Title: ムコ殿 Mukodono
English Title: My Husband
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Year: 2001
Episode: 12
Cast:
- 長瀬智也 Nagase Tomoya
- 竹内結子 Takeuchi Yūko
- 篠原涼子Shinohara Ryoko
- 鈴木杏樹Suzuki Anju
- 秋吉久美子 Akiyoshi Kimiko
- 宇津井健 Utsui Ken
- 相葉雅紀 Aiba Masaki
- 神木隆之介 Kamiki Ryonusuke
- 段田安則 Danta Yasunori
- つんく♂ Tsunku
- 小雪 Koyuki
SYNOPSIS
Sakuraba Yuichiro is a pop idol whose image is a cool guy. In real life, Yuichiro is actually happy-go-lucky and is sometimes a bumbling idiot. He meets Arai Sakura when he is hospitalized and Sakura accidentally enters his hospital room. They date for six months and Yuichiro proposes marriage to Sakura.
Sakura has a big family. She is the youngest daughter of Arai Masumi who used to be a principal and now teaches calligraphy classes in their house. The eldest daughter Takeyama Kaede is married but is separated from her husband so she still lives at home. Kaede's son Takeyama Ryo is in high school and is part of the kendo club. The second daughter Arai Azusa works in a food company as a biologist. She has a son Arai Tsutomu who is in kindergarten but she is not married. The third daughter Arai Satsuki works as a producer in a radio station.
Although Yuichiro and Sakura get married, his management insisted that the marriage should be kept a secret from the public. In agreeing to the management's condition, Sakura's family insisted that Yuichiro gets adopted into their family.
REVIEW
Mukodono is actually a term for a husband that marries into his wife's family and adopts his wife's surname. Generally, a woman marries into the husband's family and adopts the husband's surname but in some cases, it is the husband who does and this practice is called mukoyoshi.
The drama is about the double life that Sakuraba Yuichiro leads: as a cool singer in his public life and as a loud ordinary guy in his private life. I think it must be really difficult to play a character so different from your real persona but perhaps it is not very difficult for Yuichiro to act as a cool guy because all he has to do is not speak much and brood all the time.
Arai Sakura is apparently clueless about who Yuichiro is, which is kind of unbelievable because he is supposedly very popular. She falls in love with the real Yuichiro, which is honestly even more unbelievable. Yuichiro is kindhearted and an all-around good guy but his mannerisms (how he talks, how he dresses, etc.) are just too awful for words.
Anyway, I'm quite curious about Sakura's life. She's the youngest of four daughters and she seems to be the homemaker at her household. It's weird considering that all of her sisters are working women with established careers. Considering that she has these women to look up to, she must have wanted to be like them. Or perhaps she ended up as the homemaker because everyone else is too busy with their work to do the housework and cook food for the family.
I'm not really sure why I'm bothered by the fact that she's a plain housewife. I suppose it's because I always thought that women can both be working women and housewives at the same time.
The drama is about how Yuichiro adjusts and gets accepted as part of Sakura's family. Each episode features one member of Sakura's family having a problem and Yuichiro helping out this family member and the two becoming close eventually.
However, his secret gets exposed in the end and the public finds out about his marriage. He loses everything, which makes sense if you know that an idol in Japan remains popular and marketable if he is unattached because fans get to fantasize that they are the special someone in their idol's life.
In the end, it seems that he gets his career back on track and his fans still support him. It kind of negates the whole purpose of the conflict in the drama; I mean, the reason that the marriage was kept a secret is because his career will end if the public knows about it.
But then again, I suppose it makes sense. There are some Japanese idols that have gotten married but they are still popular and their fans still support them. I suppose at the time when these idols announced their marriages, all sorts of complications came up. But eventually, things have cooled down and everyone has moved on.
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ムコ殿 Mukodono!
