hanawake no yon shimai 華和家の四姉妹 [series]

aside from nigh on giving ruku-chan a heart attack due to shige’s constant nakedness, there are many other things to love about hanawake. Though that is probably the funniest.

Kato Shigeaki (News, Trouble Man) actually rocks my universe. He rules the world. Who new such a weird little hedgehog could be so f*cking great? Well, I actually did know that already but still, having him team up with one of my favourite female actors is great, I’m seeing pouting left right and centre, fantastic hair, and Shigipig buggering about with a camera – all is right with the world.

Hanawake is so melodramatic that I feel like I should watch it at home alone like a desperate housewife while my [non existent] husband is at work while I’m doing the ironing gasping nooooooo! at everything that happens.

And then when dr drake ramoray from days of our lives turns up and falls down a lift shaft we find out somehow ume was his illegitimate child who used to be a boy, takemi built the lift with faulty wiring and goes to jail, and sakurako finds a note from sho who was actually his brother saying that she is actually heiress to his millions but sho has run off with the money... I could go on.

Yes, dr drake ramoray and kato shigeaki seperated at birth. Yup. What. Why are you looking at me like that? Fair comparrison I thought.

Damn it every time I talk about Shigipig I get Shalala tambourine in my head.

I have a clause in my rental contract that says *must not sing or allow singing* - I seriously do have that. It is hard enough to not sing when you are a musician but when you have Shalala tambourine in your head it is like being in the silent library with Matsumoto trying not to laugh at him getting hit in the face with a remote control car.

yes thats right, shocked face.

So, onto the actual show then. It is really sweet and ends well.

Shige plays a total pr*ck for ages which is great, and all four of the sisters are played by people I really like. I have a few other dramas with Mizuki Alisa (Ohitorisama, Oniyomi nikki) who plays Takemi, she always tends to play strong characters it would seem.


I hadn’t seen Kawashima Umika who plays the youngest Ume in anything until we saw an episode of code blue the other day and realised that one of the patients was her – only, very tiny wee young. I really liked her in this, i thought she added a nice dynamic to the bunch, and even though Ume was not like it yet, i think she would grow up to be very much like Takemi in terms of her strong will and ability to march into places and take over when others were being useless.

Kichise Michiko who plays Fujiko the oldest sister, I have seen in lots of things. The only ones that spring to mind right at this second are Liar Game, BOSS, and Bloody monday. She is, as always, a good solid actor, she always manages to convey enough humanity in fairly stiff characters to make you warm to them. Even when you feel you shouldnt.


Another sister, Sakurako, who is Shige’s character’s girlfriend, is played by Kanjiya Shihori who I fell in love with while watching Fuurin Kazan all that time ago, then again in Buzzer Beat with Kitagawa Keiko, Yamapi, and Mizobata Junpei. I actually fully love her. I had to try so hard from taking too many screen shots of her adorable face. She pouts and whinges a lot in this drama, and if it hadnt have been Kanjiya I may not have got to grips with her character at all. She is one of my favourite actors and I really think she pulls out all the incidentals and details that you need to really appreciate a character properly.

So all in all, Hanawake has a cast I can jump about in the air for – I won’t though. I’m likely to send my laptop flying.

Takemi is a great character. She is misjudged and misunderstood by all around her but really she holds the world together like glue. Sakurako is a wet blanket but you can’t help but love her as she is adorable. Though I’m not sure how much of that is the character and how much is my bias for the actor. There is lots of stuff I could pick out to talk about but I’m not sure what would best describe the show in general.

Takemi moves back home to the family house, which causes trouble as the other sisters see her as a demon woman. They all have their own problems and dramas which Takemi systematically becomes involved in. Takemi has her own problems but they stay under the surface even though they are actually pretty troubling.

I think this may be a girlie one. Not because it is sweetness and light but because it is a proper melodrama. That, and Shige walks around half dressed for the entire show, and on the rare occasions when he is clothed he has his trousers tucked into his boots and a camera in his hands *enter swooning girls stage right, enter screaming fan girls stage left, clash centre stage, and fight-oh on!* what could be better than that. But yes, it does make me think it is geared up for a bit of a desperate housewife viewing.

With all the things I have watched this month I am reviewing about half of them, I really cannot be bothered to go through everything I have seen. So I may well keep this review short due to the fact that this is all taking forever. There are still 40 odd shows and countless movies at this point that I have seen that I still haven’t gotten around to reviewing but I do plan to at least go through what I still have on my hard drives by the end of next year. I do wish (but not really) that these new shows would stop coming out or I will never get the backlog done. If only I had started these reviews when I first started watching Asian dramas – though saying that, they would have been p*ss poor reviews though.

I can’t help but watch these new shows even though I have many old ones to get through as well. When I hear that a member of News is in a drama of course I am going to watch it whatever it is. I can’t help that, it is just the way the world now turns.

But thankfully this turned out to be a good drama and totally worth it even if just for Kanjiya and Shige to be paired up.

I do hope Shige acts more, especially since his role in Trouble man was so epically brilliant, and now this. What is with him not being popular so much in Japan? We all f*cking love him over here.

The female characters in this drama were all strong in one way or another and carried the show well. I think they were all likable and I definitely was hoping for a happy end all round. I’m not sure you can say it was a perfect happy end for everyone, but it was well rounded as a drama on the whole, and everything had its rightful place when the final bell tolled. (there was no bell, don’t go expecting one)

Mostly it was a fun drama, just relentlessly melodramatically unnecessary – you know the way no-one ever loves the right person, or someone is always secretly swindling someone out of something, or not being upfront and leaving love un-confessed, having to chose between family or work in life or death situations and it all being some great existential nightmare, talking to your dead mum on the phone… you know how it is.

I’m glad I waited for this to nearly finish airing before I started to watch it, I didn’t like waiting for the last episode of Zenkai girl and didn’t want to have to do that with this. It was pretty easy to watch – for some reason made me think of Hotaru No Hikari, I have no idea why. But it made me feel like starting the second season as I still haven’t yet. I went on to finish the last few eps of Kamen Rider Den O and all the dvd extras instead and developed a thing for Ryoutaros Imajin’s voice actor – god will this fan girling ever end? I swear I am making up for the total void of fan girling in my teens.

I’ve had enough of this review. I think that it is obvious I can’t be bothered. I’ve done too many in one go. Damn my internet being down for so long. Damn BT for putting off the appointment for yet another week. Hook me up damn yous!

so beautiful it is unreal.

~