Mitsu no Aji
10 / 10occultangle · 11 Jan 2012
I can just tell that this drama is going to be very polarizing and frankly quite despised by many people. But I simply must be the person to say that this is absolutely one of the best dramas ever, period. I happened to notice that it was written by the same person as "First Love", which was also strongly hated by many people, and which I feel is one of the most overly criticized series ever. There are many thematic similarities between the two series, even a lot of the dialogue is almost exactly the same. But most of the things wrong there, mainly the last few episodes and the over the top characters, are much better here, and one of the great things there, forbidden love, is so much more powerful and blatant here, because it's a love story between an uncle and his niece.
I know this isn't the first time Japanese entertainment media has dealt with a story about incest, but television drama always has a tendency to toy with forbidden love themes, for example often times it's a student/teacher, but they usually only use it for enough shock value to get ratings but then back off before they might actually offend people. They don't back off here! And I couldn't be more pleased with them for that. I realize that something like incest is not something normal that most people would want to participate in in real life, but it makes for very moving drama if one will just accept it as a story.
Another thing that's so excellent here is the way it builds to a climax and then halfway through reinvents itself. It allows the story to be more "epic" without either dragging on, or having to resort to trivial forms of conflict flip-flopping the story (which is exactly the problem with the last few episodes of the aforementioned "First Love".) In this way it reminds me of my absolute all time favorite drama "Aoi Tori." The story is actually very beautifully simple and straight forward, an uncle and a niece fall in love, but that is obviously not an easy relationship to have. That does bring me to the only flaw I can think of, and that is the over the top behavior of the jilted boyfriend and the power of tabloid magazines, but this is television so I don't feel like that is beyond expectation nor does it significantly harm the main plot. Kanno Miho's character is quite evil, but it's also equally believable and reasonable, and if anything, her eventual acceptance of the situation is the only thing that would be questionable in real life, but it's great for the story.
Really I was rather shocked by this drama, I really didn't think they would so honestly portray a story like this and be willing to go all the way through with it. But it was a very good kind of shocking and the best drama I have seen since "Aoi Tori."