Bascially, Kekkon Dekinai Otoko means “The guy who cannot get married”. Kekkon = Get married and Otoko means Guy. I don’t know the exact for Dekinai, but nai I believe is to show the can’t as opposed to can.

This is a twelve episode series and brings you through the life of this single man who is a professional and well known Architect with some weird personalities. (Sounds like me sans the professional and well known architect). This guy just always say the wrong thing, but when you think deeper, he is actually right, just that he has no tact. He doesn’t believe in getting married and has a small apartment of his which he termed his santuary and he doesn’t invite anybody to his house because its whatever personal space he has left.

When he got stomach pain, his neighbour sent him to the hospital and that is when he was acquainted with the neighbour, a girl, and the doctor, a lady nearing 40 who’s single too. He is just over 40, so just nice. But he isn’t interested.

Every episode you is different with different themes, mostly titles “Who says I can’t…”. Like “who say’s I can’t hate flowers”. It brings us through his every peculiarity and how he eventually changed himself.

But the funny thing is, after watching this drama, I felt that “Hey it’s not so bad to be single”. Especially with his posh apartment. Small, but nice and comfortable. I can envision myself doing that, and it’ll be fun too. Perhaps get the dog in the show. Kawaii ne.

The sad thing is you probably cannot do that in Singapore. Perhaps when I’m 40, but you have to be 35 to get a HDB flat. Else you have to get a private apartment. So there, sad isn’t it?

The ending of the drama is not so sweet, but sweet in Kekkon Dekinai Otoko’s way. He confessed that he fell in love with the doctor, who’s actually secretly in love with him as well. He invited the doctor to his apartment (wow..you know how much it means to him) and said something twitty like “If you insist you can come”. Which is -_-” because the doctor never insist. Is the architect invite one. So the doctor says “No. But if you insist I will come”. Eventually he got past his twitty-ness and said “Yes, I insist”. And hence happily ever after.

This is not a bad drama. 7 out of 10 points!

Imagine having the perfect love robot. A male robot dedicated solely to love. To please you and make you happy. Engineered just to how you think a perfect boyfriend should be. Should he be easily jealous? Adventurous in bed? What looks should he have? Should he come and pick you up from work? Blablabla.

Zettai Kareshi, literally Absolute Boyfriend (Zettai = Absolute and Kareshi = Boyfriend), is about how a Japanese research company created this so called perfect lover, in the form of a male robot. They wanted someone to test the robot, hence they tried to find someone.

Izawa Riiko is the lady that they found. Apparantly she’s too serious for people to like her, and she has just been unsuccessfully trying to attract the guy she likes. Sadly that guy doesn’t like her at all.

A namecard was given to her by the research scientist, Namikiri Gaku, and she went to the company to look around. In the end Namikiri convinces her that he is able to find the guy of her dreams and asks her to fill up a computerised form of characteristics her boyfriend should have. Soon enough, the robot prototype 01 was sent to her.

Frankly, the robot is really nice to her. If he is human, perhaps she would have liked him, but it’s a little weird to like a robot knowing that it’s a robot. By some unfortunate chain of events, she eventually “bought” 01 at 100 million yen, payable in instalments of 70 years. Thankfully 01, whom she named Tenjo Night, is able to work and help her share the burden.

The robot does many nice things for her, including helping her patch up her strained relationship with her father when her parents came to visit, and even gained the approval of her father. He once went to search the entire forest for torn pieces of a photo, just because the win blew them away. He tells Riiko that he loves her constantly and always says he is her ideal boyfriend, of which Riiko will cut in halfway and tell people he is just her cousin.

Eventually, Tenjo Night had his own mindset and stopped following the program he was programmed to do. He becomes quite “human” because he has feelings and his own mentality and plans. The research company sends someone to recall 01 back to reformat him, because a robot that doesn’t follow the program is dangerous. Namikiri informs Riiko of what the company wants to do, and Riiko runs to the company only to discover that Night is being reformatted.

However Night resists reformatting, and Riiko successfully intervenes. During Namikiri’s call to Riiko when Night was “in custody”, Riiko learns that Night has his own consciousness. Riiko starts to appreciate him and love him back, but a very sad thing happened.

Spoilers!

Night’s human’s instincts is causing the computer to overheat. His main chip eventually burns out, and before he “dies” he did many things for Riiko, and even recorded his memory in his main chip. When he dies Namikiri gives Riiko the main chip and let her see the video of Night’s memory, and Riiko cries because she loved Night too. I feel very sad after watching the ending, but I guess that’s the best ending. It would be weird if they lived happily every after and Night doesn’t age right? Not to mention fornicating with a robot. Hmm.

End of spoilers!

Anyway this is an absolutely good (pun intended) drama series. Do watch it. 8.5 out of 10 stars!

This is seriously a good JDrama. I enjoyed all ten episodes very much and I must say I watched it within 3 days and now it has left a void inside me. This belongs to a comedy kind of drama and it’s based on school life, like Dragon Zakura, another great JDrama that I have watched during this three month university holiday.

So what’s this drama about? This drama is about this guy Makio who’s 27 going on to 28 in this year (2007). His father is the boss of a Yakuza, meaning gang. However, his father wanted to do his part as a father and hence forces Makio to go to school before he will consider him to be the next boss. Makio, whose wish is to become boss, had to agree.

The problem is that his dad got him into the high school through the back door and he has to hide his identity. No one must know he belongs to a Yakuza, so no violence blabla. In the end he gets bullied and has to hand over money occasionally to the class bully. He fails his exams, attends supplementary classes and ends up attending preparation courses for university entrance examinations, something he need not take since he is not going to university.

Through the 10 episodes he matured and learnt more things about love and friendship, and even fell in love with a 17 year old girl. (He hid his age and everyone thought he was 17). This story is pretty funny because he has to pretend to be a nice guy and not get violent. But actually he is a pretty nice guy to his classmates. He becomes the class leader and led the class in many activities.

This is a pretty good JDrama so watch it if you have time!

9 out of 10 stars.

This special is the continuation of the Nodame Cantabile JDrama, and has two episodes. Previously, Jia Hao has done a review on the special. The two episodes are 2 hours each, and they are continuous episodes and not stand alone, unlike Densha Otoko’s Alternate Ending Sp and Indiana Jones Sp.

And so begins the spoilers:

The story takes place in Europe now, when Chiaki has managed to be able to sit on an aeroplane and fly there with Nodame (Noda Megumi). The main story is about Chiaki deciding to only contact Viera Sensei when he has won a prestigious conducting competition. Chiaki meets another person who’s Viera’s pupil, as well as another Japanese, and together they enter the competition. At the same time Nodame is alone with 2 other house-mates (live in the same “house”) and trying to learn french. Nodame found herself to be weaker than the rest of the students in terms of analysing the background of the music.

Chiaki finds himself getting the perfect score along with Viera’s other pupil, and in the 3rd round, they are both going to perform the same song. Chiaki is performing after the guy, and he became stressed out when he discovers that the guy performed well. During his own performance, he screws up by making the orchestra dislike him, and the orchestra played the piece without even looking at the conductor. Despite that, Chiaki managed to enter the fourth and final round.

Chiaki enters the Nodame depressing mode, where he has a whole hair full of “flies” blabla to signify he didn’t really have the heart to even bathe. Nodame arrives to cheer him up and because of certain events, he cheers up and gears himself for the final round where he corrects his mistake. He reminded himself to respect music and hence then will the orchestra respect him too. With his superb performance in the final round, he emerged the winner. It is also declared that Chiaki intends to contact Viera and possibly enter his performance tour. However..

Stresseman, henceforth knows as the DOM (Dirty Old Man), is doing something behind Chaki’s back. Chaki gets kidnapped by Oliver, a bodyguard I think, and subjected to cruel torture of tickling, of which Chaki succumbs by signing the dreaded contract, of which he will immediately go with DOM for DOM’s performance tour. Chaki actually doesn’t mind, because it’s a great opportunity, and he leaves Nodame alone for about 3 months.

During which the DOM sent Nodame photos of Chiaki in bed with skimpily clad woman, whom Nodame Cantabile’s watchers should know that they belong to DOM, and Chiaki is probably there in the wrong place at the wrong time.

DOM got sick in the Tokyo leg of the tour and Chiaki takes over and leads the orchestra with a piano performance by this young girl whom I forgot the name. Nodame got jealous and her piano playing got screwed up. Her own tutor asks her, “What do you come here for?”, and she cannot answer that questions.

Chiaki came back for a short half day and caught Nodame in a jealous and bad mood. He didn’t have time to do anything and continued with his tour.

When the 3 months ended, Chiaki came back and had a fight with Nodame. They patched back after some manga style fighting, and everything goes well. Nodame does her first piano recital to great success, and Chiaki did his Europe debut with success too. They share their first kiss and things go happily ever after (unless they do a 2nd SP and break them up).

Heartwarming story. Do watch it.

Nodame Cantabile is a romantic comedy and I really recommend people to watch it. For starters, this is one of the rare times in which I remember the lead character’s names. In certain cases like Galileo, I seem to not be able to recall the character’s names.

There are two leading characters, the first being Nodame, which is short for her real name, Noda Megumi. (See I remember even the full name). Nodame’s ambition is to be a kindergarten teacher and she is in the piano division in the music academy. She composed a “fart song” for her future students. Who the hell wants their kids to learn a fart song, I don’t really know.

The second is Chiaki-senpai, where senpai just means senior. Nodame is Chiaki’s junior, so she calls him Chiaki-senpai. Chiaki’s dream is to go to Europe to be a professional conductor. However when he returned from Vienna when he was young, there had been an emergency landing and he has an aeroplane phobia since then. Hence he is unable to fulfil his dreams because he can only stay in Japan.

The whole drama is a manga adaptation, so be prepared for manga style things happening like Nodame getting whacked and flying a huge distance before hitting a big rock.

The whole drama is about Nodame’s love for Chiaki and how he eventually “accepted” her love for him. It shows how Nodame helped Chiaki overcome his fear of planes, and eventually Chiaki is able to fly to Paris to further his studies as a conductor. It also shows how strong Nodame’s love for Chiaki is, because Nodame decided to immerse herself in music more and even attended competitions for him, something she said she will never do. In a way, she is giving up on her kindergarten teacher dream by working hard. (She has natural talent at piano also).

There is this character called Stresseman (Hope I spelled it correctly), who’s got to be one horny ah pek. But he is actually the Maestro, one of the superb conductors around the world. He’s super lame because he keeps going to parties and immense himself in the company of female escorts. He also likes reading Japan’s Magazines, the kind where skimpy clothing rule.

There are two episodes of SP to be watched after you complete the 11 episode drama. But that’s for another post. I give this drama 8.5/10. I enjoyed laughing at it. Seriously.