Japanese Drama Review: Second Love (2015)

Second Love (Japanese live-action drama series)

Year: 2015

Episodes: 7 episodes / 50 minutes each

Starring: Kazuya Kamenashi, Kyoko Fukada, Akari Hayami, Yumi Aso

My Story Synopsis for Second Love

Twenty-seven-year-old ballet/modern interpretive dancer Kei Taira (Kazuya Kamenashi) has had it all. International acclaim when he joined a German company in his teens, the winner of several awards and competitions, but now, well, now he's struggling. Jobs aren't coming his way anymore, and the idea of being a dance teacher galls him. Emotionally wrung out and depressed, he's just about reached the end of his strength when Kei spots a woman at an all-girls school, standing on an elevated walkway, the wind blowing her white lab coat and her arms stretched over her head. She mesmerizes him.

This woman is thirty-three-year-old Yui Nishihara (Kyoko Fukada), a woman equally bored with her mundane life, but unable to make a move towards anything more. Dreams are always for someone else, not for her, and so she teaches chemistry to a group of unruly teenage girls who could care less about the subject. But in the middle of a rainstorm a young man, the same young man who's been spotted lurking outside the school and sent the faculty into a dither as a potential stalker for their students, strides confidently up to her and slips a piece of paper into her hand with his contact information. No conversation, just the barest touch of their hands and a new destiny.

So begins a whirlwind romance of epic proportions. Kei is a maelstrom of sensual longing and melancholy and Yui finds herself sucked into his world. What neither of them could have imagined was that Kei would actually skyrocket to popularity again. Whereas before she was his entire world, now his world has expanded to include a busy schedule of choreography and dance, with barely time for his former muse. Can they survive the tumultuous relational ups and downs of a couple where one has a dream and the other has never dared to dream?

My Thoughts on Second Love

I've seen Kazuya Kamenashi in multiple dramas, listened to his music from the pop band KAT-TUN, and now I've had the remarkable opportunity to just watch him dance. Honestly, his dancing was the true motivator for me to watch Second Love, but I ended up liking the drama for its own merits. And yes, I chose to use a different drama cover for my review. Because I hate the one usually used.

The Acting

Kamenashi has always been such a delight playing underdog roles. You know the kind, where the male lead struggles to make ends meet, but it's not for a lack of working hard, just a lack of opportunities? He's brilliant in that type of role, and that, combined with his incredible dancing skills honed from years as a Japanese idol, made him so perfect to play Kei. There's a melancholy bittersweetness that he brings to his performance as Kei. I feel that Second Love might actually be the finest performance I've seen him give. He gets to play the character very authentically and without a lot of the stereotypical stuff. 

Kyoko Fukada as Yui is a delight. She's capable of adding an innocence and naivete to her roles that could have tended towards the more seductive if that makes sense. I appreciate that about her. She's a lovely woman and plays Yui with candor and honesty and she balanced with Kamenashi's energy and vitality really well.

Yui's mother, played by Yumi Aso, gave an excellent performance as a woman slightly imbalanced due to her husband's infidelity. She approached the role in a way that made me empathize with her fears, but also dislike the character. She did a truly good job. Katsuhisa Namase as the man Yui had an affair with performs well, but I never liked the character. Infidelity is an ugly thing and it's really hard to like a character cheating on their spouse, especially with a woman 15 years younger than himself. Now he is a stereotype.

The Story

This is a mature drama meaning it deals with mature themes.

I despise adultery. And unfortunately, Japan has a problem in that it is constantly presenting a double standard regarding adultery. There was recently a huge scandal with one of their male actors, Masahiro Higashide, and one of his female co-stars, Erika Karata. Married for quite a number of years, with kids, Masahiro got caught in a multi-year affair with Erika and Japan went ballistic.

And what about all of these dramas and movies and novels and manga that deal in adultery as a titillating piece of entertainment? I don't understand the double standard going on about this topic. How can you be so angry when someone commits adultery and yet also love a fictional story that might praise the act? It just blows my mind.

So, yes, my biggest issue in Second Love is that Yui is in an adulterous relationship with her supervisor at the high school before she meets Kei. It's disgusting and disappointing. The only reason she leaves her supervisor is that she falls in love with Kei. If he hadn't come along, she'd have stayed in the same old rut.

Also, sex is a big part of Kei and Yui's relationship and they leap into bed after having only one conversation. Not really the sign of the beginning of a healthy and balanced relationship, if you get my meaning. However, I do see that their relationship pushes them both forward in positive ways. For Kei, sex seems to be a means of communicating what he's feeling, exactly like when he's dancing. It allows him to process what's going on in his head; sort of as a lifeline. I'm not condoning the lifestyle, but that's the sense I get from him, that for him, that intimacy with Yui is about connection.

Kei doesn't seem like the kind of guy who will sleep with anybody who comes along. There's never an indication of that from him. He makes an instant connection with Yui before he even meets her. Watching her in an elevated walkway at her school, standing in the breeze and the fading sun with her arms stretched over her head, he senses the same melancholy loneliness emanating from her that he himself is feeling. He found someone who needs to be needed just as much as he does. To him, it isn't like she is some stranger on the street; he knows her intimately before he even meets her and learns her name. It might sound crazy, but that's what happens. And for Yui, when he tells her during their first conversation "I need you to save me," it has a profound effect on her. This is why she agreed to what she thought would be a one-night stand, but a one-night stand was never his intention at all. He wanted a relationship from the very beginning.

She balances him, gives him purpose, and drive, and confidence. Yui becomes Kei's muse where he had been floundering before. As an aging dancer (wow, 27 is SO old), Kei's jobs are few and far between now but he still wants to dance. It's just that no one will hire him. Just when he was at the very end of his emotional capacity, he found Yui. It's a huge burden to try and carry your dream alone. He needs someone to help him carry it. Yui saves him, and even if I don't agree with their morals, I can appreciate the beauty of that sentiment.

The Screenplay

I feel like making the drama only 7 episodes was a brilliant idea. There is almost no lag and not enough time to mess around with a ton of stereotypical tropes. The series just gets right down to business. It possesses a tranquil melancholy throughout of loneliness, but that's my favorite kind of drama, to be honest. I  mean, I enjoy the ones that are upbeat and eternally peppy, but there's a tinge of melancholy in my own life so I tend to gravitate towards that in my entertainment as well. For screenwriting and filming style, this might be my favorite drama series that I've seen. It doesn't become crass but still lets the mature themes be what they are, within healthy boundaries.

If there's one flaw it's not really giving the audience a reason for Kei's coldness later in the series. I get that he suddenly has dancing and choreography jobs so he's crazy busy and tired. But he's acting out of character by treating Yui coldly since she's his muse and we're never really given that much of a reason for it. The ending makes everything all right, but Yui goes through a bit of unnecessary emotional pain to get there. It takes a lot to make me angry at one of Kamenashi's characters, but I was pretty pissed at Kei a time or two in the last couple of episodes for his sheer stubborn iciness. He's not a cold character, so what was up with that?

Objectionable Content

Two characters are in an adulterous relationship and stay at a "love hotel" but there are no sex scenes between the two of them, two characters begin their relationship through sex, multiple "moderate" sex scenes (sensual, but no nudity, and not much movement, blankets are a beautiful thing), an older male character becomes so obsessed with his ex-girlfriend that he's kind of scary, a mother slaps her grown-up daughter, emotional manipulation is used as a means of parental control, a male dancer is assumed to be a stripper by the men he works with at his part-time job loading and unloading ships at the harbor, a male dancer is seen shirtless a couple of times, only mild language thanks to the person doing the subtitles (it's all up to the subtitler regarding how bad the language gets), a character is potentially suicidal near the beginning of the drama.

If I forgot anything, please forgive me.

I would rate this as PG13. For the topic, the content could have been so much more graphic.

All the Feels

The above YouTube music covers the first half of the first episode and is 100% clean of objectionable content, which is great since it gives the basics of how they meet, but without giving anything away to new viewers. It's a great music video and I hope you enjoy it!

Morally speaking, Second Love is on shaky ground. But I've always found that I can watch or read a story and learn lessons from it while not agreeing with the life choices made by the characters. Second Love is one of those types of stories. I enjoy it a lot, but some trainwreck kind of moments happen. That's what makes it feel more real. It's also an age-gap drama since Kei's 27 and Yui's 33, but in reality, the actors were only 3 years apart. It's the kind of age-gap drama where no one should have any issue with it since the leads are both well into adulthood, but of course, some of the characters do, and some viewers might.

Can I really recommend Second Love? Probably not, especially if you don't like the more mature dramas. I watched it because of Kamenashi. But the sexual content, while not explicit, is a big theme, and should be taken into consideration before viewing.