Lately there have been these odd dramas with actors/actresses playing “themselves’ in fictional depictions of their lives, like “Arimura Kasumi no Satsukyu” or “Kamiki Ryunosuke no Satsukyuu”, and in 2020 we had “Suteteyo, Adachi-San~ Throw It Away, Adachi-San!”
In this fictional story, actress Yumi Adachi meets with a magazine with a proposal- for Yumi to throw away one personal belonging of hers each day and then talk about what it means to her. They intend it to be 12 parts long (unironically the same amount of drama episodes) and that night Adachi bumbles around the house with no clear idea of what to discard. Unable to make up her mind, she drifts off to sleep...She then has a strange dream where her possessions take human form and talk to her about why they should or shouldn’t be discarded. Earlier that day Yumi had come across a burned DVD her agency had given her of all her early achievements, a sampler of her early works, and tonight, a human manifestation (played by good old Shihori Kanjiya) of the burned DVD comes to visit and determine if she should be thrown away or not! The DVD, through the mouth of Kanjiya, states that she may as well be thrown away since Adachi has no intention of ever watching her. Apparently the DVD sampler of Yumi’s young career was made by her company to promote her at the time, a collection of her shows and things. But she put it away as soon as she got it and never brought it out again.
Adachi claims that she’ll get around to watching it one of these day but in the meantime it’s just nice to have around. But as discussions between Yumi and her living DVD get serious, the drama becomes a more sombre tome and we hear some fears and worries that plague her beneath her strong facade...She says that she won’t watch her early career because she spent so much of her life trying to distance herself from it and the image she had. She’s afraid if she watches her early shows, she might regress back to that stage in her life, to once again have to prove to everyone and herself that she is a mature, capable actress.
As I watched this, I was like, “Hey…this seems like the REAL Yumi Adachi talking here!” Because it’s true: as a former child actress, she spent a good DECADE trying to shrug off that typecast of the little girl. Having a slight body and a childlike voice surely made those steps even harder.
But Yumi Adachi certainly has proven herself over the years and I think it’s a fact that she is regarded as a “real” actress and no flash in than pan, and ultimately, the DVD woman assures her that she can make peace with her past. “You are a good actress. People know this. You can let go of your stigma about the past.”
And accepting her past at last, they decide to pop in the DVD and watch it!
As I showed in an earlier post about Yumi Adachi, my first exposure to her was as a child in the drama “Ienaki Ko”, arguably the drama that first really hit it big for her.As they popped in the DVD to watch, I wondered if they were gonna show that drama. They didn’t actually show any footage in the drama for the viewer to see, but as they watched, you could hear the sound of a dog barking “woof woof!" which had me bursting with laughter! Even 25+ years later, Ie Naki Ko resolates, and happily, so does Yumi Adachi!
PS: Back when Kyoko Fukada’s drama Hajimete Koi o Shita Hi ni Yomu Hanashi was on, I remember my friend Saburo watching it and saying Kyoko looks good, but who’s the pretty lady playing Kyoko’s Bar Hostess Mama Friend?! I laughed and said, “That’s Yumi Adachi!” and he went “WHAATT!” and then, laughing, said, “I KNEW she looked familiar!” LOLOL It was then I truly knew Yumi had cleared the child-actress hurdle for good! Suteteyo, Adachi-San promises to be a thoughtful drama!
