Sunday, February 04, 2007

Oboreru Hito 溺れる人

Starting from today onwards, I will post past reviews and synopses of Japanese dramas and movies written in the Dorama World forum via this blog. This exercise is meant to keep archives of my past works as well as allow new visitors to the blog to know about past productions which they may wish to consider viewing.

This is a 2-hour SP drama aired on NTV in March 2005 where it was adapted from a same-titled best-selling novel written by an ex-alcohol dependence patient. Starring Shinohara Ryoko as Mizusawa Mari, it depicts the struggle of how she overcame the addiction to alcohol and the impact this condition has on her family.

The story starts with Mari and her husband, Seiji (Nishijima Hidetoshi) on their wedding day where Mari starts to drink a lot of alcohol even though Seiji tries to stop her. She makes a fool of herself when she stumbles off the stage and Seiji had to support her in case she falls. Seiji seems unhappy over this but does not mention anything at this stage.

However, things do not improve as Mari would drink even in the day and this affects her relationship with Seiji. Mari refuses to acknowledge that her drinking is a problem and flares up at Seiji for stopping her from drinking. During one of her drunken outbursts, Mari crashes into the balcony glass door and injures herself. In order to hide the truth about Mari's alcoholism from her parents, Seiji lies that he beat Mari out of anger and her mother brings Mari home. Mari is guilty about making Seiji take the blame and confesses how she came to be very dependent on alcohol. After graduating from university, Mari went to Tokyo to work but wasn't doing too well. As such, she turned to alcohol to numb herself and get over the daily problems she faced. When she realized that it was turning into a problem, she decided to come back to her hometown, Matsumoto and happened to meet Seiji who is a bus driver. They used to be from the same school and hit it off after that meeting. During their courtship, Mari did not turn to alcohol for a while but when they got married, she could not control her urge to drink again. Seiji told Mari that he will help her get over her addiction and got down to work by removing all the alcohol in their home.

The situation starts to improve when Mari gets pregnant and gives birth to her daughter, Yuka. However, Mari starts to succumb to the urge to drink again and this makes Seiji very disappointed and disheartened. He brings Mari to a psychologist which is met by strong objection by Mari's mother who refuses to believe that her daughter has a problem. Things did start to look up for a while but Mari slipped back to her old ways one night when she was supposed to buy fever medicine for her daughter but ended up drinking herself silly on the streets. Struck with the fear of losing her family, Mari goes to a hospital to cure herself of the alcohol dependence where she has to undergo cold turkey treatment for close to 2 weeks. She refuses to let her doctor tell Seiji about this and wants to meet him after she has completely recovered. After 3 months, Mari finally gets rid of this illness and returns to her family...

This is a very informative and meaningful drama where the story is based on a true-life novel by the author. She was also an alcoholic and took a long time to recover. That's why she shared her experience in this book which was made into the drama SP. Great performance here by Shinohara Ryoko who is a very good actress and never to shy away from controversial roles.

Well, it seems like alcohol dependence cannot be completely cured as there is still a chance of the patient slipping back to his former ways. It takes a lot of willpower and support from the people around the patient in order to overcome the illness. I feel pity for Mari because she cannot control her behaviour but at the same time, I also feel sorry for her family members who are in anguish over her condition. The helplessness about being unable to do anything except wait for the patient to overcome the condition by willpower is so painful. It really takes a strong family bond to overcome this together but in reality, I don't think it's that easy especially if violence against family members come into the picture.

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