A Perfect Marriage

I never had any interest in watching the K-Drama original of marry my husband. I'm not the biggest fan of the lead actor Park Min Young, and through the course of the drama I read significantly mixed reviews about its progress. Most of them echoed a very common complaint about K-Dramas, that it lost its way in terms of plot toward the end.

However when I heard that there was going to be a Japanese remake and that the remake would be a Japan/Korea co-production, I was fascinated. I was thrilled that the female lead role was to be played by an actor who had already impressed me in a couple of roles, and I was fascinated to see how the story would transfer to the shorter, tighter J-Drama format. It exceeded my expectations.

At 10 episodes, with a runtime just a fraction under 10 hours, this series highlighted everything that I love about J-Dramas. Tight, taut storytelling with an absolute minimum of padding or fluff. However, it also benefited very much from the strengths of Korean dramas. An oddity about J-dramas that I have noticed is the tendency for even a short series of 10 one hour episodes to have multiple directors. I'm sure that having one director, the Korean director of the original series, helped with the harmony and internal consistency of the series.

Another common complaint often heard about J-Dramas is the relatively low production value and poor aesthetics of many of them. Once again this was a case of Korea to the rescue, as this was a visually beautiful drama to watch.

The storytelling remained Japanese. I can make no comparisons with the original because I have not seen it and have no intention to ever see it, but I loved this story. A real highlight for me was the time the drama took to explain why the primary villain ended up the way they did. It wasn't a pitch for sympathy or empathy, but it was an aid to understanding. This was really nicely summed up in the way that the villain's own personal arc ended in exactly the same way that their mother's arc had ended. Fantastic storytelling.

I had only seen the male lead, Satoh Takeru, in one other J-Drama and really enjoyed his performance. I had seen the female lead Koshiba Fuka as lead in one J-Drama,also coincidentally a remake of a K-Drama. She was the lead in the Japanese version of She Was Pretty. I had seen the Korean original several years before I watched the Japanese remake, and I strongly preferred the Japanese remake (it was not a co-production). A year or two after I saw that I saw her as a key character in one episode of another Japanese drama and her performance in that role stunned me. She was so completely different that I did not even recognise her. I was flabbergasted by her range. For that reason I was very excited to watch her performance in this drama, and she did not disappoint.

Nor did the antagonist second leads. I'd not seen Shiraishi Sei in anything, but she delivered a really compelling villain - utterly evil, on a Lady Macbeth style descent into murderous insanity, and yet also tragically understandable once her background became known. I had seen Yokoyama Yu in a few things and don't recall having formed any strong opinions about him. In this Drama I felt for him as an actor since he faced the challlenge of being nearly ten years older IRL than the male lead and nearly 20 years older the female lead playing his fiancé. His was probably the most one-dimensional of the 4 leads, with no redeeming or mitigating elements, but his emotional display at the end was very poignant and believable.

The dialogue between the leads in this drama was outstanding. I say that with confidence because I rely exclusively on English subtitles. So I know that if the subtitles were impressive, the original Japanese dialogue must have been remarkable. It was so sensible, so mature, so devoid of drama clichés. Here are a couple of my favourite examples - angsty and romantic, but also adult and sensible.

I don't know what the Japanese word for makjang is, I consider that word part of a Pan-Asian Drama vocabulary, like kabedon. What I do know is that a big part of the appeal of short J-Drama is that there is much less room for makjang. The 16-episode K-Drama original apparently made plenty of room for makjang, this remake literally could not. It was not entirely devoid of it, though. I am extremely hematophobic, and cannot watch sanguinary scenes. For that reason I found the first 10 to 15 minutes of the final episode effectively impossible to watch. In my strictly personal opinion the amount of blood on display was not necessary to tell the story. Similar scenes with a similar outcome could have been delivered with a lot less blood. But that's just my personal, highly idiosyncratic opinion. It was also the only serious niggle I had with the entire drama.

Being a shorter Drama also meant that there was no time for elaborate 'explanatory' mechanisms for the rebirth/rewind element. Longer Dramas can get bogged down trying to explain the inexplicable. My all-time number 1 favourite "Groundhog Day" Drama, the Taiwanese Drama Love, Timeless fell into this trap. To fill time (ha!) it had an insanely complicated mechanism for the repeated time travel, and a mystery attached. This short J-Drama didn't waste any of its precious time with "explaining" the "how", it just went sweetly sentimental and nonsensical. I work for a taxi company and I can assure anyone who wonders that if any of our drivers (all of whom are Asian) started offering magic candies to special passengers for a surreal trip, the end would definitely not be a heavenly one.

Making the best use of time was also fundamental to the storyline. At one point, the ML expressed regret that he did not do so in his first life, and both he and the female lead made the best use of their unexpected second life. They also accepted that they were responsible for their actions and the outcomes thereof. This theme of personal responsibility was explicitly stressed on several occasions, and was possibly the defining difference between the protagonists and the antagonists. The latter refused to accept that anything they did was their responsibility, and in the end, their ends reflected that. I call this type of Drama "Groundhog Day" because the point of the do over is to fix whatever wasn't done right the first time. In Love, Timeless the awesome second couple did that, even though it took 4-5 goes to get it right. Here, the OTP both were focused on changing things, not repeating mistakes, and on accepting responsibility. The way the FL acknowledged her part in the 2FL's bitter trajectory was a great exanple.

In summary, I am absolutely delighted that I decided to watch this Japanese remake of a Korean drama that held (and still holds) no interest for me. The acting and the writing were everything that I'd hoped for, and the marriage (#TooEasy #SorryNotSorry) of two different skill sets in a co-production was little short of inspired. It has left me excited to watch the female leads next role. It's guaranteed that I will check out another upcoming Korea/Japan co-production remake, this one of a K-Drama that I watched and REALLY liked, Hot Stove League

P.S. if any dear (putative) reader knows who sings the song in this scene from episode 9 and where to find a recording, please do comment with the details. It sounds lovely, and I'd love to hear more of it.