In Japan, TV shows are made to sell soundtracks. Or, love may be forever, but people tend to die on you anyway, part two.

Other possible titles for this post are: Spontaneous combustion is for sissies. Violence solves everything and only Americans know it. Anyone can play guitar (and bass and drums and keyboard, too). Eugene seems to have some kind of man-crush on Keitatsu from Churasan. Okay, I’m stopping now. That’s not another title. That’s a thought. Okay, one more possible title, then I’m going to stop: I need to learn how to parse information in a less confusing manner.

Taiyou no Uta is yet another in the aforementioned dorama love story series where one person in the couple is afflicted with a terminal illness. These are, as you might imagine, always a rollicking fun-ride of non-stop laughs. This time, it’s super-cute Amane Kaoru played by Sawajiri Erika who suffers from an unfortunate condition known as XP (insert overly easy and obvious but ultimately hipocritical and desperate Microsoft joke here), which dictates that she can’t go in the sun. It’s a condition that I’m sure is painful and not a trivial matter for those who have it, but will nevertheless be the basis for a fair amount of lame attempts at humor here in the Mediaslave office. This is because I have no sense, and because I hate the sun and its life-giving beams of light. While minimal research (read here as “a skimming of the Wikipedia link”) seems to indicate that it’s only the most severe of cases that require the absolute avoidance of UV rays, the show seems to suggest that if Kaoru-chan so much as ventures out into the brightness of day, she’ll explode in a pus-and-blood-laden cloud of tragedy. And even if the evil solar beams of death never reach her, she’ll be dead by twenty. So, there’s a time limit on how much J-pop slinging fun she can have, and no matter what, she’s going to have it.

Said fun comes in the form of the guy who plays Keitatsu from Churasan, making this dorama officially the one that, for me, crosses the line into “too many to avoid acknowledging the fact in an attempt to make it seem less significant.” You’ll notice that I’m still pretending that I don’t know his name is Yamada Takayuki. Yes, even though he’s a former convicted juvenile delinquent (thrown in the clink, by the way, for using too much angry force in preventing a friend’s rape, which is a new concept to me), and impaired by an inability to grow a healty pair of sideburns, he is willing to give anything he can towards helping little Kaoru-chan achieve her dreams of singing no more than two songs to the world. Yes, there’s quite a bit of the old carpe diem thing going on here. Except for the diem part, I guess. That could burn her cute little chipmunk cheeks despite her deliberate application of UV blocking cream. Or kill her. Oh, it’s so tempting to go off on a tangent here about goth vampire shit. But I must resist, for there are other things to say that vaguely related this particular show.

For instance, I wonder if all these stories about people dying are an excuse to have characters who speak their minds because they don’t have as much time for the subtleties of Japanese diplomacy. It seems to be this way in the case of the ladies, anyway, that those who find themselves in the company of these unusually outspoken girls are both shocked and strangely attracted to this unusual attitude. In the only instance I’ve seen where the one watching the clock is a guy (the irresistable Ai no Uta starring Kanno Miho), it seems to be an excuse for him to be unusually irresponsible, emotionally accessible and laid-back. Either way, though, I wonder if it’s a reason to somehow encourage the shirking of common Japanese societal expectations. I’ve tried to employ similarly jarring and abrasive modes of interaction in my life with my only defense being that I’m an asshole. At the very least, it feels like there are different techniques being employed and goals in mind than the ones in A Walk to Remember, where Mandy Moore’s impending death seems only to compel her to vie for sainthood. Please, if you feel compelled to leave a comment here, or if you happen to strike up a conversation with me on the street, or are questioning me as the suspect in the murder of a former acquaintence, do not, under any circumstances, ask me why I’ve seen that movie. Yes, despite the pseudo-intellectual musings on cultural significance, this whole paragraph has been an excuse to mention Kanno Miho again.

Another thing I’ve noticed in this show is the constant replaying of the featured songs. It’s not as bad as in Lunch no Joou or Gokusen 2, where the “insert songs” are cued up every time an episode reaches a moment requiring a heart-warming montage, but I’m not sure it’s necessary to incorporate these songs into every single episode by way of having a performance scene demonstrating Kaoru-chan’s progress as an up-and-coming musician. “A Song to the Sun” is both the name of the show and the name of the song she sings whenever she’s given an opportunity. We get it. She likes the song she wrote. To be honest, I’m a person who is so unable to appreciate music as a stand-alone artform most of the time that I will often buy music based on the pretty images I associate with that music in the form of theme songs and soundtracks. So, I understand the thinking behind using these shows to sell CDs. And I actually like it that oftentimes, these songs are released under the character’s names, rather than the actor/singer who performs them. It is at once so meta and also somehow respectful of the fictional world that has been created. Okay. I just convinced myself that it’s a good idea to market music in this way. Hi. My name’s Eugene. I like to bring things up and then negate them completely to make everyone feel like they’ve wasted their time. Still, the songs on this show are no Seishun Amigo.

It occurs to me in the writing of this post that I may overuse hypens.

This entry was posted by eugene on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 4:42 am and is filed under japanese, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.