Drama Review: Sapuri (2006)

Sapuri

Year: 2006

Episodes: 11 episodes, 45 minutes each

Country: Japan

Genre: Inter-Office Romance, Age-Gap Romance 

Starring: Kazuya Kamenashi, Ito Misaki, Eita Nagayama, Koichi Sato, Reina Asami

My Rating: ★★

You can find a list of my Japanese drama reviews on my Japanese Drama and Movie Reviews page. 

Sapuri follows the inter-departmental relationships and romances of a marketing company. College-age Yuya Ishida (Kamenashi) is the new guy on the block, hired as a part-timer or almost an intern to do a gofer type of job. While there, he falls hard for straight-shooter Minami Fujii (Ito Misaki), a woman in her late twenties who wants to fall in love but regrets that she's never spent time actually pursuing feminine traits and can't easily put aside her business-like demeanor.

Then you have the boss, Imaoka-san (Koichi Sato) who's having love problems of his own, but who does take good care of Yuya in remembrance of Yuya's deceased father. And of course, the "other" woman chasing Yuya, Yuri Watanabe (Reina Asami) and the "other" guy chasing Minami, Satoshi Ogiwara (Eita Nagayama). With the sheer amount of romantic escapades happening, it's a miracle that anyone gets any work done.

I'm cutting right to the chase with this one.

In my estimation, Sapuri would have been much, much better if it had simply been an office comedy and left the age-gap romance completely alone. The relational stuff falls so horribly flat. I didn't buy it. I don't see how it became an age-gap romance. Yuya and Minami have almost nothing in common. He's a surfer boy with long beach bum hair, a reckless attitude, and abundant enthusiasm. He does mature somewhat by the end of the drama, but not enough to be a good match for Minami. She's straight-laced and prim and proper and no-nonsense like an American schoolmarm from the 1850s. How is that ever going to work out?

Content, it's pretty clean. There is a fair bit of drinking that goes on. The boss is in a relationship with one of his female staff members with no intention of marrying her. The "other" guy who's interested in Minami has had a long-term crush on his senior's wife from when he was in college, so that's not good. The "other" girl chasing Yuya pretends that the one time he was drunk that they had sex, which they didn't because that would be weird in the middle of the street. I remain firmly convinced that you'd have to be unconscious to not remember sleeping with someone. I don't see how that's even possible, but then, I've never been drunk and in that precarious position so who knows!?

Kamenashi is entertaining and comedic, but THE HAIR. Oh, it's so painful to look at. I've seen him with some odd hairstyles, but this one takes the cake and someone should have pulled out the scissors. It's so bad, so, so bad. There is almost no appeal in him as a man in this role. I spent the entire series thinking of him as a teenager, which is even worse than thinking of him as a man in his early twenties, which would have been accurate. I think this is partially why I couldn't buy the age-gap romance thing. If he had no appeal for me whatsoever then how could he possibly appeal to a much more staid and prudish woman like Minami? As for Ito Misaki, she was bland and boring, made that much more so by being cast alongside the charisma bomb that is Kazuya Kamenashi. Poor woman, it just didn't work. She almost played her role with an unforgivable stupidity considering that Minami Fujii is supposed to be a brilliant advertising agent.

Overall, it's just your basic office romance drama without much to recommend it. I watched it for Kamenashi, and I feel that once was more than enough. I didn't hate it, but it's completely and utterly forgettable. If you want something else with Kamenashi done in the same year then Tatta Hitotsu no Koi is a much better choice.

I have to wonder if the original manga was just as bad or if the drama series ruined it. The tropes are ridiculous, like who simply gives up a man because the "other" woman says "You have so much, can't you just give me one thing because I love him." Well, the answer to that is NO, not if I love him too, and especially not if he loves me back. I mean, sheesh, that's absurd. I think it's at that point in the 9th episode that I really took a dislike to the series, which is a shame because it might have been better otherwise. Oh well, you can't win them all. At least Sapuri's pretty clean and the subbing team did an amazing job. They even subbed a lot of the written signs and paperwork and that took some dedication.