Titles:
Japanese: それでも、生きてゆく. Soredemo, Ikite Yuku
English: "Still, I Will Live" or "Even So, We Will Be Living On"
Broadcast Year: 2011
Subtitled Episodes Available at: Ondramanice
Spoiler-free Synopsis:
Fifteen years ago a 12-year old village boy, Misaki Fumiya, killed the 7-ago sister, Fukami Aki, of his friend, Fukami Hiroki, while Hiroki was supposed to be watching his sister. Both families have been ravaged by the event in the intervening years: the Fukamis by their grief and the Misakis by harassment that has followed them even as they have moved and changed jobs to escape. The killer's younger sister, Toyama Futaba, tries to investigate the harassment and meets Hiroki, and the two then try to find Fumiya who has been released from juvenile detention and given a new identity and a job. The two families are uneasily brought together as they try to make sense of why it happened.
Crimes and Misdemeanors:
Murder, harassment, suicide, assault, attempted murder, attempted suicide
Awards: Best Drama, Best Lead Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Screen Writer
Cast:
The protagonist is Hiroki played by Eita who is also the lead in Sakamoto-sensei's The Great Divorce and the main antagonist in anone. All three roles are strikingly different to the point you might not realize it's the same actor which speaks volumes for his versatility.
The second lead is Futaba played by Mitsushima Hikari who also is the lead in Woman, one of the four members of the quartet in Quartet and has a guest role in Love That makes You Cry. She is certainly a great actress though she shows less range across these roles, though the quirky Suzume in Quartet is quite charming and different from the other two roles.
The antagonist is Fumiya played by Kazama Shunsuke who also has a small role in Mondai No Aru Restaurant.
Beyond Here There Be Spoilers:
One day while I was in grad school, I was taking a shower when Charles urgently knocked on the door of the bathroom saying, "I think Jeanette's brother is here." Charles cleared out of the house, and I dried off, put on my clothes and went downstairs to find that, indeed, Jeanette's brother was there, but it was her younger brother and not the one who had just murdered his ex-girlfriend on the streets of San Jose a few days before and was being sought by the police.
It did not occur to me as I watched Soredemo, Ikite Yuku (hereafter, SIY) that I had been on the margins of a similar tragedy for a brief period in my life. I certainly did not have any view into the consequences for the victim's family, but it did get to see how the media covered the story here, and I did get to know the consequences for Jeanette's family in the following couple of years.
SIY is probably the darkest of the eight series we will be examining here though it's resolution might be less heart-rending than that of Mother. It is important to note; however, that Sakamoto does not aim for bleakness. Most of the characters come through the narrative of his stories stronger and happier than they were before. There is genuine catharsis in his stories, and so there's always a blend of darkness and light in his work - the comedies are not entirely light as well as we shall see.
In this story, the set up is akin to Romeo and Juliet scaled down to smaller families and no political stakes. Hiroki and Futaba do grow closer through the course of the series, and were their circumstances different their love might have blossomed. In fact, their respective families reach a point that they all would approve. But in the end Futaba chooses to help atone for her brothers actions in a way that would not easily include Hiroki, and Hiroki accepts her decision. Hiroki and Futaba are far more mature than Romeo and Juliet and the attraction between them is far less intense.
You might also expect a redemption arc for the murderer Fumiya who has been working diligently for several years on a farm whose owner believes in rehabilitation and hires men and women released from the penal system. The central tragedy of SIY is that while almost everyone other than the Fukami family believes Fumiya can be redeemed and his relationship to his family and society restored, he does not believe so, and he is almost certainly a psychopath. Hiroki's father is certain Fumiya would kill again, tries to find Fumiya and kill him, and because he is dying of a terminal illness he has nothing to lose. When he fails to find Fumiya before he dies, he presses Hiroki to complete the revenge for the sake Aki and Fumiya's potential future victims. And the Fukami patriarch turns out to be absolutely correct.
Both Futaba and Hiroki actively plan to kill Fumiya in the course of the series as Fumiya's character is revealed, but they both do not want to see the other become a murderer. They hold each other up to a higher standard, and so this series is, indeed, a poignant if not romantic love story. In the moment of crisis Hiroki chooses saving a life over taking one, and while the consequences are, perhaps, harsher for both families it is the one that leads to the greatest growth and hope for all involved.
My brush with murder was a different story. Jeanette's family are highly conservative Christians who were part of a tight-knit, charismatic church community and her brother's victim had been claiming to their fellow church members that he raped her rather than admit they had had a perfectly normal consensual relationship. He killed her after she wrote him a note saying, okay, he did not rape her but with enough sarcasm to put him over the edge. Everyone else in Jeanette's family was, rightly, appalled and apologetic, and Jeanette and her younger brother appeared on the local news in front of our shared house to explain the story and express their grief and condolences to the family of the victim. The murderer was found hiding in a storage unit not far from the crime scene a few days later and he was tried, convicted and went to prison.
And so there were a couple of days there when the house was the focus of a couple of local news shows, and we handled phone calls from local reporters (this was back before everyone had their own phone). I was surprised how compassionate the reporters were. One well-known face, Rigo Chacon, on a San Francisco station called a week after the story had blown over just to check in off the record and ask how her family was doing.
In SIY the press are shown hounding both families fairly relentlessly at least for at time, and that could be because of cultural differences. There are far fewer murders in Japan, and, of course, the story centers on the inexplicable killing of a child. Our culture no longer has the sense of familial culpability that it did prior to the Middle Ages. The earliest Anglo-Saxon laws established weregilds (prices of recompense for murders) to inhibit feuding between clans, and we see similar pressures on the Miakis and Toyamas in SIY to both apologize and make up for the actions of Fumiya even fifteen years later.
A year or two after I completed my PhD., Jeanette introduced me to my wife. I went to her wedding and she came to mine. We're still facebook friends. She would call and visit her brother in prison, and I suppose he was eventually released though we've drifted away over the intervening years and so I never really heard. In any case, while it certainly was a tragedy for both families, I do not think the families were destroyed to the extent that those on SIY were by the event. I think Jeanette's family did change churches but that's a comparably trivial shift, and there was no subsequent harassment that I know of.
Clearly, SIY was a critical if not ratings success. I have not touched on all the family members in this review, but each is fully realized and have their own arc. As a whole this series is probably more of a masterpiece than almost all of subsequent series that I like better, but I am personally less inclined to melodrama.
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