3 out of 5

Directed by: Ryuichi Hiroki, Hirofumi Inaba, Yasutaka Môri

covers season 1

The Many Faces of Ito is, I believe, the first jdrama I’ve committed to watching all the way through.  In part this was due to accessibility – 30 minute episodes, only eight of them, and on a streaming platform – and partially it was due to the reasons we (hopefully…) watch anything: there was at least some aspect that maintained my interest throughout.

But there was another component that, combined with the ease-of-viewing, had me determined to finish it: I was curious if the fairly blatant girls-are-defined-by-men agenda was carried through as obviously the whole way, or if any more modern gender concepts would sneak into things.  So: I called this out as being my first jdrama because I don’t know enough about the genre yet to determine how common the themes in Ito are, i.e. if this is a cultural conceit I should expect (like the unfortunate “allowances” we may make for stereotypes in a fair share of manga and anime), and thus it doesn’t seem fair to make it part of the rating.  So the three stars = three stars for an averagely entertaining romcom, agenda considerations set aside.

Rio (Fumino Kimura) is a floundering screenwriter.  After one madly popular TV hit, she’s yet to produce a followup.  As a stopgap, she’s written a relationship advice book (appealing to fans of her show), with producer-encouraged plans to host seminars on the book / offering dating advice as a way to meet potential inspirations for another project.  And she does: four attendees tell stories about a man named Ito who appears to be one and the same across each.  So Rio arranges private sessions with each woman to hear more, piecing together the story of Ito, and turning it into the basis for spec script.

Each woman – dubbed A to D, initially given snap-judgment characterizations by Rio – gets two episodes allotted to their bit, with the cadence following a pretty clean “here’s how you’re failing in your relationship” on their first episode, and “here’s how you fix things” in the second episode, with events amusingly portrayed via flashback into which Rio visualizes herself, making notes on her “observations”, and thus cleverly giving us a viewerly way to see past events in a present context, through Rio’s eyes.  In the latter “fix” episodes, the resolution inevitably goes against our author’s direct advice, which forms the show’s overall arc of putting Rio herself through the same broken / fix process, seeing her own issues blocking her from progressing in her field and then learning how to bypass them.

Things are cute, move quickly, and there’s intrigue in trying to figure out who Ito might be, as we get shifting descriptions from girl to girl.  Otherwise?  The show’s harmless, not taking any real steps at moving past broad characterizations, or questioning motivations beyond dating and sex.  The brisk pace and a charmingly stern performance from Fumino keeps things moving, with the rotating girl / Ito cast (the actor in his role changes each episode grouping to match his then-described personality) preventing too much tonal staleness.

There’re your there stars.

…And then there’s the way that, even when these girls “discover” themselves, amd sometimes step away from Ito, it’s simply on the way to another guy, as, apparently, the only goal in life is to find love, and your job is to remain appealing and skinny and do the Sexy, All-Knowing Virgin dance to so so.  I rankled at this shallowness (accepting that is still the basis for plenty of American movies / comedies, but being more familiar with our culture and the state of our media, I know where I stand when criticizing those), but, again, I have no-genre basis to say whether this was the norm, or progress, or maybe actual as male-sighted as it seemed.

If I brave jdrama waters again, we shall see.