Drama Review: Sora Kara Furu Ichioku no Hoshi / A Million Stars Falling From the Sky (Fuji TV, 2002)

Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magick

by Ender’s Girl

The Cast:
Akashiya Sanma, Kimura Takuya, Fukatsu Eri, Shibasaki Kou, Igawa Haruka, Morishita Aiko

In a Nutshell:
Homicide detective Dojima Kanzo investigates the mysterious death of a female college student, while his sister Yuko grapples with her growing attraction to Katase Ryo, an apprentice cook who has started dating Yuko’s heiress friend Miwa.

(SpoilLert: Land mines up ahead!!! Proceed at your own risk!!!)

[Recommended companion track: “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” by U2]

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.”

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst, There Is None”

Paradise Lost

You would expect a drama bearing the title A Million Stars Falling From the Sky (The Smile Has Left Your Eyes) to be nothing short of epic. Images both great and terrible spring to mind, a tragic vision of Miltonian proportions. So you steel yourself for the onslaught, ready to be swept away by the darkness and the doom. (Don’t watch Sora Kara Furu Ichioku no Hoshi if you’re in the mood for light, breezy fluff, obviously.) The drama’s overall tone is sordid and depressing, and the denouement does NOT go down smoothly. You’re in for a helluva ride down the homestretch, so buckle up and brace for impact. The whole thing has the atmosphere of a Greek tragedy, and you come away feeling dirty, as in deep-down dirty, right after watching it. Where do you even begin to make sense of this morass of malice, manipulation and murder? Everybody here is tainted, a gray area, deeply flawed and complex. When push comes to shove, nobody is above moral compromise. Nobody. “No worst, there is none.”

The jigsaw puzzle is a recurrent theme in this drama, from the opening credits down to the final moments. The college student’s death that prefaces the story is but one piece in this puzzle, with the Big Picture gradually materializing as each (seemingly unrelated) fragment falls into place. Despite the story kicking off with a homicide investigation, and despite one of the main characters being a detective, Sora Kara Furu… is not your action-packed whodunit or garden-variety police drama. It is something else altogether, and you get the feeling that whoever is assembling this puzzle is doing so at a very deliberate and measured pace. This drama is a slow burn for the first ten episodes, and you can only watch and wait in mingled fascination and dread as the story makes its inexorable climb to that unforgettable climax.

Criminal Minds

You wonder what the two parallel story lines — the homicide investigation and the Yuko-Ryo-Miwa love triangle — have to do with each other, but you realize soon enough that these arcs aren’t parallel at all, but crisscrossing threads in a growing web of lies and lust and secrets, of past sins and new crimes, of suspicion and cover-ups. And at the center of it all is Katase Ryo, with the face of an angel (and the body of, well, something else, heh heh heh) but possessing the deadened eyes of one who has fallen from grace long before the story unfolds, who charms with his smile while ever so subtly ensnaring people in his own machinations — until they are all dead, or broken.

Ryo is arguably Kimura Takuya’s darkest role to date. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, Ryo is the perfect criminal because he never gets his hands bloodied. Both masters at string-pulling and button-pushing, Iago and Ryo play god without a second thought, moving people around like willing pawns in the crimes they have masterminded, disposable pieces in their sick little games. Othello‘s Iago is described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as this “motiveless malignity,” though one can argue that there IS a motive behind Iago’s (and Ryo’s) sociopathy, and that is POWER — over people’s lives and destinies. The lust for power is a potent drug that creates a false patina of invincibility — and even immortality. For in Ryo’s illusory world, blinded by his own hubris, he really becomes a god, vowing to make the stars “fall from the sky” through sheer cunning and will — while spitting in the face of Fate. But nothing lasts forever, and these stars that Ryo has willed to fall from the heavens — these beautiful, unattainable stars that mock him in their splendor — plummet to earth in a deadly firestorm that leaves Ryo’s world in ashes. Trapped in his own endgame, the master of destiny becomes the prisoner of doom.

Original Sin

Nippon’s National Tarento Akashiya Sanma essays the role of Dojima Kanzo, the world-weary detective whose newest homicide case inadvertently unlocks the rusty wheels of a Past binding him and his sister Yuko (Fukatsu Eri) to the mysterious Ryo. Despite his comedic roots, Sanma fits this role to a T, and after watching him on Sora Kara Furu… you’ll never guess that this guy’s bread and butter for decades have been his one million comedy and variety shows. Sanma exudes this folksy, avuncular quality that makes his character Kanzo so believable, and so easy to root for.

I was riveted to Kanzo from the moment the drama opens with him in his car, a defeated look on that careworn face. Here is a middle-aged man already burned out by the everyday tenor of life. Kanzo sees himself as a “worn-out rag” — and so do his colleagues, who (with the exception of his partner, Kotoko) treat him like an outcast because of his countrified ways and halfhearted approach to his job. To them he’s just this klutzy, underachieving bloke who’s only good for making udon and lame puns, and so they tolerate him at the precinct but exclude him from the salient points in their investigations. They don’t even take Kanzo seriously when he’s the only one who points out the odd coincidence of the DVDs on the dead student’s shelf being in the exact same order as they were before her death — despite evidence of a scuffle that left the room in disarray.

As more and more clues point to Ryo, the enigmatic kitchen assistant gifted with a photographic memory, a gnawing suspicion also starts to grow on Kanzo that Ryo may be that boy from his own buried past, the Boy with the Scar, who as a child watched an overzealous rookie cop gun his father down in their own home. At the same time Kanzo can only look on helplessly as Ryo insinuates himself into the lives of both Yuko and her friend Miwa (Igawa Haruka), and he realizes with mounting dread how dangerous this young man truly is. After a shocking turn of events confirms his initial gut feel, Kanzo vows to protect Yuko at all costs — but we soon learn that he is not above resorting to his own reprehensible tactics just to keep Ryo at bay.

But Kanzo turns out to be a puzzle within a puzzle: just like Ryo, he is not all that he seems to be, either. For the better part of the drama, Kanzo is the one out to dispense justice, the lawman who doggedly works to expose Ryo as the mastermind of this deadly game, while trying to shield those dear to him from the wiles of the devil. But you learn later on that this drama’s epic tragedy is actually rooted in Kanzo, and that stupid, senseless act of violence by his own hand 25 years ago. You realize with a sickening thud that it is Kanzo — affable, self-effacing Kanzo — who is the story’s Ground Zero, and that the bullet he fired in that forgotten past has somehow ricocheted — and is hurtling back to his world with deadly, vindictive speed.

Nemesis

What I looked forward to the most in this drama were the face-off scenes between Kanzo and Ryo. (And what an unlikely pair they make, Sanma and Kimura. They seem so mismatched on paper — the Aging Comedian and the Hot Young Idol — but together their on-screen chemistry pulsates with a wonderful synergy.) In Episode 2, Kanzo and Ryo share a smoke outside a neighborhood convenience store; after a brief encounter in the first episode, this is the first time they get to size each other up. The gloves have not yet come off, but you can already sense something dark simmering beneath the pleasantries: for what you really have are two dangerous beasts circling each other before a fight. As their conversation innocuously turns to Kanzo’s detective work, Ryo asks what it feels like to kill a person, and Kanzo candidly answers, “It feels as if you’re dying yourself.” Ryo muses aloud, “Isn’t it strange? No matter how bad the opponent is, no mater how corrupt, even if you’re just defending yourself, a human being killing another is wrong. Humans aren’t gods.” Kanzo counters with a rhetorical question: “But with guns, don’t they become gods?” “The wrong kind of gods,” Ryo retorts. You don’t realize right away how this little scene slyly portends the story’s main unraveling at the drama’s close. It is only much later that you see all the different layers embedded in this short exchange, and the twisted, ironic symmetry in their words when viewed in light of their shared past. (Take a bow, Kitagawa Eriko.) There are other scenes in the drama that play out Kanzo and Ryo’s epic battle of wills as more plot kinks get unsnarled and more puzzle pieces fall into place, but this moment was one of the best for me.

Kanzo and Ryo’s last two scenes together are equally outstanding, for they mark that critical moment of truth in their relationship, the single beam of starlight that dispels all the cobwebs and shadows obfuscating their past. Their emotionally charged confrontation in the empty precinct in Episode 10 is a reversal of roles for Kanzo the Lawman and Ryo the Villain, and the dialogue grimly echoes their first moment together. This time it is Ryo with the gun, and it is Ryo who, having recently regained most of his childhood memories, lays the terrible charges against Kanzo. And although Kanzo minces no words in disabusing Ryo of his own disembodied version of the incident, the indictment rings home. (The BGM used was ALL WRONG for this scene, though. Totally inappropriate, and bloody distracting to boot. No BGM would’ve been better.) Kanzo and Ryo’s final scene together in Episode 11 (a reprise of their cigarette break nine episodes ago) is less nerve-racking, but far more devastating — and the absence of shouting or any form of violence makes it even more so. The matter-of-fact tone of their conversation belies the earth-shattering implications of the words spoken: for the last shred of truth is ripped from its hiding place, the final rivet that unmakes Ryo’s world.

The Talented Mr. Ryo, or When the Baddie Is Also the Hottie

The tragedy of Ryo’s life is not so much the cruel twist of fate he suffers as a child (witnessing his father’s killing, his own disfigurement, and thinking his sister dead), but rather it’s WHAT this stroke of misfortune turns him INTO. The real tragedy is that even as a child, he allows the traumatic experience to poison his soul, and so he grows into an adult consumed with hatred and bitterness and envy. The writing takes such pains to account for Child Ryo’s heartbreaking past, but at the same time the drama makes him too irredeemable a monster to elicit much sympathy from the viewer. The world is full of people who have seen and experienced unspeakable things, yet have managed to rise above their circumstances and lead normal (read: CRIME-FREE) lives. You can’t live your life holding your past accountable for your own wrongdoing, no matter how terrible this past may have been.

It’s interesting that the one time Ryo personally commits a crime is when he does it for someone other than himself. The paradox of Ryo as a tragic figure is that it is his love for Yuko that brings about his own undoing; by fully embracing his humanity, it destroys him in the end. Only when he has learned what it is like to love, to feel, to be vulnerable to joy and pain, to become a REAL person, that he perpetrates this act — the one crime among his litany of sins. Ryo finally learns to love, but this love is not enough to redeem him in the end. True, the healing power of redemptive love has restored many a wrongdoer on the path to wholeness, but not so for Ryo, who is too far gone to receive any absolution for his transgressions. And yet in its own quiet way, Love still succeeds in humanizing this monster, though it does not save his soul.

Kimura’s performance is solid and compelling, and props to him for embracing the dark side. It isn’t every day (or every drama) that he gets to sink his teeth into a character so… depraved, lol. His portrayal of Ryo is truly a double-edged sword: as the viewer you’re repelled by the privy knowledge of his villainous nature — but at the same time beguiled by all that mind-blowing sensuality, heh heh. This is his most blatantly sexual role to date — and maybe for the rest of his career. (Dammit!) As Ryo, Kimura makes my blood curdle AND my toes curl all at the same time, heh heh. Damn, but that man simply oozes carnality — clothed, or not (but better — not! better not!!! lol). And did I say that this drama could also have been titled “A Million Sex Scenes Falling from the Kimura Sky”? Heh heh heh. With such a predator on the prowl, I guess you can’t really blame all those poor women for dropping like flies before Ryo’s wiles, ne?

Sora Kara Furu… definitely counts among Kimura’s best work, although (admittedly) it will hardly stand out in the spectrum of Great Drama Villains. Nevertheless I still thought Kimura did his role justice, and those moments immediately following the Big Revelations in Episodes 10 and 11 (“Kanzo! Killed! Your! Father!” and “Your! Lover! Is! Your! Sister!” respectively) showed an actor at the top of his game. <Gun + refrigerator + a child’s family portrait + The Truth = Ryo’s world implodes, sucking you in with it. And all you can really do is go, “My God, how terrible…. how terrible.”> I was also impressed by Kimura’s range, having seen him switch from melodrama lead (Beautiful Life) to quirky (Hero) to Angry Young Samurai (Chuushingura 1/47) in just two years, before doing Sora Kara Furu… Then he turns around and does breezy rom-com fluff a year later (well, hello-ooo, Co-Pilot Shinkai on Good Luck!).

Beauty and Madness

And oh, the women in Ryo’s world…

Nishihara Miwa (Igawa Haruka) starts out with the viewer’s sympathy on her side, Miwa being the resident Poor Little Rich Girl, the proverbial Bird in a Gilded Cage. Though born into privilege, Miwa’s restlessness and dissatisfaction with her lot in life (which is to marry this rich cad her parents have foisted on her) provide the impetus for her romantic entanglement with Ryo. And being the perfect opportunist, Ryo seizes this chance meeting to add another victim to his portfolio. So he plays his cards well and she falls for him almost immediately — but she is no ditz, and realizes soon enough that he is not all he claims to be. The consummate con artist, Ryo ever so deftly reels her back by leeching off her vulnerability and fueling the… winter of her discontent. And this time, you want to kick Miwa for falling prey to this fork-tongued charmer while that truism keeps playing in your head: “Shame on him if he fools you once, shame on YOU if he fools you twice.”

And so, like a hackneyed refrain, Miwa becomes yet another willing pawn in Ryo’s bid to play god — until her own desperation to be with him at all costs drives her to do the unthinkable. Although by now, she has outlived her usefulness to him, while he in turn has calculated with chilling accuracy the lengths to which she is willing to go for his sake. Miwa’s downward spiral meets its own horrific conclusion in an act that is just as much Ryo’s doing as it is her own, but no judgment awaits her in the eyes of the viewer — just an overwhelming sense of sadness and regret.

In contrast to her sorely miscast turn on Good Luck!, Shibasaki Kou is perfect for the role of Mizashita Yuki, that deeply troubled girl blinded by her misguided love for Ryo and her own feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing. A large part of it may have been due to Shibasaki’s (stunning!!!) physical attributes and her own acting mannerisms (i.e. sullen expression, mumbles her lines), but her portrayal of the child-woman Yuki–a contradiction of maddening sexuality and heartbreaking innocence — was highly satisfying and spot-on. Ironically enough, it is Yuki who is left standing tall in the end, the only character who finds true redemption and healing as she gradually (but painfully) weans herself off Ryo, owns up to her crime, and takes stock of her life before it careens completely out of control.

In Yuki there is the hope of a fresh beginning, which sadly is a luxury not everyone gets to enjoy in this story. Her character emerges from the psychological carnage bloodied, yet unbowed. You learn that she is more resilient than she seems at first, and it is her unlikely friendship with Detective Kanzo that further bolsters her resolve to piece her life back together. For it is Kanzo’s unrelenting kindness that helps set Yuki’s perspective aright, and it is only when she sees herself through his eyes that she realizes her true worth as a person — and not as an object of sexual gratification, or an embarrassing anomaly in her family’s gene pool. Kanzo and Yuki’s few moments together are both tender and bittersweet, and it comes as a mild surprise that it is she who falls for him first, and not the other way around. In this sense, Love succeeds where it could not with Ryo, because it redeems and liberates Yuki from a life lived in filth and shame and condemnation. In Love, Yuki finally finds her absolution.

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me

And so we come to Dojima Yuko.

(Fukatsu Eri, you ROCK.)

There’s something about Yuko that melts the heart right from the start. She’s nothing like your conventional heroine: both the viewer and Ryo first meet her as this twitchy young woman self-consciously trying on wigs and clothes at Miwa’s birthday bash. Yuko is a strange little creature, a bundle of nervous energy and red eyeliner, and with an air of cheerful desperation about her that serves to mask her deep-seated insecurity. She reminds you of a string pulled taut, or a wild animal ready to take flight.

Yuko’s attraction to Ryo is from the get-go, but ever the loyal friend, she acts as both messenger and go-between for Miwa and her hot new boyfriend. Her instinct warns her that Ryo spells danger! — both for Miwa and more importantly, for herself — but such is her overpowering fascination with this man (nothing like that Bad Boy allure, tsk) that it is she who actively seeks Ryo out, irresistibly drawn to him like a moth to a dark flame. And strangely enough, for all of Ryo’s liaisons, it is Yuko who catches his eye — yet she is no mere passing fancy, and is in fact the only person who can make him lose his composure, make him feel like a real person. As Ryo tells Yuko in Episode 3: “Being with you somehow… it speeds me up. I lose my cool, I’m thrown off rhythm. And I have a feeling I can’t turn back.” True enough, this episode is the turning point in their relationship, the slippery slope leading to their doomed romance. Yuko is also the only woman whom Ryo ever lets into his digs (frightfully ugly as the place is — more like a hutch with giant ventilator fans and an armchair, heh), and the only one he lets into his own heart, blackened as it is.

So goes this ill-fated love story between a soulless monster and a woman who turns out to be his own sister… An aberrant coupling, yes, but a love story nonetheless — and one that is only intensified by the exigent circumstances swirling around the lovers: the murder investigation, Miwa’s death, Kanzo’s patent disapproval of their liaison, even Ryo’s personal quest to unlock his childhood memories. And their matching burn marks provide the single clue to a long-concealed truth, fitting together like grotesque puzzle pieces. “It’s like we’re connected,” Yuko murmurs thoughtfully to Ryo while viewing their reflections in the mirror. “Sort of like a map…” Indeed, the contiguous contours of their scars point the way to their own terra incognita, although Ryo and Yuko learn too late that this so-called dreamland is the realm of their worst nightmares.

But oh my stars, that chemistry. Kimura and Fukatsu Eri scorch up the screen no matter where the scene is set — whether it’s a neighborhood diner, or a convenience store, or the sultry cocoon of Ryo’s bed. This drama would not have worked the way it did given a different set of actors: Kimura and Eri’s individual qualities render them perfect for their roles, and together… DY-NA-MITE. You just can’t duplicate the kind of chemistry they bring to Ryo and Yuko’s romance, or the immediacy — and the desperation permeating this forbidden love. Ryo and Yuko throw themselves completely off the cliff–and into their love, just as Kimura and Eri throw themselves utterly into their characters with all the intensity and unbridled passion they can summon, holding nothing back.

Fukatsu Eri’s performance is a tour de force in every way. Of the Sanma-Kimura-Eri trifecta, it is Eri’s masterful interpretation that stays with you the longest: a portrayal that is not only gripping, but one that shows a character fully developed in all aspects. As the story unravels, so does Dojima Yuko, and her acute sense of betrayal in the final episode, caused by her own misinterpretation of Ryo’s motives, is what precipitates the drama’s climax. For Yuko, the scales have fallen from her red-rimmed eyes, and so she makes a final stand to protect the man she calls her brother — with her life, if need be. And oh, Yuko and Kanzo… I really have to hand it to Kitagawa Eriko for writing brother-sister dynamics so damn well (Long Vacation, Beautiful Life, and now, Sora Kara Furu…). Kanzo and Yuko’s relationship is so wonderfully complex, and their chemistry as siblings so well-utilized, with genuine affection mixed in with the darker elements that now threaten their home — such as the deception (on both sides) and Yuko’s willful refusal to give Ryo up.

Murder, She Wrote

Romantic Drama Hall of Famer Kitagawa Eriko boasts an impressive oeuvre with far more gems (Long Vacation, Beautiful Life, Tatta Hitotsu no Koi) than lemons (the unfortunate Asunaro Hakusho, a mistake in every way). Sora Kara Furu… is the one deviation from her renzoku ren’ai norm, and although her screenplay often glows with the beauty and sadness that are trademark Kitagawa Eriko, there are weak points in the narrative that give away her limitations as a ren’ai writer. For one, she flounders in the murder investigation story arc, which is poorly developed and just flatlines toward the middle. The detectives don’t seem to be doing much sleuthing; sure, they pace around the precinct spouting snide comments in Kanzo’s direction, but the investigation never really gets under way — it’s like nobody puts in an effort, even for appearances’ sake. Why didn’t the investigators follow all leads and exhaust all angles before writing the case off as unsolvable? It would have seemed more believable that they kept shooting down Kanzo’s theory because they had their own premise that they wished to pursue. Their shabby treatment of Kanzo would have made more sense if their investigative work had been carried out more assiduously. Nobody was putting in an effort — probably because Kitagawa Eriko as a writer wasn’t, either.

Perhaps an even more gaping hole in the plot is how quickly Miwa’s character is forgotten after her suicide. The first episode clearly shows Miwa to be chummy with both Yuko and Kanzo (who is even secretly infatuated with her): why else would Yuko be in Miwa’s room, trying on wigs and clothes, and why else would Kanzo be invited to Miwa’s birthday shindig in the first place? But if this were the case, then why were there not enough scenes showing the aftermath of Miwa’s death? Why didn’t it create a significant impact on Kanzo and Yuko, other than one or two moments when they first learn of the shocking news? The two seemed to recover from this loss too quickly to be believable, despite the drama having played up their closeness.

My third bone to pick with the writing is the heavy-handed use of the caged bird leitmotif. Unlike the jigsaw puzzle or the “million stars” reference (which is first mentioned in Ryo’s letter as a child, and later echoed in the drama’s gripping finale), the bird-in-a-cage metaphor (which applies not only to Miwa, but more significantly to Ryo, as we later learn) is as overused as… Ryo’s tweed baker boy cap (but, okay, I loved that cap, lol). After about the second time that danged bird was alluded to, I felt like screaming, “I get it already, you don’t have to bludgeon me to death with the avian analogy!!!” I also felt like singing a la Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins: “Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a caaaaaage!!!” Er, I mean bird in a cage. But even the dialogue belabors the point: in Episode 5, Ryo tells Yuko, “It’s like putting a bird in a cage (*ka-ching!* there ya go!), then locking up its heart. Not being able to come out, not happy, not sad, not hoping, not trusting, not loving… so I can’t be hurt.” He’s obviously referring to his own desolation, and that line was moving enough to work by itself, but the excessive use of this same trope throughout the drama just dulled the impact for me.

Curtain

As a tragedy, Sora Kara Furu… feels more Greek than Shakespearean. Although both sub-genres chart the main characters’ downfall amid the storm and stress of life, Greek tragedy (Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for instance) emphasizes man’s epic struggle against Fate — and Fate (or the will of the gods) is often portrayed as capricious. Greek tragedy also draws heavily from Greek myth, which has no qualms about depicting the sordidness of the human condition, rife with taboo elements such as incest and parricide. But such is the human condition as it wavers between two extremes: man as god and the apex of Creation, and man as beast. The noble and the depraved — we are always a mix of both. It is the choices that we make through life that determine which side will win out in the end.

In the drama’s final act, the players in this puzzle make choices that ultimately seal their own fate. Ryo and Yuko’s tragic story — which has simmered steadily for the first ten episodes — now reaches boiling point, a scalding tempest of ruinous consequences. Only this time the heat does not merely scar the lovers; it consumes them. But the climax is no less than perfect in light of how the situations and the characters’ own actions have panned out. Ryo’s demise by the hand of his lover/sister is the judgment long due him for having lived so dishonorably — and NOT because he unwittingly fell in love with his own sibling. Pain, desolation, heartbreak, death — these are Katase Ryo’s… or I should say, Sawada Shougo’s just deserts.

And so the curtain closes on Ryo and Yuko as they lie cold in each other’s arms. With that, night falls on the accursed House of Sawada. The police and crime scene investigators swarm over the riverbank, their flurry of activity in stark contrast to the quietude covering the dead in that little boat, which has become their own funeral bier. Dojima Kanzo can feel the last jigsaw piece falling into place, the final death blow hammering home. The puzzle’s tragic vision is complete, and he has not been spared his judgment. “God has turned His back on me,” he tells his partner Kotoko. “Koto-chan, take a look… At a time like this, on a night like this, the stars falling from the sky are so beautiful.” And just as he says, the night sky is ablaze with a million, billion, trillion stars: immeasurable, eternal, and unfathomable as the human heart.

“Smile, though your heart is aching…”

Our story comes full circle with Dojima Kanzo back in his car, playing an old cassette tape he found by the river that (somehow) went unnoticed that fateful night. On the long, lonely drive back to Tokyo, the strains of the Japanese ballad fill his car — just as memories of the dead wash over him in a tsunami of grief and remorse. There is no rest for the weary, and Kanzo has many miles to go. He stops before a traffic light, oblivious of the impatient honks from the vehicles behind him as the light turns green. Finally roused from his abstraction, Kanzo drives off under a sunless, starless sky. But what is he thinking of at that very moment, when that cryptic smile (or grimace?) passes over his face? Only then do you realize the significance of the Elvis Costello song, which will be the theme of Kanzo’s life for the rest of his days. And you wonder if he will truly find, upon reaching the end of his own road, that “Life is still worthwhile,” as promised by the song. That is something we will never know, the story does not say. One can only hope.

Grade
Artistic & technical merit: B-
Entertainment value: B+
Overall: B

***
Photo credits: ginkovn.wordpress.com, cranberrysheep.livejournal.com, mapenzi01.cowblog.fr

Title credit: “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (1991)

Explore posts in the same categories: Dark Kimura, J-Drama & Film, The Kimura Project

Tags: akashiya sanma, fukatsu eri, jdrama, kimura takuya, kitagawa eriko, sora kara furu ichioku no hoshi

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