Aoi Yu Enters David Lynchian Territory

Aoi Yu in Shozukai

As regular readers of this blog know well, I am a huge, huge fan of pretty actress Aoi Yu, but I just don't know about this new drama of hers "Shozukai"... it is WEIRD, WEIRD, WEIRD! I mean like Twin Peaks "Fire Walk With Me" weird, Ya know. At first I thought it was going to be a serious, heavy drama like Eguchi Yosuke's "Triangle" or dark like Ayase Haruka's "Byakuyakou", but it just got less and less like a solid murder-mystery and more and more like an "existential" art-house project , if you will.

The sdtory begins engagingly enough...four friends are witness to one of their classmates  being taken away by a mysterious person and murdered, yet none of them can remember what the person looked like upon questioning later. The murdered child’s mother curses the four girls to lives of misery where they must “atone for their sins” for failing to bring the girl’s killer to justice.

The drama takes a turn when we jump ahead to the four girls, now all grown up and properly messed up because of the incident, dealing with personal issues in their own way. Seems like the curse the mother has set on them has been working! This portion of the show is shot in this colorless, grainy documentary style film, adding to the mix of a gloomy, morose plodding story, and I'm all like, 'Ehhhhh...It's like Su Ki Da, all over again!" Too Bad, Aoi Yu was looking so darn pretty and lithely feminine, GOD, I love this girl!

The next few chapters of this drama feature other actresses I love like Chizuru Ukewaki and Koike Eiko, but  I dunno if I'm going to be in this for the long haul. Blessedly, the drama's only a short 5 or 6 episodes long, so I guess if they translate them, I might give it a gander...Onto Episode 3!