What's Love Got to Do With It?

 

I've written before about my preference for Japanese dramas. Overall they click with me more than Korean or Chinese dramas do. Thanks to the recommendation of the awesome Alisa@DaebakPodcast a bluesky mutual and serious East Asian Drama expert,  I have had that reality confirmed twice more.

 

LONG VACATION 

                                 

The 1996 J-Drama Long Vacation has two strikes against it for many people: First it's from 1996, and second it's from Japan. I hope that people can overcome those barriers and give this drama a try.

The strength of this drama is in the believability of its characters. Romantic couplings, decouplings, potential re-couplings all play a prominent part in the story and yet it did not feel like romance was central. Character growth and music were central to the story.

As shown above, the drama opens with the female lead running in traditional Japanese wedding attire after having been jilted "at the altar". She turns up at the address of her intended groom, only to find that he is not there. She ends up moving in with the roommate he left behind, and they are the central couple of the drama.

One of the earliest features of this drama that I loved was the way her ex was a total MacGuffin. We never even see him, he is nothing more than a tool to set up the story.

Japanese dramas are short, and yet this drama never felt rushed in its development of the characters. The growth of the relationship between the lead couple happened at a realistic pace. Much is made of the fact that she is around six years older than he is, and for the first half of the drama she thinks of herself as his older sister providing advice on life and love. And this is where the drama gets interesting.

An older woman younger man living together is almost the ultimate romantic drama set up cliché. Yet for each of them the focus is on their individual growth. The younger man is a competent and skilled pianist whose relationship with the music he plays and teaches is largely lifeless and mechanical. His music professor tells him that he has put up a wall between him and music. The older woman on the other hand is paying for the crime of being an older woman  — just over 30 years old and a recently fired model with no other occupational skills in a society where women over 30 are effectively dead. 

Their cohabitation is much more about each of them addressing those issues than it is about whether they end up as a romantic couple. One powerful piece of evidence in support of the idea that romance is not the primary focus of this drama is the way that none of the individuals involved in the various romantic couplings feel like "villains". In a romance drama, generally the audience is encouraged to cheer for one side against the other, to view one person as the cheater, or the wrecker, but there was none of that in this drama. I loved the absence of "drama" throughout - everyone and everything felt real. Awkward, flawed, credible. No villains, just human beings.

Music is at the heart of this drama. The emotionally detached male lead acquires an even more skilled student who is even more clinical and academic in her approach to music. His efforts to get her to feel what she plays and to learn to enjoy music are very well depicted as being lessons for him. For me, one of the most poignant scenes in the Drama was when he received a postcard from that student, now at Juilliard, asking him how she can find enjoyment in music.  The initial focus of his romantic interest is also a musician. Her character is naïve and unworldly but her interactions with the male lead and the female lead's musician brother all play a part in the male lead's reconnecting emotionally with music. I first saw Matsu Takako, the actor playing the second female lead, in the 2017 J-Drama Quartet, which I absolutely loved. It's about a group of not-very-talented musicians who form a string quartet, so finding out from researching this Drama that the actor's own long and illustrious family pedigree is steeped in music and musical theatre was fun.

What makes this drama special to me is the way that all of the romantic interactions are actually focused on developing the two lead characters as individuals. The male lead's pursuit of his university alumna and everything that happens around that helps them to bring down the walls that his professor spoke about. The female lead's romantic interaction with a photographer who shot her during her modelling days ultimately plays a critical role in her finding an enhanced sense of self and a purpose for her life going forward. The end result of all of this is that even though there is at times what seems like a merry-go-round interchange of romantic couplings by the end of the drama it doesn't matter whether the male and female lead end up together because it's been established that's not really the key point of the story. As for whether they do, all I will say is that the very last shots of the movie reference the very first shots in a very entertaining way.

This drama may well not be for everybody. Although it lacks the OTT manga-style acting and filming that puts many people off Japanese dramas it is very old and given that many are already turned off Japanese dramas by what they see as lower production values, that problem would only be made worse by the age of this drama. 

I cannot wrap up this summary of my reaction without highlighting the acting and the actors. There were multiple scenes in this drama where complex and intricately nuanced emotional reactions were conveyed without any words, simply by the actors making skilled use of their faces. Thirty years on from when this drama was shot many Korean and Chinese actors are physically incapable of that kind of micro-expression control because of extensive surgery and other aesthetic manipulation. The subtlety and nuance of the expression is managed by the actors in this drama reminded me why I am saddened when modern actors choose to deprive themselves of the ability to use their face as a means for acting.

 If you're looking for a break from clichéd love stories and overheated romances, take a Long Vacation  and enjoy seeing characters grow through music, and life and love and music.

 

Turn to Me Mukai-Kun

 

After I finished Long Vacation I started another Japanese drama recommended by Alisa, a very different one, but with thematic elements that reminded me of the older Drama. Turn to Me Mukai-Kun is not thirty years old, just three. And it does start in a rather shrill OTT manga-esque style. In the first episode the character of the male lead's brother-in-law Genki (an unsubtle pun that even I grokked, and which was referenced explicitly at least once) was so unwatchably irritating for me that I considered dropping the drama. Thankfully I reflected on my experience of how many Japanese dramas I've watched wherein they settled down down after a shrill start and decided to press on. The reward for my patience was huge. I cannot recall a drama like this one.

The setup of the drama is about a 33-year-old man who has been single for 10 years unable to move on from the breakup of his last relationship. He ends up getting life and love advice from a woman he meets at the restaurant owned and run by his brother-in-law. That woman is played by Haru, and her presence was the main reason I decided to watch this in the first place. Her character, though, I found incredibly irritating for the first three or four episodes. She was clinical and ruthless and filter-free when it came to dissecting the male lead's actions and thinking and telling him bluntly what he was doing wrong. It turns out that my reaction was not only expected but intended. Later in the drama Haru's character expresses recognition and regret over her sermonising habits.

In the meantime though, her lectures really help the male lead to consider the whole sphere of love and romantic interactions from a completely different perspective. Different perspectives are a huge part of the theme in this drama. The male lead's sister Mamin and brother-in-law Genki have very different perspectives on their life together as a married couple, yet Mamin struggles to express her perspective and her issues with Genki's perspective in words.

For me what made this drama remarkably different and special was that relentless focus on "using your words". Haru's character used her words to not only prompt the male lead to think about his own thinking and behaviour but to express his reactions to her analysis and to talk about how he felt with the people who made it in his life. After the frenetic shouting subsided in the first couple of episodes, this was the clear theme of the drama — talk about, it talk it out.  The fact that, as shown above,  the opening title image is just the title in a speech bubble is clearly no accident.

 The male lead's mother was an awesome support character, very supportive of all her family —  her son, her daughter her son-in-law who lived in the house and was effectively her son too. The closest she ever came to telling somebody off was when she took the time to explain to her daughter  Mamin why not speaking about how she felt was a very bad idea.

Like Long Vacation there were a lot of romantic couplings decouplings and at least one re-coupling in this drama. Again like Long Vacation, those romantic couplings were not an end in themselves, they were not the primary reason the drama existed. They were means to an end.  The end or objective was the growth in self-awareness of the characters. There were many references throughout the drama to the difficulty faced by everyone in understanding to any extent how anyone else feels about any situation.

The humour in this Drama was very Japanese too. I love that J-Drama humour tends to be dry,  understated and a bit off-kilter. For example, I lauged out loud at this scene, where Mukai-kun walks in to his brother-in-law's curry restaurant to find his 'relationship coach', wh's been advising him on how to handle his interactions with his ex, sitting amiably WITH his ex.  

 

Once again, this drama is not for everyone. The efforts the male lead makes to "do as he's told"and  try to see every relationship from the other person's point of view often lead to paralysis of thought and action as he analyzes and then counter-analyzes every possible action and reaction in the light of what he's learned from his conversations with Haru's character. Even I found them a little bit excessive on occasion, but overall they were interesting. Here too, the short runtime of Japanese dramas was important because 16 one-hour episodes of that would likely have driven me to drop it. The writers though had a clear goal in mind and they worked toward it, as when Haru reached the point of realising that she was coming across like a preacher. From about that point, the  focus was on the nature and growth of the friendship between the two leads.

On the mydramalist website, some felt disappointed because the exact nature of the relationship between the male and female leads was left unspecified at the end. For me, rather than being an ambiguous ending, the ending of the drama was perfectly in sync with the theme and objectives of the drama, ending with the two leads talking to each other.

 

 

BOTH these Dramas are great examples of what makes J-Drama different. Different perspectives, different focus. Whether a 30-year old Drama about people growing through trying to love, or a 3-year old Drama about people grwoing through talking about trying to love, if you want fresh answers to the question in the title of this ramble, Try one. Even better, try them both.