Nanase Nishino: "Kotodamasou" drama, episode four recap

 

 Air Dates: October 9th until December 11, 2021 on TV-Asahi, Saturday nights at 11:00 pm

Subs done by arkisubsxx.... shows are 23 minutes in length, total of ten episodes.

**** The December 4th episode had to be pre-emepted so the series will end on the 18th.

Main Cast: The setting is a women's apartment building where #7 has just moved into. After her will be listing the cast by what room number they're in as we discovered in the third show that's key to the story. Of course Nanase has the lead role but every women will have at least one turn in the spotlight save for the female in apartment one which disappointed me a bit. Kind of a large cast and the hardest part in doing a series is writing this opening up! Episodes are a bit short so we didn't see much of a few characters early on and will be updating the bios.

Kotodama- A Japanese word that means that evil powers dwell in words and names, this is the curse our heroine is trying to discover and kill.

Nanase Nishino as Kotaha Utagawa.... Lives in apartment seven and has just moved into the building thanks to the help of her best fiend Sayaka. Kotoha has her own ViewTube show called 'Attraction Channel' and it's not all that popular so where does she get her money? The underlying question for the first four shows is does Kotoha have an odd curse, one that involves her use of words which has a bit to do with the above word Kotodama.

Ayaka Miyoshi as Sayaka Agi.... Apartment one dweller but not for too long so will need to update this for the third episode. Sayaka is Kotoha's best friend and is a budding songwriter who has had little success. That is until the first episode where a song she wrote has become a minor hit and a man performed it on live TV, however he died during his performance!

Yurika Nakamura as Shiori Maruyama.... Lives in the second apartment and is an assistant to a politician. Shiori is not an easy person to get along with and is a bit shady which has changed after she was targeted for death by her boss!

 Mayu Hotta as Ayako Komiyama... The woman in apartment #3 and seemed like the nicest female in the small building, that is until the third show. Ayako is a freelance announcer but has obtained a somewhat steady gig at Ashita-TV which has made her a tad greedy and untrustworthy, still a nice woman but there's something mysterious about her.

Misato Morita as Asami Kikukawa.... A budding doctor who lives in the fourth apartment, she was the focus of this recap and came off as a very cruel woman.

 Anna Ishii as Saki Hayashibara.... Resident of apartment five who is a school teacher, like the below woman we haven't seen too much of her yet so will be updating the characters as time goes on.

 Rio Uchida as Hitomi Watanabe.... Final resident in the building who resides in #6. She's an editor/publisher and the biggest reason for not knowing much about the final two characters is that the stories will go in order from apartment one up until seven.

Kento Nagayama as Reishi Nakame.... He's a sham psychic who doesn't believe he is. In the first show he hooked up with Kotoha to perform an exorcism which proved to be fatal. However he's a major character who eventually formed a partnership with Kotoha to solve this unknown curse/mystery and is a bit of a goofy man.

 Yuki Saito as Shima Iwato.... Final major character and she's the aunt of Reishi. She's the head of a local shrine where Kotoha and Reishi have visited for advice which never seems to work because Shima is more interested in money than helping or at least early on she is.

 Previous recaps

Episode one .... Episode two

 Thanks if you made it through the above recap which had more questions than answers. Won't use it as a huge excuse but did forget so much of what took place as I had viewed the first three episodes close to a month ago. But watched this show just a few days ago so everything is fresh in my mind and some mysteries are becoming easier to understand. But in drama recaps try not to give every single detail away in case you plan on viewing the show, this is a series I would recommend which has been getting more intense with each episode.

 This was the best show to date, at the end of the above recap said that Shiori would become the main focus of this episode. When she entered that abandoned warehouse at the end of the second episode Shiori had somehow got a case of amnesia which suddenly disappeared a few days later and she seemed on track to be discharged from the hospital soon. In case the amnesia returns she's videotaped a confession with Kotoha about the evil doings of the congressman Otaka, she probably won't be his personal aide in the future. But hours after that confession Shiori's condition had a severe turn for the worse and is in a semi coma. Of all things who should be her doctor at the hospital but Asami who is Shiori's next door neighbor at the all women's apartment building. It's been determined that the Kotodama curse has been going in numerical order in attacking the women, the gal in apartment one has died but the women in the next two rooms are still alive.... for now!

 Asami lives in the fourth room so it's logical to think the curse will be after her in this episode. Asami is a 29 year old doctor, she's 3-4 years older than most of the residents. She asked to be the main doctor overlooking Shiori but was it because she wanted to help her neighbor or was there an alternative motive? The second is the case which I'll reveal very shortly. But Kotoha caught on quicker than I did about Asami's intentions, with the help of her new 'friend' Reishi they managed to smuggle Shiori out of the hospital, Kotoha thought it was a matter of life and death which it was! That's because shortly after Asami entered Shiori's room with the intention of giving her a shot of, one that would end her life? That we'll know the answer on soon but Asami had declared Shiori to be brain dead which baffled Kotoha for she had just been talking with her friend a few hours earlier. In the bottom screenshot above Asami mumbled the name of Suzuki, much about him is coming up.

 Shiori is back safe and sound in her apartment building as she made a quick recovery. Actually the shots Asami was giving Shiori wasn't to kill her but to make her brain dead and why? In the last episode the focus was on the woman in apartment three, Ayako. She's a reporter who has been touched by the curse of Kotodama, she was forced to announce on the air some false stories about a reporter named Shimatani which almost caused her death.. It didn't but her producer died and news leaked out that Ayako was an innocent victim so still has a job at the Ashita-TV station. Being a reporter gives her access to much information and she was able to check the records at Asami's hospital. What she dug up really shocked Shiori and the other residents of the building, the third screenshot down above is the person named Suzuki.

 He's a thirty year old man who is in dire need of a liver transplant. Through Ayako's digging of info she discovered that Asami at one time had dated the man(!), he dumped her but she's still madly in love with him. She has the same blood type as Suzuki but the hospital's main surgeon has told Asami her body may not be strong enough to survive a transplant. However he'll allow it to happen if they were married so you know what Asami's option may be. But before that when she had been tending to Shiori she discovered her neighbor also had the same blood type and what cruel thing Asami attempted to do. She began injecting Shiori with a drug that would eventually leave her brain dead, Shiori had a donor card saying it was okay to give a dying person an organ if she was in that state. So it became a waiting came for Asami until Shiori was truly brain dead, all that for a man who had dumped her?!

 So naturally Asami was furious that Shiori had been 'abducted' from the hospital but who could she explain that to? Meanwhile back at the building Shiori is getting close to normal and does have a nice side to her that we hadn't seen, no doubt because of working for a corrupt politician. At the apartment building Kotoha and the other women investigated Asami's room where they did get confirmation that she had ben dating Suzuki. In Asami's diary was also a blank marriage certificate, her alternate plan was to wed Suzuki if all else failed but as mentioned she's still madly in love with him. Haven't talked much about the curse of the Kotodama which is because there wasn't much to discuss, that is until the end.

 Just before the ending though Kotoha had once again paid a visit to Reishi's aunt Shima who is the head of a local shrine. This woman cares more about money than helping others, Kotoha is in such a jam so she's trying to raise two million yen for the whole apartment building to be exorcised. But her only income was via her ViewTube channel which only had 300 subscribers. But if she could increase that figure to 10,000 she would have enough $$ to hopefully save herself and the other women. This Kotodama spirit is not just an evil curse but if used properly good fortune could happen. Kotoha and Reishi wished over and over for her channel to hit 10,000 subscribers and what do you know, by the end of the show it happened but no clue yet if that exorcism will actually take place.

 In the final two minutes the Kotodama arose again, mentioned good things could happen because of this 'spirit' but it's mainly bad things. In the next recap or one after that will try to add in a section at the top for all of the info I've gathered about the Kotodama, it's a lot of things and a bit confusing. So at the end while at the hospital Asami suddenly passed out, when she awoke she was on an operating table with a surgeon about to remove her liver to give to Suzuki! That was the work of Kotodama and what an ending that was. Slightly longer post but so much happened in this episode which was only 23 minutes long. Haven't viewed any shows past this one but am about to, after being confused for a while now am on top of things and the next pair of recaps should be in about five days.