Starring:
Katori Shingo as Shiomi Eiji
Takeuchi Yuko as Shirato Mio
Shaku Yumiko as Ono Yuki
Matsuda Shota as Kudo Naoya
Yagi Yuki as Shiomi Shizuku
Motokariya Yuika as Shizuku’s mother
Terajima Susumu as Shijo Kengo
Ikeuchi Junko as Hishida Keiko
Miura Tomokazu as Anzai Teruo
Bitoh Isao as Hirakawa Tatsumi
Tamayama Tetsuji as Kamiyama Shun

Bara no nai Hanaya is a Japanese drama that aired in the winter of 2008. It was 11 episodes long and was one of the more popular dramas of the season, securing an average rating of 18.6%.

The synopses of this drama online are misleading, I tell you! I thought that this drama was just about a single father who owned a flower shop, and so I thought, ‘well, that doesn’t sound too interesting.’ But I noticed that the drama has really high ratings, especially for this season, and kept hearing from others to pick up this drama, so I did. And boy, am I glad I did. So now let me summarize the storyline. Without leaving out the most important part of the series.

Shiomi Eiji is a young single father of a young girl, Shizuku. Unfortunately, Shizuku’s mother passed away during childbirth. He is the owner of a flower shop and one day finds a blind woman, Shirata Mio, outside his shop, taking refuge from the rain. He invites her in, and she eventually gives into his kindness. The two hit it off pretty well and since Mio is new in town, he offers to help her out if she ever needs it. The two become close friends.

What Eiji doesn’t know about Mio is that she actually isn’t blind and isn’t new in town, either. She is a nurse at a reputable hospital. The hospital’s director is the grandfather of Shizuku and believes that Eiji treated his daughter cruelly and wishes to exact revenge for never loving his daughter. What follows is a complicated love story, complete with neighborhood friends and the problems of parenting.

Now see, if I had known about the whole revenge plot beforehand, I would have definitely started this drama earlier. While the storyline is very much the Asian-overly-dramatic type of storyline, it doesn’t really seem that way. This is probably due in part to the many veteran actors and actresses in this series as well as a few new faces. And I have to say that for being so young, the girl who plays Shizuku is great!

It would have been easy to make this storyline into that sort of overly cheesy and ridiculously dramatic show, but the directors and producers took it in a different route. Katori Shingo and Takeuchi Yuko are both brilliant in expressing this type of complicated yet pure relationship, without making you groan.

The minor characters were also fleshed out pretty well and held their own ground, even though there weren’t really any subplots. It’s okay, though, because the main storyline had so much depth to it that there wasn’t any need more side stories.

Overall, this is one series worth watching. It will make you feel every feeling you’ve ever felt in your entire life! Can be a bit of a tearjerker, even if you don’t cry easily to tv and media (like me).

Buy the boxset: Japan Version

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 9:44 pm and is filed under dramas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.