Keigo Higashino's "A Death In Tokyo~The Wings Of The Kirin"

Continuing on with my new hobby of reading the Keigo Higashino novel and then watching the film/TV adaptation, I recently re-watched the 2012 movie "Kirin No Tsubasa~ The Wings of The Kirin" after reading the 2022 English translated domestic release "A Death in Tokyo".

As I had mentioned before, though I really enjoyed Abe's crime drama SHINZANMONO, I had no IDEA that The Wings Of The Kirin was a Movie featuring the characters from it when I originally watched it- I simply thought Hiroshi Abe, Junpei Mizubata, etc, were playing stereotypical crime drama roles that I've seen them play a hundred times before! You would have thought the characters NAMES would have tipped me off, but honestly, I didn't remember what any of them were! LOL

This was a crime drama that I originally grabbed mostly because I mistakenly thought it was a Yui Aragaki Movie. Aragaki IS in the movie, but she was more part of an (admittedly stellar) ensemble cast than a starring role, not that it mattered because I was captivated throughout the movie anyway! If there's one thing that's been proven, when times are tough and things seem hopeless, Hiroshi Abe is THE MAN when it comes to cracking the cases and bringing the guilty to justice!

  Kirin No Tsubasa follows the mystery of a Factory Owner who is found dying on a bridge in front of a huge Gryphon statue. At first no one knows where he came from or who the assailant might be, but soon a suspicious young lad is discovered hiding in some nearby bushes with the murdered man's briefcase in his possession! 

Mizobata Junpei and Abe Hiroshi

Miura Takahiro

Aragaki Yui

The cops give chase, but before they can get any information out of him, he is struck by an oncoming vehicle and  later dies from the injuries. Despite the evidence, the suspect's girlfriend (Aragaki) firmly believes him innocent, and as the force begin digging deeper into the people connected to the case, they find more and more secrets and lies, til they've stumbled upon another crime buried beneath the surface!

Kuroki Meisa and Abe Hiroshi

Nakai Kiichi

Matsuzaka Tori

Mizobata Junpei, Taketomi Seika

Tanaka Rena

Mizobata Junpei, Matsushige Yutaka

Aragaki Yui

Mizobata and Abe

Tanaka Rena  and Aragaki Yui

QUITE fun to both read the book and novel together for a whole new experience! Strangely, even though I watched the movie first, it had been so long since I'd seen it, that I didn't picture ANY of the movie stars as their novel counterparts, except for, perhaps, Hiroshi Abe himself!

Still found it fun to match the actors and actresses faces with the roles, and, as mentioned before, the visual medium DOES have one advantage of SHOWING you all the breathtaking scenery and locations, something that you can only do in your mind when reading the ebook, additionally, music score does a lot to convey feeling and mood.

Whichever you choose, both have  fine tale to tell!

Posted by zdorama @ zdoramaagain.blogspot.com

Time Spiral Gettin' Good!

Kuroki Meisa as Natsuki in Time Spiral

 We’re coming into the homestretch for the Meisa Kuroki/Gackt sci-fi drama Time Spiral, and it’s become a favorite show of mine to watch! This tale of the time-jumping adversary Tatsumi Sensei (Gackt) who’s manipulating time and events for his own  plans pays homage/steals from just about every time travelling movie out there, but it still somehow manages to seem original and exciting enough to grab my interest!

A Directive from the Future

* * * *ATTENTION: SPOILERS AHEAD  * * * *

The show uses a lot of elements from other time tales, but I’ve been mulling it over in my head, and the time traveling story that Time Spiral seems most like to me is the absoluetly awesome 1988 Dean R. Koontz tale “Lightning”. 
  In that story, a Time Jumper named Stefan comes upon a crippled woman named Laura who captivates him by how strong and passionate she is despite her handicap. Watching over her from afar, he falls in love with her and decides to use his Time-Jumping skills to”fix” her life. He learns that she was handicapped during a botched delivery by a drunken doctor, and jumps to her time of birth to replace the inebriated surgeon with a capable one, thus sparing her handicapped future...But each time he moves towards the future, he finds that some OTHER malady has once again robbed her use of legs. It seems that no matter what he does, FATE keeps trying to “correct” what should have been in the first place.

  By the halfway point of Time Spiral, we now know that all of Dr. Tatsumi’s (Gackt) interventions have been for the welfare of his beloved younger sister Mami (played by adorable Taketomi Seika). Somehow, in the future, Mami is deceased, and Tatsumi has been jumping into the past to try and "correct" events so she'll come out alive, but sadly, no matter what he alters in the past, he keeps returning to the present to find she has died. 

Dr. Tatsumi: Making Plans

Little Sister Mami (Seika Taketomi)

Somehow Mami's fate depends on Natsuki (Meisa Kuroki) and Kentaro's (Hiraoka Yuta) relationship. Tatsumi realizes that his sister's life is intertwined with those two, but each time he tinkers with their destinies to try to get a favorable outcome for Mami's future, he keeps harming and weakening the foundation of love and friendship Natsuki and Kentaro have. Soon they don't even feel like they know each other anymore. When will Dr. Tatsumi cease his manipulations on them...and to what EXTREMES is he willing to go to? Scary!

Confusion as  Natsuki and Kentaro's lives get tossed.

 Man, only two more episodes to go, damn this is such a GREAT drama!! At first I was worried because it was only 8 episodes long, but I’m realizing that the drama has the same amount of content as a regular 11 episode drama, except with the side stories and filler CUT OUT! Time Spiral is a lean, right-to-the-point show, and the only sad thing is about how soon it’s going to come to an end!
Posted by zdorama @ zdoramaagain.blogspot.com