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meganbmooreSato Taro is an extremely poor widower and father of three who can’t keep a good job or feed his children more than egg-over-rice (their chicken, Asako, lays exactly one egg a day) and bread crusts. Mitazono Alice is a fashion icon who is almost inconceivably rich. After they meet when Alice is having a fight with her boyfriend’s other girlfriend (this involves a prank of hers that is actually very out of character for the rest of the series) and Alice later hires Taro to be her driver, and later to impersonate her boyfriend during a marriage meeting.
I didn’t like this as much as I did the last few jdramas I watched, but I was very entertained by most of it, and started it Saturday evening and finished it Sunday afternoon. I was recced this while lamenting the fact that, while I really like Ueto Aya (Alice), a lot of her dramas don’t appeal to me. Kuninaka Ryoko and Taro’s childhood friend was a very pleasant bonus. Though, Japan, could you please stop casting her as the kind and virtuous woman who is unappreciated by the object of her affections? Please? (You can keep the part where she seems to always become BFF with her romantic rivals.) I thought a lot of it was hilarious, but the humor also often hit my embarrassment squick. I’m also not sure I’m convinced the writers always knew what they were doing with the characters, particularly Alice’s stepmother, Makiko (is she horrendously evil, or amazingly awful at getting close to her stepdaughter?) and her ex, Gotoda (is he out for revenge, or is it all a ploy to prove he’s good enough for Alice?). And I’m not really convinced that where those two plotlines went was always planned.
I really like that Alice was neither the “stuck up rich *****” or “poor little rich girl” (though there are elements of the second) but rather someone who doesn’t really relate well to people (but without the “Woes! Isolation! Must learn humility and manners!” usually associated with rich girls with poor social skills) because she was raised with values most of us can’t relate to. I also liked that, aside from the rather uncharacteristic bit in the beginning, she seemed almost incapable of malice, without resembling a pushover and that, while she and Taro’s kids were crazy about each other, they never played it as her having motherly feelings. She was more like an eccentric relative who’s a lot of fun, and they’re cute, so cohabitation is totally ok if she and Dad get married. Kamiji Yusuke was very funny as Taro, but a lot of the approach to his character and poverty seemed to be “family hour >> feeding your kids,” and that never separating kids from parents was way more important than the kids being clothed, fed, healthy, and having a safe home. I’m not sure I completely bought the romance between Taro and Alice (I think I was more convinced by an implied secondary pairing that never actually happens), but it was entertaining.
But then, I sometimes thought the plot was “Kamiji Yusuke makes great faces, and Ueto Aya is really cute and fun to dress up.”
I didn’t like this as much as I did the last few jdramas I watched, but I was very entertained by most of it, and started it Saturday evening and finished it Sunday afternoon. I was recced this while lamenting the fact that, while I really like Ueto Aya (Alice), a lot of her dramas don’t appeal to me. Kuninaka Ryoko and Taro’s childhood friend was a very pleasant bonus. Though, Japan, could you please stop casting her as the kind and virtuous woman who is unappreciated by the object of her affections? Please? (You can keep the part where she seems to always become BFF with her romantic rivals.) I thought a lot of it was hilarious, but the humor also often hit my embarrassment squick. I’m also not sure I’m convinced the writers always knew what they were doing with the characters, particularly Alice’s stepmother, Makiko (is she horrendously evil, or amazingly awful at getting close to her stepdaughter?) and her ex, Gotoda (is he out for revenge, or is it all a ploy to prove he’s good enough for Alice?). And I’m not really convinced that where those two plotlines went was always planned.
I really like that Alice was neither the “stuck up rich *****” or “poor little rich girl” (though there are elements of the second) but rather someone who doesn’t really relate well to people (but without the “Woes! Isolation! Must learn humility and manners!” usually associated with rich girls with poor social skills) because she was raised with values most of us can’t relate to. I also liked that, aside from the rather uncharacteristic bit in the beginning, she seemed almost incapable of malice, without resembling a pushover and that, while she and Taro’s kids were crazy about each other, they never played it as her having motherly feelings. She was more like an eccentric relative who’s a lot of fun, and they’re cute, so cohabitation is totally ok if she and Dad get married. Kamiji Yusuke was very funny as Taro, but a lot of the approach to his character and poverty seemed to be “family hour >> feeding your kids,” and that never separating kids from parents was way more important than the kids being clothed, fed, healthy, and having a safe home. I’m not sure I completely bought the romance between Taro and Alice (I think I was more convinced by an implied secondary pairing that never actually happens), but it was entertaining.
But then, I sometimes thought the plot was “Kamiji Yusuke makes great faces, and Ueto Aya is really cute and fun to dress up.”