Japanese: Woman - yes, like Mother, the title of this series was in English even in Japan
English: Woman
Broadcast Year: 2013
Subtitled Episodes Available at: Newasiantv
Spoiler-free Synopsis:
Aoyogi Koharu is happily married with a daughter and another child on the way when her husband, Aoyogi Shin, is killed in an accident at a train station. She works several jobs and struggles to make ends meet. A serious medical condition has her seeking additional governmental support, and with her father dead she is forced to contact her mother, the two having been estranged since her parents divorced twenty years ago. Her little family is slowly reunited, but there is more to the story as she tries to get treatment for her illness and insure some stability for her children.
Crimes and Misdemeanors:
Spousal Abuse, Child Abandonment, Grifting, Manslaughter
Awards: Best Lead Actress
Cast:
The protagonist is Koharu played by Mitsushima Hikari who also is the second lead in Soredemo, Ikite Yuku, one of the members of the quartet in Quartet and has a guest role in Love That makes You Cry.
Koharu's mother is played by Tanaka Yuuko who has similarly important roles in Mother and anone (where she plays the titular role).
Nikaido Fumi plays Koharu's half-sister, Uesugi Shiori. She is also part of the main ensemble in Mondai No Aru Resttaurant where she plays the Todai graduate who has to keep reminding everyone she is a Todai graduate.
Usuda Asami plays Koharu's co-worker and best friend. She also plays the divorcee struggling to keep custody of her son in Mondai No Aru Restaurant, and has a small role in The Great Divorce special.
Takahashi Issei plays Koharu's doctor, and is also one of the members of the quartet in Quartet.
While not appearing in other series by Sakamoto, the actor who plays Koharu's step-father is Kobayashi Kaoru who also plays the diner operator at the center of the anthology series Midnight Diner, the most recent version of which, Tokyo Stories, is available internationally on Netflix.
Beyond Here There Be Spoilers:
This series is clearly meant to be a follow-up if not a sequel to Mother with a similar set of themes, shared cast, similar look and similar title. There are five mothers in Mother, but Mother might be a better name for this series since one of the themes of the series is the difficulties that working class single mothers face in Japan. Like Mother, it also explores the kinds of hard choices and sacrifices mothers are willing to make for the sake of their children.
Koharu's family after the death of Shin is happy but always on the edge financially, and child care is inconvenient and barely affordable. Further, when Koharu is diagnosed with aplastic anemia affording treatment and even finding the time for treatment proves pretty much impossible. She does have access some governmental support, but as is the case in the US and other countries all family resources must be exhausted first, and when the caseworker contacts Koharu's estranged mother he receives word that she can and will help financially.
In facing her potential death before her children are able to take care of themselves, she swallows her pride and goes to see her mother. Soon she takes her children to live with her mother, step-father and a step-sister she had never met before without telling them about the illness. Her plan seems to be to hope that they all will bond with her children, and, hopefully, take care of them should she die.
Sakamoto has an occasional weakness for plot contrivances, and it's in full force in Woman. As the two families are brought together it is revealed that Koharu's step-sister was fairly directly the cause of Shin's death. She had gotten in with a bunch of grifters who taught her how to accuse men on crowded trains of groping her, and the team would then extract cash from the men to prevent her from going to the police. When Shin appears at her home apparently to try to help Koharu reconcile with her mother, Shiori follows Shin onto a train and, apparently, felt enough jealousy at her previously unknown step-sister to similarly accuse Shin of groping her without her gang around, and a crowd decides to beat up Shin at the next station, and fleeing his attackers (and trying to recover the pears Korahu's mother wanted her to have) his head intersected the next train approaching from the opposite direction. The vigilantes and Shiori fled, and Shin was reported as having died as the result of his being a sex offender.
Now, Sakamoto is clearly feminist throughout these series, but it must be pointed out that this particular plot point is not especially suited to his usual feminist framing. I'm sure such grifting does occur in Japan, but, as is usual in most matters of sexual harassment and rape, false accusations occur orders of magnitude less frequently than actual incidents of sexual harassment and rape. However, the specters of false accusations are constantly raised by the traditional patriarchal power structures to inhibit any kind of progress from being made to mitigate the real problems. Thus, not only is this plot point contrived, it also runs contrary to the otherwise egalitarian themes of the series.
The aplastic anemia is also a contrivance since it is treatable with a marrow transplant and viable matches are hard to find outside of fairly close blood relationships. I guessed who would provide the match, and I am sure you can as well.
A third contrivance puts an undelivered letter from Shin written the day before he died in the hands of Koharu which leads her to his mother who, unfortunately, for everyone is an alcoholic and essentially abandoned Shin when he was twelve in a similar fashion to the plot of the film Nobody Knows.
All that being said, the relationships between the members of Koharu's family are well drawn and well portrayed, and the series is well worth watching despite the contrivances. Korahu's daughter is particularly delightful as she swiftly establishes a relationship with Koharu's step-father and the two work to bring the family together despite the real issues between Koharu and her mother and her step-sister. This show is, unltimately, a hardscrabble tale of reconciliation and healing.
No comments:
Post a Comment