Showing posts with label nomaguchi toru. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nomaguchi toru. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Furitsumore Kodoku na Shi yo~ A Suffocatingly Lonely Death~

Furitsumore Kodoku na Shi yo (A Suffocatingly Lonely Death) is a Suspense/ Murder Mystery drama focusing on a Special Investigative Task Force hunting down a serial killer with at least 19 victims to his name. The story:
6 years ago on a routine investigation of an abandoned house, a police detective named Jin Saeki (Ryo Narita) and his team stumble upon a basement which seems to be suspiciously chained up. 

Delving inside, they find a decrepit area that looks like it once housed children. And at the back of the basement, they find a strange octagonal symbol painted on the wall…and a huge pile of skeletal remains heaped below!
Once tallied, the remains come out to 19 victims of very young age, and a bulletin is immediately put out for the owner of the house, a man named Juzo Haikawa (Fumiyo Kohinata). Though they try, Saeki and his team (Meisa Kuroki, Taiki Sato, Toru Nomaguchi) are not been able to make any kind of headway with the case.

Things turn when one day, a beautiful young woman shows up at the precinct and declares she has information about Haikawa and the mysterious abandoned house. Saeki runs down to interview her at once!


They expect her to give information of an evil, twisted person, however, the man this woman is describing seems more like her light and savior. Her name is Kanon Hasumi (Ai Yoshikawa), and a as a child, was severely abused and neglected by her mother, to the point of starvation. That is when the mysterious Juzo Haikawa came into her life, showing her not only how to think and act quickly in shoplifting to survive, but also by eventually inviting her to live with other children just like herself, at his home.

So grateful to this man are they that they call him “Father”, not in the blood related sense but of that whom a father should be- protective and nurturing. That is until one day he disappeared, leaving the now growing up teens to leave the house and scatter to the winds. They have not heard hair nor hide of the man in years…not until his name and the house came up in the news.
Kanon Hasumi wants to help Saeki and his team, and provides not only a photograph of Juzo and all the children that resided there while she was a tenant, but the names as well. Through this the detectives are able to identify some of the remains at the house and they are also able to locate some of the other children, now grown ups themselves.

Despite all of the former roommates of the house swearing only loyalty and innocence to Juzo, he is eventually  tracked down and apprehended by the police, and the serial killer case is seemingly over.
Fast forward to present day, where a woman named Toko Mori (Mizuki Yamashita) who tracks runaways and homeless teens, has made a chilling discovery when trying to locate a particular teenage girl who has gone missing. 
She tracks down Jin Saeki, who has given up detecting and is eking out a life as a traffic guard, to show him what she has found:
In a photograph of the girl taken before she disappeared, she is seen with a tattoo of a octagonal design on her arm. The same design sprayed on the walls of the death basement and carved into Juzo's palm. She believes that the serial killings may have begun again, and wants Saeki to come out of his self imposed retirement and help close the case for good.

As some of you know well, I have not been a big fan of Japanese Drama murder mysteries because they ALWAYS follow the same darn cliches: the shady boss, the turncoat best friend, the sordid politicians and of course the corrupt cops, etc, and I really was going to pass on this one- except for the fact that this was Actress Meisa Kuroki’s return to dramas, and as a HUGE fan of hers, was determined to check it out!
WELL,  I don’t know how this drama is going to go, and for all I know we’ve got yet another cliched by-the-number slog of a mystery, but as far as the first episode goes, it was STELLAR, and I’m dying to see more!

Friday, April 1, 2022

Gossip: #Kanojo ga Shiritai Honto no 〇〇

 Ririko Seko (Haru Kuroki) is a no-nonsense clerk in the accounting department of a major publishing company. She is highly regarded by her superior Masaki Niwa (Masanobu Ando) not only for her diligent accounting, but for her keen eye in discovering discrepancies and untruths in the receipts the employees give her; with only few clues she can get to the truth of things like a determined detective!

So good at her job is Rikako that Niwa takes her out of accounting and gives her a NEW task: To be placed as the head of a dying online news site the company owns named CAMPHOR News, straighten the employees up and re-focus the site as a Gossip Column instead of the old cut-and-paste News Site they were…and get viewership UP!

As soon as she gets there, she immediately bumps heads with the staff, for one thing, these are all employees who have long since given up on their Media site being popular and lazily drag their feet and scoff. Adding the problem is Ririko’s cold and unfeeling way of addressing people and situations, seeing everything in black and white with no room for feelings to get in the way.
But it is this very intensity about her that the staff will discover makes her unique, and they learn that because of her unwavering adherence to facts, she is able to turn a mere “gossip rag” story into a REAL News piece, and make Camphor News the place where a reader can find the actual truth about things! And slowly, she begins to earn the respect of her so-called peers….
Along with Ririko, the Camphor Staff are:
Michiharu Nezu (Junpei Mizobata)
Makoto Ichimoto (Anna Ishii)
Shuto Shimouma (Shuhei Nomura)
and Seiji Kabatani (Toru Nomaguchi)

REALLY enjoying this one so far, Ririko is yet another wonderful role for the talented Ms. Kuroki. Quite a relief to see for myself because I had seen early buzz online about the show's low ratings and people saying Ririko is “an unlikeable character that rubs you the wrong way”…I absolutely did NOT feel that (though I suppose the other characters in the show were meant to) and in fact I found her quite sweet and naive, a character I wanted to know MORE about!!!

There is this scene of Ririko fighting the urge to take a picture of a cute kitty, and watching it, I felt the same feeling I got seeing her in “Mi Wo Tsukushi Ryoricho” and “Nagi No Oitoma”, slowly paced, no dialog, just the camera following this girl...

Already up to episode 3 and am looking forward to more!!!!!