Last spring NHK Premium launched a 4-part live-action television drama based on Tagame Gengoroh-sensei’s manga Otouto no Otto (published in English by Pantheon as My Brother’s Husband.) This drama starred Sato Ryuuya as Yaichi, the protagonist and Baruto (Kaido Höövelson) a Sumo wrestler from Estonia, as Mike Flanagan, the man who married Yaichi’s brother and who bring chaos into his quiet life. 

The Otouto no Otto TV Drama (弟の夫) follows the books fairly closely. Canadian Mike Flanagan arrives at Yaichi’s door on a trip to visit his late husband’s hometown. Yaichi’s daughter, Kana, is ecstatic to find she has an uncle and a foreign one at that, and insists Mike stay at their home. With Mike’s presence a palpable reminder of his failure to stay connected to his brother, Yaichi finds his values challenged and is made very aware of his own, albeit passive, homophobia. The harder he is pushed by other’s people more overt homophobia, the more his own implicit homophobia is uncovered. In the mean time, Mike is able to provide a role model and advice to a young man in the town who knows he’s gay, and meets a former classmate of his husband Ryouji’s, a deeply closeted man who own internal fear makes Mike uncomfortable. 

By the end of Mike’s stay, we can see that Yaichi has grown in his understanding and acceptance of his brother and, although it’s too late for Ryouji, it might not be too late for the next kid in town. 

The dialogue cleaves closely to the original, with one notable omission. In the beginning when she meets Mike, Kana says that it’s weird that Japan won’t allow same-sex marriage (not in those words, the line was closer to “it’s weird that they can’t here.”) This line was scrubbed from the drama, presumably as it was too close to a criticism of the Japanese government’s policies and NHK is Japan’s national public broadcasting organization funded by public fees. It is pretty amazing that NHK aired this, but….let’s also remember it aired on a pay cable channel, not one of the main network channels. I had written NHK to ask if they planned on airing this on the USA-based NHK cable network TV Japan, but they said flat out they had no intention of doing so. So I’d count this a half step, rather than a full step forward for representation on Japanese TV. 

The DVD comes with a director interview as an extra. There are no subtitles for the audio track, but if you’ve read the books, you can follow the dialogue without problem.

The cinematography is very small and claustrophic, without being intrusive. It gives a feeling of being in the room with the characters, without being up into their faces. Sato Ryuuya was excellent as Yaichi (and as Ryouji for a few scenes) and really communicated all the many layers of discomfort he was feeling.  Nemoto Maharu was a fantastic Kana. It’s a pretty pivotal role, as she has to say what the audience is thinking most of the time. And Baruto did a pretty good job, considering he’s a sumo wrestler, not an actor and not Canadian. His English is heavily accented, but you know what? Who cares. ^_^

A friend of mine who is deeply embedded in the Japanese LGBTQ community said that they had heard this drama wasn’t that good, but we discussed that this drama wasn’t targeted to the LGBTQ community, as such. It was about them, as so many LGBTQ-themed works are. It was targeted to a straight, mainstream audience of nice people, family people, good people who just happen to have a lot of deeply held opinions about why being gay is bad and will make you live a short, unhappy life (in part, from decades of late-night TV specials about being gay in Japan.) On the other side of this, a Japanese acquaintance – who is admittedly rather more worldly than many other people – commented that they liked the drama quite a bit. They represented the presumed audience much more closely, I believe, than anyone in the LGBTQ community. Nonetheless one cannot draw conclusion from an n of 2 and your mileage may vary considerably, depending on what you expect from this drama.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

From my perspective, as an adaptation of what is a fairy tale about the gap between tolerance and acceptance and how much unpleasant shit lives in that gap, this was a very well done television drama.