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| Yuna Taira and Ryuhei Maruyama in FOGDOG |
The latest series in those ubiquitous J-drama crime shows featuring a lead detective with quirky “power” or skill comes FOGDOG, a fun and entertaining buddy-cop drama, featuring a yankee lead investigator prone to violence and a near-autistic partner with the inability to see faces but an immaculate memory for facts!Kiri Inukai (Yuna Taira) is an introverted (and autistic?) police detective currently on leave for mental health reasons, where she is trying to deal with her prosopagnosia, the inability to register faces. What she does have is a savant- level talent for facts, and when we meet up with her, she’s foiled a would-be robbery simply by noticing the inconsistencies of her usual clerk’s behavior!
This is witnessed by detective Hibiki Saruwatari (Ryuhei Maruyama), who is on his way to his new department after being demoted for his many violent outbursts in the field. When he arrives, he is none too happy to see that this “department “ is nothing more than a closet, and when he is told his job will be to catalog the department’s cold cases, he instead offers to go out and SOLVE the cases on his own!Concerning a case of a hit-and-run witnesses say was caused by a bear, he decides to visit a bookstore to read up on them, and is surprised to find that quirky detective from the convenience store working there! Inukai stammers that she isn’t trying to work two jobs, and explains her prosopagnosia to him. She then shows her greeat memory skills, and he immediately has the great inspiration to team up with her! With these two oddball investigators on the case, one might think it’d be a complete mess, but it seems the two work GREAT together and actually have a knack for closing those cold cases!!! Regular readers of this blog know how much I love Yuna Taira, and this role of the eccentric Inukai is just fantastic! Instantly fun and likeable! And Ryuhei Maruyama is entertaining as the over-the-top brash yankee cop Saruwatari! Guess He’s got to be the face of FUN in Kanjani8 nowadays since Yu Yokoyama is now the King of Creeps, LOL!
HPriest Subs tentatively picked up FOGDOG with the warning that they’d only subtitle episode one, and if it didn’t interest them, they would drop it. At this point I’m not sure if FOGDOG has passed the muster for them to continue, but it would be nice to see more! Crossing fingers!Posted by Zdorama @ zdoramaagain.blogspot.com
