From dramawiki:
In Tokyo in the 80s, before the Big Bubble: Momoko is the second oldest daugther of four siblings in the Mitamura family. After her father Tadashi Mitamura is laid off from work and suddenly disappears, the sensitive Momoko feels most responsible to fill his place. But the family starts to break apart, when their problems outgrow. Mother Ayano deals with her disappointment, oldest sister Sakura Shimizu is troubled by her husband's infidelity and the youngest brother Kentaro faces a difficult job hunt and begins questioning his own life.
Little more to the drama than that but that's the basic outline of the story, probably say this again at the end but this was a six episode series, first 3 - 4 episodes were really top notch and then something happened, really fell towards the end and what could have been almost a must watch drama just turned out to be okay. As mentioned the father had left the family and they had no clue what happened to him, sort of vanished off the face of the earth, he was suffering so badly after the loss of his job. Momoko begins to take over the running of the family, there's 4 children but the oldest Sakura is married and living apart from them. The mother doesn't work so most of the finances and income are from Momoko's job as a copy editor which was not a high paying position. Two others live at hime, her sister Yoko who is working as a waitress and the brother Kentaro who is a student but ends up also working to help the family out.
Story mainly revolves around Momoko and her struggles to keep the family together and also an almost relationship she had with a slightly older man who worked at the same company her father did. Though they became close and were together often things didn't work out, mainly due to his wife and child who came home after a years separation. During this time Momoko also finds her father and tracks him down, he's been living in a seedy apartment with another down and out person called Sersuko who runs a udon shop which doesn't get many customers and does some odd jobs too which is what her father ends up doing taking a job holding promo signs around the city. Though the family was in turmoil after he left they stuck together and were surviving fairly well despite the income being very low, the mother at times was the least dependable of them all, seemed like for a while she was having a breakdown, she never could get over the father leaving the household.
That's up until episode 4 and that's where the story went way downhill, such a good potential plotline, was a bit eerie and depressing at times but always quite interesting but the last few episodes were the opposite of that, seemed to get a bit boring. Seems as though the mother and father met a few times secretly but we're not positive why, she wouldn't divorce him even though he had left and was still living with that other woman. The two main events that happened these last few episodes was Sakura leaving her husband due to his cheating, she moved back home but for some reason at the show's end gave him another chance and was going to move back with him. The other main event which is how the series ended was the father getting ill and falling into a coma, he was sent to the hospital and by the end of the series was still in that coma, there were a few scenes at the hospital where both his wife and mistress were together to tend to him, for some reason there wasn't that much hate between them. The show wrapped up way too quickly after that and not in a good way, as mentioned the one sister Sakura went back to her husband, the other sister Yoko got married and Kentaro was becoming successful as a chef, all too neat and tidy plus all that happened in a span of about 2 minutes, but we never really learned what became of Momoko.
Though it went way downhill at the end still give this s good recommendation, it was only six episodes so not sure if that helped or hurt it, being short they had to wrap things up fairly quickly and couldn't go into detail enough on certain things but do like shorter series like this. For the most part the cast was fine led by Nao as the daughter who held the family together when they had no idea what to do after the father suddenly left, everyone else also did well though no standout performances though the oldest daughter Sakura really did well and it would have made the drama a tad better with her role expanded and more important. For a rating the first half would have gotten a 9/10, it really was that good but the second half got more of a 7/10 which still may be a bit high but all in all a drama worth watching.
Air dates: July 26 to August 30, 2011 at 10:00 pm on NHK, average rating for it was 8.7%.
Cast:
Nao Matsushita as Momoko Mitamura
Keiko Takeshita as Ayano Mitamura(mother)
Keizo Kanie as Tadashi Mitamura(father)
Haruka Igawa as Sakura Shimizu
Asami Usada as Yoko Mitamura
Koji Seto as Kentaro Mitamura
Taizo Harada as Minoru Tsuzuki
Naomi Nishida as Setsuko Onda
Few pics of Asami from the show, next post has many of Nao from the drama.
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