Even the promotional photo for the 1998 drama KIRA KIRA HIKARU would have us believe that its four main characters aren't exceptional women. If you look at the promotional photo below, our eyes are naturally drawn to Suzuki Kyoka in the upper left corner, who plays the part of Sugi Yuriko. We see that she is lovely and around thirty years old, a woman who would be a catch for any man, as she speaks happily, lively into one of the world's first cellphones. A very exciting, trendy image, for its time. But not a hint, in the image, that Yuriko is an established doctor. Once we've watched the drama, we look back at the photo and recall that Yuriko almost never smiled once throughout the entirety of the story. Maybe occasionally, but barely, and over the flaws and foolishness of her fellow women professionals. Yuriko is a serious-minded individual. The plotting of the drama was driven primarily by this very quality of hers. The other three women look up to her, but only one lacks the pride to admit it.
Not a great start to this one, I thought. But it turns out the little superficial chatter struck upon an important theme. Eiko wasn't talking about men; she was referring to working women like themselves.
Using a scene like this to get the drama rolling turned out to be a clever move. It knew that there would be people like me watching who would see a discussion like this and immediately think the women shallow. But soon we see that by day the four women bring their skills in forensic research and detective work to the coroner's office, as they stand around the recently deceased to delve into mysteries. They depend on scientific data to solve their cases, but this data also leads to dead end results. Ultimately, because of these dead end results, the only way to solve the cases is for the women to examine the sources of human motivation. There is no data for human motivation; nothing about the soul is for certain. But the women do have their intuitions, and some even act on them.
KIRA KIRA HIKARU is one of a great number of dramas that look at a woman in her twenties setting out to learn her trade. Amano is an intern at the coroner's office, hoping to be as good at her work as Yuriko. Upon the theme established by Eiko when discussing volatile, gutsy men, in Episode 5 we see Amano at work, alone, with a researcher who did his training at a medical school in Boston. Boston! It is remarkable (or maybe not) the number of times the greatest city in America gets referred to in the world of Japanese television drama. Speaking as a proud Bostonian myself, that reference can only mean that this man Amano is working with has trained to be the best at what he does, will be the cream of the crop, and indeed this man comes across as highly qualified, handsome, an expert in the field. If anyone wishes to be the complete package, come to Boston, we'll turn you into someone special. However, before long, we can see the moment when elite training slips its mask and the researcher reveals that he isn't what he appears to be, that he cannot be trusted. He says for Amano's approval,
女の人はやっぱり、真剣に働いてるところ一番なきれいだ
Women look their best when they’re working hard. A bit of a flatterer, this one. But if schmaltz like this is meant to attract Amano, she's not paying attention; every thought that passes through her mind is focused exclusively on solving the case. The episode revealed, not surprisingly, that a man who would use a line like that is a phony and a fraud. He wishes to be seen as a professional, but as the plot develops we see that he is really only seeking a kind of perverse pleasure. And so the drama continued to work its theme.
Amano chose to become a coroner for her life's work when one night she came across a dead body on the street, and saw the woman who would eventually become her Senpai—Yuriko—at work examining the evidence. Calm, unruffled, efficient, Yuriko was seen to be examining the brute reality of death with knowledge, experience, and a daunting sense of authority. "I want to be like that," thought Amano. But as the drama develops, we see that Amano isn't anything like that. The story contrasts her highly emotional, impulsive, still immature style with Yuriko's cold, austere, highly rational one. We can see how different the two women's styles are in the following clip.
Amano has a lot of growing up to do, then, professionally and emotionally. Throughout the drama she never really grows up emotionally, but it's that very emotional impulsiveness that gets her to see things in the data that her colleagues cannot because their highly rational ways of evaluating the evidence prevent them from doing so. This notion is probably a little fantasy playing out for the sake of the drama, the idea that youths know better than their superiors simply because they are not stiff and set in their ways. But it is definitely a question worth considering, especially for a drama that takes seriously the notion that a woman's work style is her fate on the job.
On a side note, the way Fukatsu Eri mutters to herself in this scene when upset reminds me a lot of the way Ueto Aya did in HANZAWA NAOKI. It's funny to me how some women, when they get angry, cannot ever really be truly angry, and so they make you laugh rather than put the fear in you. Their styles are too cute. Cuteness is actually at the very core of their being. It is impossible for them to ever really be persuasively angry. Why not, you ask? Because they are cute. Nothing wrong with that, though. Cuteness probably limits how far someone can advance in the professional world where cuteness as a dominating characteristic very rarely gets the job done. But I say don't ever let anyone persuade you that cuteness is a character flaw, especially for that reason. Cuteness helps us see the humor in things, even if the possessor of cuteness fails to see what's so funny to everyone else those times when cute does actually get very angry.
Three of the women show that they are very aware that a woman's highly emotional response to things can be a hindrance on the job. Yuriko, the one of the four who has the most complex inner life, makes an effort at suppressing her emotionalism so that she can approach her job like a man. Certainly like the boss of the coroner's office does, Tadokoro, played by the always refreshingly masculine Yanagiba Toshiro. I don't think I've seen a role that features Yanagiba where he doesn't appear as competent, accessible but tough, vulnerable, but only to the very few who are smarter and cagier than he. Those very qualities, combined with his deep, commanding voice, the musical way he manipulates his words, make him a natural when casting requires a moral authority for its story. We learn something important about his wife in the final episode, and not until then do we get a sense for the philosophy with which he runs the coroner's office. Yuriko is his equal when it comes to discretion, and perhaps the only reason why we learn about Tadokoro's private affairs is because Yuriko's private affairs entered the office and became everyone's affair.
How Yuriko's mind works eventually does reveal itself in the final episodes. Up until the crisis, Yuriko is seen as having earned a place in society as a respected forensic examiner. We know very little else about her other than she is exceptionally good at her job. She socializes with her colleagues but never to learn anything new about herself (one of the main functions of showing the four women getting together for dinner each episode is to show how little interest Yuriko has in the private lives of her peers). When the crisis hits we see that she has been suppressing certain aspects of her individuality, and as a woman, for the sake of her job. Maybe her supreme professionalism is to explain it, maybe the heartbreak and trauma she experienced due to her sister's betrayal can. But, not surprisingly, the more the case involving her sister's whereabouts breaks down that part of her life she has suppressed, the more, not surprisingly, she becomes closer to her highly emotional intern, Amano. The following scene shows a moment when Yuriko and Amano are responding to each other as women and not as Senpai and Kohai. And then they receive a jab a moment later when they are spotted by Eiko conversing, not as colleagues but as, gasp, women alone talking among themselves.
"Why are you two both looking so weepy?" asks Eiko entering the lab. (Or, "What are you two agonizing over?" with the tears implied.) Obviously Eiko is not criticizing them for being teary-eyed—there is always a little humor in everything Eiko says—but she is striking upon a theme, once again, that is driving the content of this drama forward.
Yuriko's sister Saeko (Shinohara Ryoko) is, in a word and a half, a screw-up. She reenters Yuriko's life and would rather not. Saeko stole her sister’s lover, then ran away with him without ever looking back. Beat her daughter up when things weren't going well for her personally. (An especially difficult scene to watch because the young actress who played the part of Julia looks so innocent and pure.) She works with low-lives in a gross Kabukicho bar in order to pay off her debts. One of the reasons why she hated her sister Yuriko so much was that when they were growing up, she explains, Yuriko would always have to ask "why, why, why" for everything. For someone who cannot tell the difference between being rebellious and devious, a seeker of truth like Yuriko is an especially threatening kind of person to have in one's life. Saeko's very speech patterns show how she can so easily slip from one lie to the next. It’s the boldness with which she expresses her self-confidence that is especially galling, because anyone else can spot the lie. And there are too many to spot. She asks Yuriko, “If Tsukimoto died [the lover the two sisters had once shared], then who is raising my child Julia now?” Well, that should have been you, you narcissistic dolt. It is here that Yuriko slaps—finally gets the chance to slap—her sister. And scolds her for being irresponsible.
Does that slap help reform Saeko? Of course not. But that moment does tell us a lot about Yuriko's character. Both sisters have, in fact, constructed great walls between themselves and the social world around them. The drama shows how both sisters require a great psychological adjustment if they're to build better, stronger relationships.
I don't want to give the drama too much credit, though. Yuriko is a great character because Suzuki Kyoka is great. She got rewarded for her performance for KIRA KIRA HIKARU, earning "Best Supporting Actress" for the 16th Television Drama Academy Awards. The drama itself has too many far-fetched elements to list. Saeko escapes Japan with Yuriko's lover, but only to land in Bosnia just in time for its horrific civil war. When she returns to Japan, she has arrived just in time for the terribly devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake. It makes you wonder why she hadn't just gone up north to Hokkaido in the first place and assumed another identity.
Most laughable portrayal in the promotional photo shown above is Matsuyuki Yasuko's detective Tsukiyama Noriko. Pictured as rosy-cheeked from blush that she is layering on rather thickly, eager for the night, I assume, to offset Eiko's glaringly red lipstick in the opposite photo, I suppose, this glorious character is as good at her job as Yuriko, and, oddly, seems to have given even less attention to her love life than Yuriko. She is attracted to Yanagiba's Tadokoro, and though forceful with every other aspect of her life, she is at a complete loss for how to approach a man that attracts her. This is just one aspect to her character I found endearing. And of the many attractive aspects to her style, as it played out in the drama, I don't see a single one reflected in the promotional photo.
The following scene shows another one of the women's dinners. Eiko, unloading more of her bold, strange ideas about men, doesn't persuade the table, Noriko least of all, though she does seem to look somewhat amused.
"Your pride (regarding men) bores me." That's what Yuriko and Amano are probably thinking too, but only Noriko among the three would ever dare to point that out. Additionally, I love Matsuyuki's smile here, and in the many other scenes that demonstrate her bluntness. The smile itself is very warm and affectionate... but ultimately she can't be bothered. That's a kind of woman you'd want to kill for, precisely for knowing that you'd never be able to outwit her.
Noriko chooses to do something, in Episode 9, that I'd guess at least 50 million American women would find beyond the pale, if not disturbing in the extreme. It is well established by that point that Noriko takes risks on the job that the other three women would never think of doing. Of the four, her personality consists of the right balance between Amano's emotionalism and impulsiveness and Yuriko's no-nonsense rationalism. She never has to let people know how she truly feels because, remarkably, spectacularly, that's never at issue. The moments she drifts into emotionalism is when she takes issues personally. One case involves a Senpai to whom she owes her career. As modern a woman as she appears, she would never disappoint a Senpai. But to pursue the case in the manner she wishes to pursue it would put her and Tadokoro in trouble for disobeying protocol. Tadokoro warns her strongly not to pursue the case the way she wishes. She goes ahead and does it anyway. Predictably, her and Tadokoro have to suffer the consequences. She receives a demerit from her bosses at the police station. We see her honor code at play, and at least for me I found it an impressive one. Though ordinarily I myself would never choose to disobey a boss I respect of the kind we find in Tadokoro.
This next moment is, perhaps, Noriko's most important one. It is indicative about something essential to her character. It is the controversial one I noted above. Moments before this we see this same man roughing up a woman right in front of Noriko's car; in fact, landing on her car hood with a thud. Noriko does nothing about it. She has a badge. She has a gun. She could put an end to this man's physical and verbal abuse in an instant. But she doesn't. It is not until they cross her path a second time that she finally decides to get out of her car. But her instincts (as a woman?) tell her that it's the wrong thing to do.
Earlier scenes show that she is the only woman employed in her division at the police station. Does she feel she needs to get out of her car to prove her worth, as the sole woman in the office, once again? Does she hesitate to get out of her car over the contempt she feels toward a kind of woman like this who is unable to defend herself (or for getting in this scrape in the first place)? Everything that we have seen about Noriko's character tells us she would never allow herself to be put in that kind of a situation. She does eventually get out of her car to help the woman, and as we can see, aggravated that she even has to get out and help. If you have watched the drama, you know that she should have trusted her instincts. Like Noriko, I was completely blindsided by what happened next.
Let's take another look at the promotional photo. Does it accurately reflect the drama, the four main characters of its story? Not in the least. It begins to look like an inside joke created by the producers at the expense of us viewers. Yuriko isn't a woman about town, looking for fun and pleasure while yapping away on her phone; Amano isn't a pensive girl worrying over her boyfriend situation, sipping away at a latte; Eiko is never caught dead meditating, deep in thought; and Noriko isn't overly concerned about her makeup. I don't think the total misrepresentation of the drama's four main characters was designed by mistake. Though I do think it is imparting a message and it is this: Could it be that the women we most admire as professionals aren't really the women we see?
[Photograph: 鈴木京香 Suzuki Kyoka, from Episode 9 of the 1998 きらきらひかる Kira Kira Hikaru. Fuji TV]