Currently watching: Marumaru Tsuma

Well, I’ve not been writing much recently but actually I’m feeling pretty optimistic about this season of J-dramas. Perhaps because I’ve not had much time to watch TV, and now it all seems fresh and original again. Anyway, there are four dramas that have caught my eye and I’ve even started visiting d-addicts multiple times in a day, hoping that the subs have been updated. It's been a long time since I did that. I’ll try and write about these four in the next few days.

The first I want to write about is Marumaru Tsuma. This series stars Shibasaki Kuo as the perfect wife to her husband, a TV news presenter. She's attentive, caring, patient. Everything you could wish for in a wife.

Except this perfection hides dark undercurrents. She’s too attentive, able to predict her husband’s needs with eerie precision. Also her desire to do what’s best for her man means she sometimes resorts to less than honest methods.

Who she is and what her true motives are is, I guess, the main story of this drama. The end of episode one threw in a few surprises to convince the viewers (who would have already suspected) that this woman can't be trusted and those dark undercurrents are about to come bubbling to the surface.

Episode one was all about setting up the situation and characters and, as such, nothing really dramatic happened until the last ten minutes. Then an awful lot happened at once. Perhaps almost too much, as various truths about the wife came tumbling out one after the other. A lot of the hidden menace will have gone with so much out in the open. But we’ll see. I could be wrong.

However, whatever her history is – yakuza, spy or even an assassin for Mossad – one thing is clear: leaving her husband when he has to look after his elderly mother (which was her idea) is not a nice thing to do.