Of Swords and Parasols

Boku to Star no 99 Nichi is a romantic comedy about Kouhei, a part-time bodyguard who gets assigned to guard a Korean superstar, Han Yoo Na, for 99 days while she's shooting a drama in Japan. Except his job isn't so much to guard her from other people but to keep her from sneaking out and getting into trouble and hunt down mysterious men from her past.

It's pretty much adorable and a good example of why i tend to prefer the jdrama/kdrama fusion romances we sometimes get over the contemporary-set kdramas most of the time. (Sageuks and fusion sageuks are another matter.) It does the romantic drama well and mixes it up with Kouhei's kooky family and coworkers and Yoo Na's costar, who has A Secret Past with Kouhei and who I was pretty sure was secretly in love with Kouhei for the first 7 or so episodes until he was fighting with Kouhei over Yoo Na. (Then I decided he was in love with both of them.) There's also and evil reporter who's out to destroy Yoo Na (apparently he just threw a dart at the pictures of various stars to target to create a scandal about as we never really get an explanation there....) a quasi-romantic subplot with Yoo Na's brother and Kouhei's niece that's very cute cute until you start wondering exactly how old they are. (The age difference is actually probably a good bit smaller than that with Kouhei and Yoo Na, but an age difference pings differently when a woman is in her late 20s and when she's in her late teens.) BTW, the guy playing Yoo Na's brother is lucky that he's cute and has an endearing stage presence-at least when interacting with people who actually can act-because he cannot act at all. I'm not sure he actually tried most of the time. (I think he's actually primarily a kpop guy, but apparently he wants to be an actor too.)

(I actually watched this some time back-before RMPW and Naniwa started-but kept forgetting to comment on it despite meaning to at least once a week.)

I've also been watching the second season of Koshonin (aka The Negotiator).  It's about like the first season, save that Usagi has been in the departmment for a while so her male coworkers aren't going out of their way to be sexist this time around, and Usagi is more at ease with her job.  Err...as at ease as you can be when your job is to negotiate with killers, kidnappers and terrorists, that is.  I will forever hate that commanding officer of hers, though.  I'd say that, in general, if you watched the first season, you'd feel roughly the same about the second.  Only the first 4 episodes have fansubs.  After that it's the engrish subs that come with the Chinese DVD releases.  Those are actually better than a lot of others but, well, still very much engrish.

Usagi Reiko is a Japanese police officer recently transferred to the negotiation team, SIT. SIT is male dominated, and her coworkers don’t take her seriously and disregard her ideas, despite her excellent abilities at profiling and her observational skills. She also has a strange relationship with a (possibly insane) young man in prison, who seems to simultaneously hate her and have an emotional dependence on her, and she seems to have a history with several of her superiors that they may not be aware of.

I first heard of this when I saw Reiko being compared to Erico from BOSS, and it’s a worthy comparison. Both are awesome, super competent, physically skilled and capable without falling into “Warrior Woman” clichés, extremely intelligent, consistently prove they’re excellent in their chosen fields, and deal with sexism in the workplace with their own special kind of class. Seriously, there should be a crossover where they team up and destroy all the lesser mortals in their paths. I think someone told me that Reiko is the most awesome jdrama heroine ever. While she’s certainly a contender, she has some pretty fierce competition. (There should be a poll? Maybe I should get on that.)

Unfortunately, the series as a whole doesn’t hold up to the BOSS comparison. While BOSS had an awesome supporting cast, both in actors in characters, the first episode of Koshonin had me hating pretty much every character other than Reiko, and while Yonekura Ryoko is amazing (I wish more of her dramas got subbed) most of the rest of the cast, while competent, is rather flat and unengaging, and I spent the entire series recasting most characters. Like, Reiko’s boss? Would have been awesome if played by Abe Hiroshi. I’m just saying. I kind of, uhm, ended up not paying attention the way I should have in scenes without Reiko. She’s in most scenes though?

But did I mention that Reiko is supremely awesome? Because she is, and that should be repeated. Does anyone know if the second season is still being subbed? Because it looks like subs stalled out at ep 4.