Main Cast:
Naoki Tanaka as lawyer Yukio Hakamada
Akiko Yada as Kanae Kurasawa, aspiring manga artist and divorced in episode 1
Naomi Watanabe as Kurumi Umemoto, private eue
Nami Iwasaki as Rino Shinozuka, college student who works PT at the Tanaka's office
Jun Miho as landlord Toshie Toyama
Nana Yamada as the spaced out waitress Sara Mizutani
Of course another divorce case but with two twists in the story, the main one being that for the first time it's the husband who is seeking the divorce. He's kind of a meek person and his wife is taking advantage of him by controlling all the finances and abusing him both physically and emotionally. He works as a salaryman but has a solid job and is making quite a bit of money but that goes straight to his wife who spends it like there's no tomorrow buying the most expensive clothes, jewelry, etc. and going out with her upper class friends. Besides that she does zero around the apartment, the husband has to do all the cleaning, shopping, everything in maintaining the household and one day just cannot take it anymore.
As usual Hakamada has zero clients at the time when the husband Ichikawa visits, hard to figure why as he seems to win every case. Hakamada accepts this divorce case, he says it'll be harder to win in court but is 100% confident of victory. Problem is that the wife doesn't work so how is the husband going to get any compensation from the divorce but this is when we learn more of the Japanese divorce laws. The couple own a condominium and if they sell it the husband can keep 75% of the money from the sale and because of all the money the wife has spent over the years he is probably going to be entitled to 100% of them selling the condo, he's looking at getting 14 million yen for his compensation. Meanwhile the wife will get zero which actually is a good deal Hakamada explains after her spending habits over the years. The wife is not a good person, what a 'diva' she is and not sure why, she's really nothing special, not overly attractive or smart so it's unknown what she acts the spiteful way she does to her husband.
In a final showdown Hakamada lays all his cards on the table and though the wife swore up and won she wouldn't sign the divorce papers she's trapped in a corner with no way out and does sign the papers. During that period she did explain what made her become such a mean person, she had felt so alone and ignored because her husband was always working and never spent any time with her. She eventually met some upper class women and her spending habits after that went through the roof to impress them. Well the husband never knew any of this until then and after her confession grabbed the signed divorce papers and ripped them into pieces. He's willing to change his ways and not ignore his wife anymore and his wife would gladly go back to her pre-spending days so the two of them have decided against the divorce and are going to attempt to salvage their marriage. Hakamada knew this was going to happen, he doesn't always let on what he knows or is planning but he had done some intensive background checking on the couple and knew why they ended up the way they were, he knew why but sadly the couple didn't, it took the threat of a divorce for them to realize what their mistakes were.
And that's that for this episode, two big differences in this show being a husband was looking for the divorce and secondly there was no divorce in this show. None of it was suspenseful but it was interesting enough and good to see a few twists thrown in, hope future episodes throw a few in too. Hard drama to break down, no excitement in it but it moves along at a good pace and has very rarely dragged at all, episodes are about 43 minutes each and seem to go by fairly quickly, many dramas I've watched where I keep looking to see how much of the episode there is to go but haven't done it to this series. To date wouldn't give it a high recommendation but if you're looking for something different this might be worth your time, is a weak season for shows so this may end up being one of the better watches. As usual check out the next post for many screenshots from this episode where you can perhaps fill in some of the blanks which I left out of the recap.
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