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Synopsis: Five women receive invitations from a mysterious source to live with a struggling novelist who tries hard to create inspiring work despite being burdened by the crimes of his father who sits on death row for the murder of his mother. The living arrangement challenges all to overcome their own hardships while trying to discover the identity and motives of the person responsible for bringing them together.
The Invitation
A name like Million Yen Women aroused various assumptions as to the show's focus. My initial prediction was that I would be treated to the Japanese version of Desperate Housewives, or perhaps more ambitiously, a Japanese Sex in the City. However, these assumptions were cast aside quite quickly as the show went on to hit the ball straight out the park with its first episode, laying in front of me a mouth watering mystery that I eagerly tucked into after the first tentative nibble.
Five women and a man sitting around a dinner table set the scene as the series focuses on a rather unique living arrangement. The protagonist of the story is a struggling novelist named Mishima Shin, whos unpopular novels fail to capture the attention of readers who are otherwise attracted to more popular and easily accessible work. Shin's stories seem to parallel his own conflicted, unique and average personality, which none the less still carries a great deal of promise which his publisher hopes to inspire and share with the world.
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Stranger still is the fact that Shin's stories are also constrained by a very specific rule, and that's that no one in his novels die. The rule comes primarily as a result of a traumatizing event which saw Shin's father murder both his mother, the man she was having an affair with and a young police officer who attempted to intervene. Placed on death row for his actions, the sins of the father would follow the son like a dark specter, haunting him in the form of terrible faxes sent to remind and insult while simultaneously hampering any success to come in the future.
Compounding this is the fact that five strange women show up on Shin's doorstep and claim that they each received invitations to live with him. The origins of the invitations are unclear,but what is clear is that they come with their own set of rules. The rules state that questions are not allowed to be asked of the ladies, Shin is not allowed to enter their rooms, they must all eat dinner together and they have to all pay Shin a million Yen in rent every month. While bizarre to begin with, the group become accustomed to the new landscape and even start to become something of a family, the ladies seeming to adopt the roles of sisters who give Shin a hard time while none the less remaining supportive and fiercely protective of him.
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Each woman is more unique than the last in both personality and age, providing a diversity which is given the chance to unravel in each episode like beautiful parcels that are carefully unwrapped. However, while the home life adopts a sense of normalcy, the motivations of the one who sent the invitations remains a nagging issue that gnaws at both the characters and the audience as the series progresses. While Shin attempts to write a novel that will strike a chord and inspire, he is also placed into situations where he must deal with the affections of the five women living under his roof, five women who each seem to develop feelings for him in their own way while trying to deal with their own problems as well.
The Good
Million Yen Women intrigues from the outset, creating a nail biting genre which produces gut punches in every episode. It's a drama that put's forward the classic challenge of trying to figure out who could be the mystery puppeteer who hopes to control the selected group of victims, and there certainly is enough characters to provide a great deal of theories. Each episode clocks in at around 24 minutes, and while I felt that longer episodes would've been great, I came to appreciate the effectiveness of the short run times,as they provided thrilling cliff hangers that widened eyes and dropped jaws. While each lady living in the house brings something interesting to the table, they also inadvertently seem to act as fragments of Shin's consciousness, or at least this was my way of interpreting their roles.
There's the young high school girl that represents innocents and potential, the plain and apathetic women who represents our more rational faculties, the celebrity who represents our desire to be liked and acknowledged, the bookworm who gives a more domestic feel, and lastly, the tough 30 year old who's intense confidence is the result of experience, her demeanor the proof of invisible battle scars that have weathered the worst of life's storms. It is each of these ladies that act as a muse for Shin who tries to maneuver through his own life's challenges in the hopes of creating something meaningful in a world populated by pop authors that sell images and not literature. The pop author in this case, beautifully represented by a young, good looking novelist named Yuzu, parades around arrogantly in the series, his narcissism burning brightly like a fire that's fed by superficial fans and brown nosing publishers and critics alike.
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The Bad
As good and exciting as Million Yen Women is, it does none the less require allowances as far as the absurdity of five women living with one man is concerned. This particular niche genre is quite popular in the world of Japanese anime and is referred to as Harem Anime, always featuring a bumbling, average man or boy who miraculously attracts the affections of several different women for some reason. If viewers can allow for the premise, they will find something endearing about the dynamic and find it easy to get behind Shin and the women that he shares a space and his life with.
Final Chapter
East Asian series on Netflix have not missed a beat so far, and even though Million Yen Women came out in 2017, it still remains a highly worthwhile series in the present day. It has much to say about the lives that we live, the characters, at least according to my interpretation, serve as wonderful portrayals of who we all are. The characters demonstrate how personalities come in various quantities within us all, while also showing how, when it comes to the creating of novels in this case, that quality of work will often always play second fiddle to pretension and popularity.
I found Million Yen Women to be a satisfying and exciting series with great lead characters, beautifully frustrating antagonists, a highly engaging story and one of the most beautiful songs that perfectly complimented the end of each episode, a detail so simple, and yet often ignored by other series. Like the invitations that each of the ladies cannot ignore, an invitation to watch this series can similarly not be passed on, and on that note I wish you all happy viewing :).
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