Air Dates: April 14 to June 30, 2017 on TV Tokyo, Fridays at 1:00 am
Main Cast:
Yojiro Noda as Shin Michima
Rena Matsui as Hitomi Tsukamoto
Rena Takeda as Midori Suzumura
Rila Fukushima as Minami Shirakawa
Yuko Araki as Nanaka Seki
Miwako Wagatsuma as Yuki Kobayashi
Lily Franky as Tatsuyuki Michima
Takashi Yamanaka as Seiji Sakurai
Tomoya Nakamura as Yuzu Hanaki
Tetsuhiro Ikeda as Ryuichi Moriguchi
The fourth episode was by far the best to date, tale of two shows today as the fifth was just so-so while the sixth episode was quite good. That fourth show ended on a thrilling cliffhanger as the useless punk Takeshi had been run over. We weren't sure if he was still alive and the answer to that was yes.
Midori had lived with him at an orphanage for over a decade.Though they weren't friends she needed him to be a guarantor for her as she won a billion yen lottery at the age of seventeen. Like America that makes you too young to collect the winnings which is why he had to co-sign whatever form so she could collect the massive amount of cash. But since then he's been mooching nonstop from her and it's been adding up, now he had wanted 100 million yen from her.
With no one else to turn to Midori asked Minami for some help to get rid of Takeshi. As you can see above her driver Sunako ran him over but he was still alive though badly hurt. Minami said to run him over again but Midori had a change of heart and said not to. Sunako ended up taking Takeshi away and who knows if this will be the last we see of him, kind of hoping it is.
It's taken a while but we're learning about the backgrounds of the five women who are living with Shin. This time around it was Yuki's turn and one night at the dinner table she blurted out that she's married. Yuki didn't get into much detail with the others about it but through some flashbacks we learned a bit about how that marriage came about.
Yuki had been the maid for a very elderly man who had to be about seventy and his name was Keisuke. We weren't told what he did before he retired but he's a wealthy man and for some reason asked Yuki to marry him, she was 21 at the time. Her response was yes which shocked Keisuke but we never did see what kind of married life the two had together.
The reason that Yuki moved in with Shin and the other four women is that her husband is now in a coma and probably only has six months to live. Least we found out how Yuki had come into a lot of money, bit strange thing to say but she seems like the most down to earth gal of all of them yet at the same time may also be the oddest of the bunch.
Shin is the main character in this series but as it goes on the roles of the five women has increased quite a bit which has really made it a more interesting show. Shin is under pressure from his editor to come up with a best seller as he's finally finished his fourth novel. Though not a popular author most people who read his works seem to enjoy them and find them interesting.
Shin is an interesting guy but not around most people as he's quite quiet and actually depressing around others he doesn't know well which would most people in the world. The five women have taken a liking to him though, when the show started out they had been living with him for six months but think it's now getting close to a year.
His housemate Nanaka hasn't read any of Shin's novels but does seem to like him quite a bit. To help him out she did a celebrity interview with his rival Hanaki, Nanaka is an actress but had disappeared from the entertainment world over a year ago.
In the interview she didn't make Hanaki shine too brightly, she did it unknown to Shin so she could know his rival a bit better but it seems Hanaki is just a writer for the money and fame. Nanaka wasn't too impressed at all with him and would rather not see him again. Hanaki has other ideas though as he tells his editor he won't write for his company anymore unless an evening with Nanaka is set up, that was in the fifth episode and so far we don't know what the outcome was or if there will be one.
The above is a bit of a combination of the fifth and sixth shows. Finally in episode six we get to see much more of Rena M. as Hitomi who had the biggest screen time of any of the five to date. Hitomi is an avid reader who is very knowledgeable about the literary world, it's a bit surprising she's never tried to be an author herself.
Perhaps that's because of her father who was a very popular and esteemed author who died eleven years ago. His books continue to sell very well to this day and the royalties Hitomi receives is more than enough to lead a comfortable lifestyle. She does have some pull with some writers who knew her father and she ends up using them to help Shin become eligible for an award.
Shin's fourth novel is titled "Drifting Emotions" and like his other works isn't a huge seller. In it's first week out the sales for it were 362 copies sold so least that means he does have a few fans out there. Hitomi truly enjoys his books and now she figures it's time to use her father's name to her advantage as it's time for the 50th 'Japan Outstanding Literary Prize' to be announced.
The committee to select the winner had been meeting for a while and were going to choose Hanaki as he's the most popular writer around. It is true his books sell well but they're actually not interesting reads, for some reason readers have been attracted to his unimaginative way of writing. Readers should have been taken a liking to Shin is what Hitomi had thought and knew an old friend of her father's on the committee.
At their final meeting to select the winner Hitomi was allowed to give her thoughts on who they chose and she naturally thought Hanaki was a bad decision. She was right when she said a winner of a prestigious prize shouldn't be chosen on how books they sell but how interesting it may have been. None had heard of Shin so Hitomi had brought each of them a copy of his new novel, after they read it is when they'll give their final decision.
There's a literary critic who we've seen on a few occasions and he's definitely in Hanaki's corner. He dislikes Shin's novels immensely and doesn't think he's qualified to be a writer. The critic's name is Moriguchi and until Hitomi had met with the committee he had persuaded them to choose Hanaki as this year's winner. But Hitomi's strategy paid off as after the committee members read Shin's new book they chose him as their winner.
Quite a shock that naturally was to Shin and his editor, there was a first run of 3,000 copies printed but now there will be a second run of 200,000 printed. At the awards ceremony Shin was his old dour self and kept apologizing for winning the prestigious award but the reporters told him not to be sorry for that and that he should be proud of his achievement.
The critic Moriguchi was at the ceremony and he was irate that Shin had won. Also in a stupor was Hanaki who didn't attend the event but watched it at home. He's never read "Drifting Emotions" but asks his editor for a copy, now it looks like the rivalry will be entering a brutal stage and not sure what devious plan Hanaki has up his sleeve.
Shin's five housemates are also watching the ceremony at home and are preparing a celebration party for him, they really are proud of his winning the award. At the conclusion of the show things take a turn for the worse as one reporter asks Shin a very personal question and it's about his father. Five years ago Shin's father had committed three murders and is now on death row though no date has been set for his execution yet.
The reporter asks Shin if it's true that the murderer sitting on death row is his father. Shin didn't blink an eye and said yes to the question which brought quite a bit of mayhem to the quiet event. That incident brought us to the finale as there's another nice cliffhanger to bring us into the next episode.
After that first scene in the fifth episode with that car running someone down the pace really crawled to a halt. But the sixth show was so good it made up for that slow stretch and do have to say that Rena M. as Hitomi is looking more attractive then ever, she turned 26 this past July.
Interesting cliffhanger going into the seventh episode plus there's one other mystery that we'll be seeing more of. That's who sent the women the invitations to live with Shin and why were they sent? Even Shin is clueless about it but Nanaka had told him she knows why they're all living together, unsure if she was telling the truth at the time. Halfway through the series now and will be back with the next recap probably on Thursday.
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