"Mischievous Kiss" (2013) Part 3

So why did Smart Boy agree to an arranged marriage? Aside from the financial benefits... that is. Was it because his ego was stoked by the thought of all these women falling at feet. The show never quite goes into that. Would Oizumi have withdrawn his interest in the family business if Smart Boy had said "no". I'm not convinced that he would have.

I suspect an element of guilt in all of this. Smart Boy had strenuously resisted every effort on the part of his parents... his mother in particular, to manipulate his love life and his career choices. Dad collapses after a major family showdown and then Smart Boy feels obligated to reverse the family fortunes. No doubt he is racked with guilt, believing himself, at least in part, responsible for the deterioration of his father's health. That he has the brains to comprehend what is at stake is never in doubt. However, under that bravado is still a 19 year old adolescent struggling to find himself. At the end of the day, he is a boy playing a man's game.

Quite likely too, he underestimates the extent of his feelings for Lead Girl, believing some how that the head will overcome the whispers of the heart. It's not hard to see where the thought processes come from: The fiancee is nice to look at, intelligent and proves to be handy in the kitchen -- everything Lead Girl isn't. On paper, she's perfect. Except we don't marry paper. People are flesh and blood with feelings even geniuses with IQs of 200. Once the interloping fiancee realises where Smart Boy's heart truly lies, she's not inclined to play second fiddle.

In all of this, I sense a gentle repudiation of traditional familial strictures for personal choice and freedom. Family is important... but mainly as a place where individuals can find love and acceptance. For instance we see a motherless girl who craves for romance, gains a de facto family first then marries into it. That aspect especially had resonances of While You Were Sleeping.

Yes, Dumb Girl marries Smart Boy. With all the frills... and for her part, with no small amount of glee. The strange thing is you don't wonder why. On paper it feels odd and yet seeing them together it all makes sense. It's a challenging coupling from the start but there's beauty in the chaos as each demands the other to be better than what they are.

This version of ItaKiss isn't perfect but the casting of the leads was wondrously inspired. If it hadn't been for their palpable chemistry, I doubt I would've continued watching after the first episode. I think I fell in love with the show about the same time Smart Boy started to see Dumb Girl in a different light. Poor fellow, he would never be the same the day she moved in. Watching all those tender looks he cast her way when she wasn't looking, I was urging my screen to: "Kiss her already, you know you want to."

And so he does...

In the rain, no less...

"Mischievous Kiss" (2013) Part 2

While I am taken with Itazura na Kiss, I worry about the heroic dumb girl role model.  It seems incredible that a girl who has grown up without a mother for most of her life has such woeful culinary skills especially if Dad is supposedly a chef of some renown. One would’ve thought that if there was something a motherless girl would be good at, it would be cooking – having to fend for herself and all that kind of thing especially when Dad’s working late nights.

Yes, I know, it’s fiction and it doesn’t have to make sense except within the schema of the story.  Only I suspect it’s a necessary contrivance because it opens up avenues of humour throughout the story. Clearly, it’s a running gag that Lead Dumb Girl can’t cook to save her life and it’s a point on which her good nature is sorely tested. The fact that she’s surrounded by good cooks, only serves to exacerbate her incompetence in cringeworthy fashion. There’s one occasion where Lead Girl takes it upon herself to cook her way into smart boy's heart (spurred on by well-meaning friends) and there are no prizes for anyone who guesses how that misguided notion turns out. Smart boy doesn't appreciate burnt offerings as love tokens no matter how good the intention so he takes a turn behind the stove and show why he is the prince of men.

As a mother of two girls, I find the dumb but lovable girl scenario both cloying and disturbing. I don't see the attraction myself but it's a common characterization in these kinds of stories.

The saving grace for me is that Lead Girl here oozes her own brand of likability. It’s a relief that despite her sometimes masochistic attachment to smart boy she’s no doormat. And that dogged persistence to win his heart is almost admirable.Thank God too, there’s something called character development...  and I’m relieved to say that she comes out smelling like roses. When the time comes for her to walk away graciously, she does so with dignity.

Smart/Lead boy seems to me a bundle of contradictions. He is meant to be a genius and is blessed with an eidetic memory. But apparently with all of God’s gifts bestowed upon him, he doesn’t really know what he wants in life. Added to that, he's emotionally stunted. He hasn't yet, we are told, found his big dream. Evidently he likes Lead Girl but isn’t quite sure if he wants to live happily ever after with her. Further complicating matters is the fact that the pursuit of his newly discovered passion is inevitably conflated with his growing attachment for lead girl. After all it is she who points him in the right direction. While he is dillydallying, his sense of self and his love for lead girl are put on trial when Dad falls ill and the burden of holding together the family business falls on his shoulders. Angst and anguish ensue when he offers himself a candidate for martyrdom and turns a hundred and eighty degrees from his struggle for independence to becoming the family’s sacrificial lamb in an arranged marriage situation.

It's never quite clear why he feels the need to go this far.It confuses dumb girl no end because despite what is commonly thought about her, she has enough nous to notice that he is gradually thawing out. Thawing out, however, is not the same thing as saying, "I love you".

So he's not game to throw in his lot with Lead Girl until he thinks that she might be ripe for the picking by her long time admirer. It's a headscratcher that one... what he was thinking when he agreed to the arranged marriage... Was he thinking of building a harem... Didn't think polygamy was still practised in Japan in any meaningful fashion. Well, he does have an ego the size of China so I probably wouldn't put it past him to harbour fanciful ideas about Lead Girl pining away for him for the rest of her pitiful days on earth. Luckily for us and Lead Girl, the fiancee sees his hidden fires... Then he has an epiphany in rain, comes to his senses and makes his confession in first rate egotistical fashion:

You love me

You can't love anyone but me...

Don't say you love any man besides me

Funnily enough... it all ends well. For Lead Girl and Smart Boy. Conveniently well. As it should... It's a rom com after all. Who wants to watch a rom com that ends badly.? I certainly don't. :D

"Mischievous Kiss" (2013) (Jap: Itazura Na Kiss -- Love in Tokyo)

Last Saturday (Aussie Time) saw the end of Itazura na Kiss: Love in Tokyo, a Japanese live action, television adaptation of a ridiculously popular manga of the same name. I gather that it’s the Pride and Prejudice of shoujo manga as this is the fifth version to grace television and computer screens worldwide. It is, to all intents and purposes, a farcical rom com that begins as an unrequited high school romance and then moves into angst territory.  It is loads of silly fun and features characters with personalities at opposite ends of the spectrum. The fact that I liked it surprises me... I’m not a fan of high school romances as a rule... and I’m certainly getting too old for egregious slapstick. Nonetheless, I was charmed almost instantly by the plucky (though underachieving) female lead who has a talent for getting things wrong and who has a penchant for stalking the object of her affections. With admirable fearlessness, she sets herself the mammoth task of winning the heart of the smartest boy in school, whose icy declaration that he doesn’t care for “dumb girls” becomes the catalyst for a rollercoaster “will they, won’t they” journey.

Okay...  it sounds fairly pedestrian as romances go but the familiar can be oddly addictive. Especially if it is oozing with all manner of cuteness. Before you know it, the show seduces you into rooting for the most unlikely couple in Dramaland. At first, smart boy maintains his distance and disdain but much to his own surprise, dumb girl turns out to have an unexpected streak of deviousness and determination. In spite of himself, he begins falling for her while still maintaining a facade of disinterest. Oh, he likes her... it leaks when she's conveniently not looking but he’d go to hades in a hand basket first probably before admitting to it. Not helping the course of true love, however, is his somewhat overbearing mother whose tireless insistence that he marry dumb girl pushes all the buttons of his already well-developed rebellious radar.

The moral of the story in Itazura na Kiss: Love in Tokyo, it seems to me, is that mother knows best. No matter how ridiculous her machinations and plots are, no one knows her children like mum does. Mama's heart is always in the right place. Before anyone else has twigged, she knows deep in the recess of her motherly instincts that dumb girl is just the one for her supercilious, overachieving boy. She knows something that only mothers are privy to. Apparently dumb girls have their uses... they can teach smart boys a thing or two about humility and that thing called love.