Air Dates: July 27th to September 14th on NHK
Shows were on 11:30 pm Saturday nights, 28 minutes an episode and subs by HPriest
Main Cast:
Yuki Sakurai as Mana Endo.... 30 year OL who stumbled into the world of Idol groups
Seminosuke Murasugi as Takafumi Shiiba.... Sunny Side Up group's lawyer
Yoshihiko Hosoda as Hiromu Azusawa.... Group's co-manager(?) and a huge otaku
Yu Sawabe as Minoru Shogoin.... Police detective who interviews Yuki
Hideyuki Kasahara as Masaru Urita.... Group fan but overly obsessed with Hana
Sunny Side Up Idol group
Sei Shiraishi as Hana Kurimoto.... Untalented waana-be Idol who Yuki befriends
Ruka Matsuda as Karin Hara.... Group's leader
Akari Matsukawa as Shiori Mugita
Shuri Tanaka as Rinrei Nasu
Jun Amaki as Noriko Tomaji
As I just mentioned in a recent post will be sticking with Japanese dramas for a while. To me they've gone downhill a bit the past few years but lately there seems to be a rebound with them. More so with the late night shows such as this one and think I picked a good one to recap as after three episodes have really been enjoying it. It's mainly about a thirty year old OL who by accident stumbled into the world of Idols but not the stars as the group here are considered an underground one but everything will be explained as we go on. There's a total of eight episodes so will have four in a row for today, hopefully at this time next week will have the remaining four and let's get to the action.
The main character is a thirty year old office worker named Yuki and most of the story revolves around her. Those top two screenshots are of her narrating past events, they pop up here and there in every episode. Didn't know what they meant for almost this entire first episode but it gets somewhat explained at the end, only somewhat as it raises a mystery of 'what's going on?'. When Yuki is doing her narrating she's doing it in the present time but when the story starts it's April 2018 and for at least the first three shows it remains 2018.
Yuki works as an OL at Daito Life Insurance and seems to be one of their best workers. As she mentions in the first screenshot life is kind of normal for her or at least the normal way she's been taught to live. But soon her life is about to be torn apart just as she was planning on moving to Portugal with her boyfriend Kyosuke who just got transferred there by his job. But he's more than a boyfriend to Yuki as the pair plan to marry and she wants it to take place before the big move.
But Kyosuke had other plans which were heartbreaking to Yuki as he's decided she's not cut out to be his wife. Yuki is an avid social media user which was unknown to Kyosuke, when he discovered all of the pics she had posted of the pair it was just too much for him. In his mind Kyosuke thought of Yuki using him just to get likes and followers, that may have been true but nothing more was heard of this occasion after this show. The pair had broken up in April 2018 at a park, it's the last Yuki and us saw of Kyosuke and in her meltdown about being dumped Yuki lost dropped her phone at the park. She didn't discover that until she had a night of drinking by herself at a Karaoke bar to ease her misery. But when she tried calling her phone luckily someone answered and said he would return it to Yuki at a club.
Before I go any further will briefly discuss what Oshi means as it's a word you'll be seeing so often in screenshots. An Oshi is a person that really wants to support someone with that person being a singer, actor, writer or something along those lines. Having an Oshi doesn't make you an Otaku but it's on the path to becoming one. What Mana is referring to in the bottom pic is how she found her first Oshi when she went to retrieve her lost phone and it was a person who she actually hated at first.
The place where Mana needed to go to get her phone was a small club in a cellar called Basement. When she first entered the place Mana was in a daze as she had never been in a club like that before as an Idol group was performing in front of a small crowd of fifty fans. 'Sunny Side Up' was the name of the group and while not a huge crowd they do have devoted fans. The group is a quintet and while four of the members are very talented the fifth gal isn't whose name is Hana.
Second to last screenshot is of Mana berating Hana while the group was singing a tune, her screaming promptly stopped the show and the whole crowd turned to stare at Mana in fury. Mana didn't stick around long enough to see what the crowd may do to her as she high tailed out of the club quickly after her blowup. Needless to say Hana was in tears as she may have known what Mana had said was true. Hana tried her heart out on stage but compared to the other four members she didn't have what it took to be an Idol or at least not yet. The following day at work Mana's conscious got the best of her as she couldn't understand why she had such a meltdown, to her was it perhaps because Hana reminded Mana of herself?
To try to set things right Mana made a return trip to the Basement club for Sunny Side Up's next performance, she had no plans on what to do but really wanted to somehow apologize to Hana. This time around the club was fairly empty as the first time Mana had seen the girls perform it was a release event for their first single. Even with a mask Mana on was recognized immediately, above is her talking to the group's manager/lawyer Shiiba. Hana was a bit late for the performance as the crowd and her group was wondering what happened to her, could the cruel words spoken by Mana have something to do with her absence?
Not an absence as Hana made her grand entrance and it seems a bit of what Mana said hit home to Hana. She had cut her bangs for the first time in years as she may have realized what Mana said had some truth to it and did admit do the crowd that she had hid behind her mangled bangs for far too long. Bit of a happy ending as after the performance Mana made a trip backstage to talk with Hana who at first was quite scared of the older lady. But Mana was sincere with her apology and it's now the start of a friendship with the two and actually it becomes much more than that.
What I have found very interesting from watching four episodes is what Idol groups such as Sunny Side Up go through, they're referred to as an Underground Idol group and there's too many to count in Tokyo. They don't have the backing of huge groups such as AKB or Nogi, these groups really struggle to become popular but more so to make money. How they do is by having sessions after their shows where they sell merchandise or take pictures with their fans, they get a small cut from the proceeds. But when there's only 25 in the crowd obviously not much money will be made but the prices that are charged are quite high.
More on that as these recaps go on and Mana ends up being one of the group's biggest supporters when she learns how much they struggle. The action takes place in 2018 but it's really Mana in 2019 relating the story of how she ended up becoming such a huge fan. She's telling the story to a detective named Shogoin and as this first episode end he asks Mana 'Did you push Urita off the roof?'. First we heard of that name but you will in the next recap and that final question really threw me for a loop.
Wrote up half the recap and then took a three day break so hope the second half wasn't too scatterbrained. Through four episodes am really enjoying this drama as it's one that is so down to earth and in Japan what takes place really does in real life. This was the first of four recaps and you can find the other three right below this post.
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