Throwback Review: Utahime

Another throwback review from almost two and nearly half years ago. Utahime, written for my personal blog so its a bit more…. fangirlish?

I finished Utahime. :DD Oh yeah, major spoilers from here on out.

It’s a good drama. Really good. The only problem I have it is that the characters around Nagase get really annoying, some more than others. Probably because I was totally not feeling Suzu’s attraction to Taro and visa-versa. I was also a little pissed off at Tacchon’s character later on in the series because he seemed more like a cockblocker than anything. Always having a speech about how perfect Suzu and Taro are wtih each other, it got really annoying by the 10th episode. I didn’t like how the town treated Miwako, Taro’s wife who came to the town when she found out he was alive.

I’m sorry, but if you’ve been suffering for ten years because you thought your husband was dead to find out that he was alive all these years, instead of cockblocking her — give her the respect and dignity to try and work something out with her husband. I guess, at the end, I was so pleased with the ending because what happened to her happened to them, like karma. Though… not exactly… The only reason he left the town to go back to Miwako was because he found out he had a daughter. He told James, the only one who knew that he never lost his memory, he wants to live for his daughter. In a way, basically, he was only going back to her because he had to go back to her. That he had no choice.

I also guess my dislike for the Taro/Suzu relationship came from the fact that it just felt pedo to me. If Taro met Suzu when she was ten and he was roughly, around, 23 – 25 and ten years have pasted that makes him in his mid thirties and Suzu just 20. Also, the thought of him having such attraction to this girl as she grew up bothered me a bit because all the flashbacks he had of her were when she was young, not when she was a teenager. Sorry, that just bothered me everytime I watched it. I prefered that it was one-sided, like in the beginning, like she just had a childhood crush rather than him receprocating her feelings.

I always found Suzu to be extremely childish too. She never seemed woman to me because whenever something happened that didn’t go her way she always ran off crying. It was just ridiculous to watch at times. Which is another reason why I couldn’t see the relationship work in my head. To me, Suzu’s love for Taro seemed more like a silly childhood crush rather than actual love. She went on and on about marry him when she was young which makes me believe that it evolved from joking to childhood crush… She was possessive and it was just annoying. He’s a man, you’re a child, leave it alone.

Which is why when Suzu and her family started to get defensive around Miwako, though indirectly, I just became more frustrated. I guess if the town had experienced the loss that Miwako had experienced from the war then they wouldn’t had have made her seem such an outcast and a nuisance to the town. They basically drove her out, which is was rude in my opinion.

But despite all the frustrations I had with this show from episodes 6 – 9, the ending proved to be one of the best, satisfying, drama endings I’ve seen in a really really long time. Everything worked out in the way that I wanted it to work out, which was good for me because then I wouldn’t feel so angry at the show. Everyone, who I suspected, ended up with everyone and it tickled me to know that Sabako outlived nearly everyone in that town except for James/Student-san, who was around 22 during the events in 1955. But if Sabako outlived everyone and its 52 years later, then Sabako has to be at least 100 XD

Either way, I loved how the drama was named. I was trying to figure out where Utahime came into place, and it worked in both ways. The drama Utahime is named after the fact that when Suzu ran into Miwako in the tea room named ” Utahime ” everyone’s destiny’s crossed…and the movie is probably called Utahime because Nagase’s character’s daughter (Sakura) wanted to become an Utahime and he expressed this to James who then named the movie Utahime… because James had no idea about the Utahime Tea Room.

I laughed at this short scene in episode 10. There’s probably a crap load of Nagase/Tacchon fics on the internet due to this.

Now I’m gonna finish watching Tiger and Dragon — I saw the first episode four months ago and never finished it. Okada Junichi and Tomoya Nagase in the same drama? MAJOR. LOVE.