Out of the 10 J-dramas I’m been currently watching, nine shows were all of the light-hearted or straight out comedy types, and now that I’ve wrapped up Reverse, the only “serious” drama of the bunch, I’ve been looking for a gripping, dark melodrama to balance my fun-going palate of shows, and after one episode it looks like the Nagase Tomoya/Riho Yoshioka drama GOMEN, AISHITERU is the one to watch!
“Sorry, I Love You” has had quite a bit of history to it, the original drama was a Korean show which aired in 2004 and then there was a Chinese movie in 2014, a Thai remake in 2016, and now we have the full-on Nihongo treatment here in 2017!
Tomoya Nagase stars as Ritsu Okazaki, a Japanese man working for an influential Korean family in Korea, but when he is wounded in the line of duty, he is put out to pasture, and it’s then that he decides to go back to Japan and seek out his mother.
Ritsu was abandoned by his mother and dropped off an an orphanage but now he wants to meet up with her, where he expects her to welcome him with open arms and apologize for even having left him.
Arriving back at the orphanage he once called home, he is met by the innocent Wakana Kawai, played with impeccable charm by the ever-adorable Chizuru Ikewaki.
They’ve been childhood friend ssince the early days in the orphanage, but since that time Wakana’s been in a car accident which damaged her brain and she is more or less still childlike it her outlook. Nonetheless, she’s managed to have a child herself, and with the arrival of her friend Ritsu, hopes to make a go of it as a family once more.
But Ritsu’s main reason for coming home has always been to meet his biological mother, and through the means of an unscrupulous agent who works for his biological father, Ritsu finds the address where his mother lives and makes his way down to reunite with her.
What Ritsu doesn’t know is that his mother, Reika Hyuga (played by the stoic Shinobu Otake), has long since moved on from the time she abandoned him at the orphanage. A famous pianist, she now lives a life of affluence and had another child, a boy named Satoru (Kentaro Sakiguchi), he himself a genius pianist, whom she dotes on and worships like the world. She is watching over him while he practices the piano as the doorbell rings…
Back when Ritsu was still living in Korea, he had an altercation where some thuglike colleagues of his attempted to rob, con and kidnap a pretty girl who was visiting Korea. This girl was Rinka Mita (Riho Yoshioka), and she was there for her job, as the assistant to the aforementioned pianist Satoru, who was having a concert there.
When her purse gets stolen by the thugs, she asks Ritsu for his help, and though he initially has no real interest to help her, her drunken talk and attitude charms him, enough that when the thugs come back to kidnap her, Ritsu instead pulls her away, and, on a stolen bicycle, spirits her away to hide the night out in his old lean-to.
The next morning, Ritsu is gone and Rinka has only a vague memory of the man who saved her life that night as she packs up and returns to Japan. She had thought she’d never see him again and he, her. But in a strange twist of fate, it is Rinka who answers the door to the house when Ritsu comes calling! She is shocked to see him here, thinking he must have followed her here. But when he barges into the house to confront Mrs. Hyuga, she can see something else is going on.
Far from the warm reception Ritsu was hoping upon seeing his mother, he is met with fear, scorn and apprehension. She flinches away from his touch, and it is painfully clear to Ritsu that this woman has clearly forgotten him and has completely moved on. With that, Ritsu storms out of the house, never saying a word of who he is.
His pain of rejection soon turns to anger, and as the new day approaches, Ritsu comes back with a new resolve: to extract revenge on the mother who threw him away. But he is once again confronted by the sweet and caring Rinka. How will Ritsu progress from here? And how will the appearance of Rinka affect the outcome?
Rinka is involved in a one-sided love with Satoru: she is the daughter of the Hyugas' lawyer and has cared for him all her life.
Satoru is oblivious to the fact, he himself in a one sided love relationship with the cold and calculating Toko Furusawa (Ayaka Onishi)...how will Ritsu's appearance change the game between them all?
Boy, so much going on in this drama, and though the story of the orphaned child who comes back only to see his parents have moved on and gotten new children isn’t a new one (many, many dramas featured this storyline), these is so much going on that am am constantly on my toes, desperate to see what happens next. And the direction of the drama is so sad, so blue and melancholy, really, from the opening scene with Rinka visiting the site of the old lean-to where Ritsu first took her, was already captivated and desperate to understand where the story was going. Gomen Aishiteru has become my must-see drama!
PS: Gotta admit, while I was watching the drama, I just couldn’t place who the main actress was. I knew I’d seen her before in something, but the drama eluded me. It was only after I checked the credits did I realize that Rinka was played by the same actress who played the hilariously picked-on assistant to Tachibana (Yo Yoshida) in the medical drama “Lady Davinci No Shindan”…oh MY, didn’t recognize her, she looks soooo pretty here, she looked so haggard in Lady DaVinci , heh, who wouldn’t after being the ‘gofer” for Tachibana’s whims throughout the show, LOL
