really sweet. All in all I really loved the dynamic between the siblings, they meant the world to each other and Rio really went so far as to create a whole new freaking medicine to cure his rare condition. Their relationship was the dearest of the dearest and therefore I think the title applies to them the best.

Regarding the soundtrack, I love me a good Utada Hikaru song. I’m always happy to hear Utada Hikaru songs in Japanese dramas because it takes me back to the old HYD days, to ‘Flavor of Life’ and those kinds of classic drama OSTs. ‘Kimi ni Muchuu’ was no exception. I also liked the suspenseful track ‘Saiai’ by Yokoyama Masaru, it always added an edge to an already thrilling situation.

I think with this I’ve covered most of my thoughts about the characters and the cases in this story. I really hope it all reads coherently, as I was getting things jumbled up a little bit while writing this review. Anyways, let’s get to the cast comments!

I’ve seen Yoshitaka Yuriko before in Tokyo DOGS (major throwback, by the way), Watashi ga Renai Dekinai Riyuu and Tokyo Tarareba Musume, and I know that there are at least two other dramas with her on my watch list. I really like her as an actress. I think she’s especially great at showing off her bright side, I love her smile and the energy she gives off. I think this was the most serious role I’ve seen her play so far. While I personally found it a bit of a pity that ‘the old Rio’ didn’t come out as much after becoming an adult, and she remained a bit distant even with Daiki, I think she did a good job of portraying Rio’s multiple layers. She was very determined to work for what she held dearest, and it was very satisfying to see her accomplish her goal in the final episode. Despite having peace with her relationship with Daiki the way it was, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t the tiniest bit disappointed that there wasn’t a kiss, haha. On the other hand, romance wasn’t the main focus of this story, and it would’ve maybe become a completely different series if they’d suddenly started making out, so maybe it was for the better like this. I loved the way the series ends with a shot of the two of them visiting walking back hand-in-hand after visiting the Asamiya family grave together and how the scene just morphed into the final screen with the characters for ‘saiai’. That also made me think that their love for each other was a very important ‘saiai’ in the story. I really want to watch more shows with Yoshitaka Yuriko because I really like her. I hope I can get to one of those watch list items soon!

I don’t believe I’ve seen Matsushita Kouhei in anything before, but I really liked him as ‘Dai-chan’. I just liked the way he portrayed the character so realistically and never became cringy, even in the scenes where he was most definitely flustered because of Rio. He’s also really handsome, in my opinion. I just liked how he seemed to be this really laid-back don’t-bother kind of guy, but when it came to people he cared about, he really went all the way and did whatever he could to help them out. I think I liked him the most in his dynamics with Rio, Kuwata and little Yuu. It was just really sweet how he would suddenly open up and start cracking jokes when he was with his childhood friends. As I said, I wouldn’t have minded at least one little kiss between him and Rio, because I felt that once she would give him the green light, he would not be able to hold himself back, lol. It was really sweet that he wanted to protect her until the end, even after Kase disappeared and he never told her how the case was wrapped up. I loved how, when Rio was like, ‘I think I have a pretty good idea about Kase-san’, he still went like, ‘what could you possibly mean?🤔’. I don’t know, there was just this understanding between them that they played out very well. I hope I can see more of his shows in the future!

Is it just me or is Iura Arata in almost every single Netflix J-Drama I watch these days? I know him from Rich Man Poor Woman, Tantei no Tantei, Unnatural, and this year I saw him in First Love: Hatsukoi and The Makanai. He’s always a very steady actor and I believe this may be one of the most ‘dear’ roles I’ve seen him in so far. I remember really liking his role in The Makanai too, so maybe I just like it when he plays a ‘kind’ character, haha. I’m used to seeing him in kind of villainy roles, so seeing him being nice is like a relief, haha. That’s the thing, no matter what role he plays, he always shows something new that I haven’t seen him do before, and I like that a lot. Here too, even though he was revealed to have secrets in the end, it’s not like he was suddenly revealed to be the typical ‘it was me all along muhaha’ type of villain; I still had sympathy for his character even though he committed some crimes, and that’s all because he portrayed Kase as such a genuinely kind man. You come to love him because he loves Rio and Yuu so much. I really liked his performance here.

Not trying to fangirl here or anything, but Takahashi Fumiya is such a gorgeous boy. He was only 20 when this drama aired! To be honest I just knew he was Yuu from the moment they introduced him as Goto’s informant, althought I did wonder at first why he would spy on his sister. Anyways, he was adorable. Both as the puppy-eyed ‘what do I do’ Yuu as the more confident and independent Yuu he became after he started living with Rio. I also loved how he basically shipped Rio and Daiki and kept trying to get them to make up and talk together. I haven’t seen anything with Takahashi Fumiya before, but the way he smiled somehow reminded me of Kang Tae Oh, so I guess it just felt like I’d seen him before, lol. I really liked how he managed to portray Yuu as someone who’d become a victim of his own condition, but without making the character become pathetic. I have at least one other Netflix J-Drama with him on my watch list, so I hope I get to see more of his acting soon!
Adding to this, I want to also mention Hiiragi Hinata, who played the nine-year old Yuu. This little boy stole my heart, for real. His scenes with Yoshitaka Yuriko as his big sister and Matsushita Kouhei as his (basically) big brother-in-law were incredibly sweet. He did an amazing job channelling the fear going through Yuu on that typhoon night, how he was just sitting curled up in a corner screaming while his father and Kase were trying to think of a way to save this precious child from conviction. I was really impressed by his performance, seriously, Japanese child actors are going places!

I feel like I should recognize Yakushimaru Hiroko from more, but I think I’ve only seen her as Satomi-chan’s mother in Unnatural before. I thought she was a really nice casting choice for Rio’s mother, and I also liked how her character remained original in its own way. In a more typical story, the mother would’ve actually been evil or something, you know. I liked that Azusa really didn’t have anything to do with any of the murder cases, and that she had the guts and the decency to stand up for her own fraudulous business if that meant it could save her daughter’s and her family’s reputation as a whole. She may not have been the warmest mother to Rio in terms of emotional support, but she definitely showed her daughter how to be strong and how important it is to be able to rely on family. I thought she performed very well, also in keeping Azusa’s hidden agenda a mystery for so long before the truth finally came out.

I know now why Oikawa Mitsuhiro gave me the creeps from the get-go: he was the predator teacher in the 2016 Erased movie! Other than that I probably recognize him from the movie Love Like the Falling Petals, which I watched recently, but I don’t remember which character he played (whoops). Anyways, apart from those two movies I haven’t seen him in a drama series before. I think he was the only actor in this series whose acting started bothering me a little bit at some points. He was such a typical character with his poker face and constant dead-glare, that it was just weird to suddenly see him make exaggerated expressions, or even to see him smile. I don’t know, it just seemed so out of character for him to suddenly become so lame after the fraud business got shut down. When he showed up at Azusa’s office looking all raggedy, it was such a stark contrast with how he usually walked those halls, with his back straight in his tight suit and his nose in the air. What did redeem him for me a little bit was that he came out with an honest explanation to Rio at the end. He had always simply acted out of his devotion for Sanada Group, that was all he knew and wanted to stay true to, and that in itself is an admirable thing. Of course, scamming old people in care homes out of their money is unforgiveable, and he knew that too, but it also felt like he had nowhere else to go. He was only ever loyal to his work and there is something to say for his sacrifice. I did feel a bit more compassion for him towards the end, when the whole frigid attitude made way for more self-reflection. I wonder if I’ll ever come across him in a drama where he plays a friendly character, that should be interesting to see!

I don’t know what it is about Tanaka Minami exactly, but something in her face reminds me of Lee Min Jung. Anyways, I haven’t seen her in any drama series before. Something I learned while looking her up on MDL was that she actually worked at TBS and she’s currently working as a freelance announcer herself, besides acting. Must be interesting to get to play a character who’s in a business that you’re personally familiar with! I liked Shiori, and I would’ve liked to get to know her a bit better. Because of the short duration of the show there isn’t that much time for elaborate back stories, and the most important information we get about her is that she fell victim to Watanabe Kousuke and had a dark period in college, but there was still a lot about her that could’ve been uncovered had she not been killed off. I still find that a pity, really. I found her a very intriguing character, especially after she reveals to Kase that she just wants to be acknowledged for doing something good in the world – where does that desire come from? She never expresses any interest in being acknowledged that much before, she even tells Goto that there’s nothing interesting about her and that he shouldn’t even bother helping her out. She was a character that I definitely would’ve liked to have more backstory. I really liked how she performed Shiori in her brazen, reckless kind of way.

I see that I’ve seen Sakuma Yui in the move Call Me Chihiro which I also watched not too long ago, yet I already have difficulty remembering her from there (my memory is literally the worst). First of all, she’s gorgeous. I really liked how she carried that androgynous look as seemingly being the only woman in the police force. They never show her wearing more feminine clothes either, and that really shaped her character for me, it gave the impression that she was comfortable in her own skin, and that was very cool about her. I loved that she wasn’t just Daiki’s sidekick, but that she actually started taking the lead in the case after he left the team. Her determination and loyalty towards both her job and Daiki, even when he was off the team, made her very likeable. It was also nice that they gave her some quirks, like always using hand cream and the fact that the entire team called her ‘Kuwako’ and she was always like ‘Kuwata desu😑’. I liked that she became more and more her own person throughout the story. I hope to see more of her acting!

Lastly, I just want to mention Tsuda Kenjiro because I kept wondering why he seemed (and sounded) so familiar, only to come to the realization that he’s one of my favorite voice actors🤯. I’ve never seen him appear in a drama or movie before, so it took me a while to make the connection! It was funny to see him appear here as Daiki’s police captain, although I still feel like his character was a bit too minor to put on the poster, lol. In any case, it was nice seeing him on-screen as a real person rather than just listening to his beautiful voice, haha.

Well then, I’ve covered the cast members that I wanted to comment on the most!
As I already shared in my introduction, while I liked this series as a whole -it was well-written, the acting and the story were good and it kept surprising me with new twists and pieces of evidence- it didn’t fill me with as much excitement as I would’ve liked. I’m not sure what it was, but it just lacked a certain spark for me to get really invested in the story. Although I think this was the right duration for the story to unfold and be wrapped up nicely, I still would’ve liked to get more closure, and sometimes things were kept purposely vague or mysterious for engaging reasons while I just wanted people to speak up, lol. What I did like was that the title fit the story so well, and that I really felt that every single character acted out of their own ‘saiai’, their own devotion to what was dearest and most important to them. The themes of different types of love, loyalty and commitment came through very clearly and it definitely had a powerful message. I personally really liked the love that existed between Rio, Yuu and Daiki, and also the loyalty and genuine fondness that Kase felt towards Rio and the Sanada family as a whole. It showed how everyone can be driven by their own dedication to something, whether it’s a person, a place or a career, and how far people are willing to go when it comes to protecting what’s dearest to them, even if it takes them down the dark path. I’m glad I gave it a chance, it was very interesting and original in its own way.

As I’m bound to get super busy the coming months, I’m not sure how much time I will have in-between to continue my watchlist, so I can’t promise when my next review will be out, but I’m definitely going to try to at least upload one review per month! Wish me luck, haha.

Goodbye for now! Bye-bee! x