Recommended: Camouflage: Aoi Yu x Yottsu no Uso

This post is a lesson in why it's not a good idea to put things off. I meant to write about this sometime ago - indeed, the sole commentator on this blog to date mentioned it, so it's been in my mind for a while. However, I never did, and then I learnt that Viikii (the site currently hosting it) is about to go legit and carry only shows it has a licence for, so I figured any second now it'd disappear from the internet.

However, that was some weeks ago, and it's still up on Viikii (EDIT: no it isn't) so I thought I'd write about it, even though I'm quite sure that any day now it'll be taken down. Especially now I've posted about it.

Camouflage is basically a vehicle for Aoi Yu, in the same way that Ueno Juri to Itsutsu no kaban was for Ueno Juri. A TV station, WOWOW, takes a new acting talent and films a series of short dramas with them in the lead. Camouflage has the recurring theme of lies through its four stories filmed by four directors, and all are of such a high standard that it stands alongside Lost Time Life as one of my favourite pieces of Japanese TV.

Especially fine is episode two (the four stories are split across twelve episodes) which is a fantastic piece of drama. Aoi Yu's late boyfriend comes back to her in dreams, so she starts taking sleeping pills to spend more time with him while they slowly realise that hanging on to the relationship is unhealthy and they have to say goodbye. Obviously shot on a cheap budget, it still looks good and the performances are perfect. By some distance, this episode is my most-watched piece of japanese drama, and episodes one and three (which complete the first story) are also of the highest quality.



The rest of the series never quite reaches the heights of the first story, but they're all excellent and all quite different. Indeed, the directors often change styles from episode to episode - in particular one story begins as a sitcom and is then shot as a soap opera in the next.

Inventive and touching, this series is a must-see for anyone with a heart.