The first story is “Poison Daughter”, about an actress named Yumika Fujiyoshi (Rika Adachi) who has been raised with a seemingly dominating “Poison Mother” (Shinobu Terajima) who overprotects her to the point of controlling every aspect of her life including film choices and even her love life.
The Second chapter is called “Holy Mother” in which we see things from the Mother’s side this time and find that all her actions had in fact been protecting Rika from bad things. (Personally I think they went overboard to portray the mother as kind and caring when she obviously wasn’t in Part One, and to paint Yumika as the selfish and uncaring one)
Chapter Three "Sinful Woman" involves the tale of a kind young girl named Yukina Amano (Kaya Kiyohara) who befriends an abused boy named Masayuki in her apartment complex. She is always there to care for him and look out for him like a sister, and is thrilled when she bumps into him as an adult(Yuto Takahashi). She hopes to reconnect, and she is shocked when Masayuki snaps and goes on a mass-murdering spree in a shopping mall.
Yukihiro is put in jail, and through interrogation, we see the relationship with Yukina from his point of view… and find things aren’t quite the same as Yukina remembers it.
Chapter Four "Best Friend": When upcoming screenwriter Suzuka Sazanami (Yuri Nakamura) is knocked out of first place for a prestigious award that would get you work on a new drama, she is at first happy with second place…til she sees the winner.
Kaoruko Omaniuda (Maho Yamada) is an awkward novice who doesn’t know the first thing about the television business and has seemingly won the prize simply because it was a true story of her husband’s cancer and death.
Yet despite Kaoruko’s inexperience, she keeps succeeding upward, while Suzuka keeps struggling every day to even get her name mentioned. This fuels an intense jealousy in Suzuka and she becomes obsessed with making Kaoruko fail.
It’s here that the series takes an interesting turn and begins referring back to the past episodes and we see each story is in this same universe!
A book “Slave Of Love” that the Television studio is hoping to develop is the same drama that Yumika Fujioshi tries to get in episode one-
wehn short of ideas, Suzuka sees news coverage of the shopping mall murder from episode 3 on TV and suggests they write a story about that.
And the huge drama that Omamiuda writes to great success is the movie that Yumika Fujioshi stars in at the end of episode 2!!!
Pure GENIUS how they tie all the stories together!!!
Chapter Five "Kind Woman": We have Kana Kurashina as a girl who is too kind to everyone and ends up being accused of murdering her inept co-worker at a company barbecue...
...and the final episode "My Dearest" deals with Ayumi Ito as a woman who can only confide in her cat!
A wonderful, thought provoking series.