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Summary:
Kitajima Shinnosuke, a cowboy, parachutes down into the middle of Tokyo. He’s on a mission to search for a 17-year-old Indian girl named Imoko as a request from his friend Geronimo back in Arizona. However, his Japanese is not that great, and he gets into all sorts of trouble after he lands. With no other place to stay, he ends up setting up camp in a tepee in the middle of the city. Meanwhile, there’s a Para Para group named Angel Heart comprised of all girls. In this group, there is a girl named Saki and her friend Shizuka. Shizuka is a bit clumsy and because of this, some of the other girls don’t really get along with her. Saki often feels the peer pressure to ostracize her friend. Saki and Shinnosuke’s paths meet when she falls into a pit trap that he dug in the park. Because of a misunderstanding, he pulls her out of the pit and carries her to a drugstore because he thinks that she said that she’s feeling bad. She eventually starts using her two favorite phrases, calling him annoying and telling him to die. He, of course, takes this more literally than she really means. Saki even says those two phrases to Shizuka after Shizuka paid off the drugstore owner for the trouble they caused. Sometime later, Saki passes by Shinnosuke’s tepee while he’s away and accidentally sets it on fire. As a result, Shinnosuke has to move in with a policeman named Ichinose who’s been on his case this entire time.
The bullying of Shizuka in the Para Para group only gets worse as time goes on. Because of the other girls, Saki once again tells Shizuka that she’s annoying and should die. Shinnosuke happens to be passing by and confronts Saki about her usage of those two phrases. She explains that she’s not really serious when she says it, and then runs away from him. Saki is feeling regretful about what she said to Shizuka, so she tries to send an apology mail to her, but her other friends catch her. She instead sends a mail telling Shizuka to die. The other girls follow suit and flood Shizuka’s cell phone with similar messages. Shizuka ends up sending a farewell mail to Saki that implies that she’s going to commit suicide. Saki tracks her down and stops her from jumping off a rooftop, but in their struggle, she herself slips and falls off the ledge. Shinnosuke catches her with his lasso, but he initially lets her hang there for a while, saying her two phrases to her. He does finally pull her to safety, having made her realize the impact of the words that she uses. In the aftermath, Saki and Shizuka become friends again. Geronimo’s daughter Momo also parachutes into the city, landing right outside the room that Shinnosuke and Ichinose are sharing.
It’s been a long time since I blogged a drama (last one was Hana Yori Dango). This was certainly an interesting first episode, with Fujiki Naohito playing a cowboy from Arizona who goes to Tokyo to find a Native American girl for his friend Geronimo. That quickly took a backseat to the theme of the episode, which was Saki’s usage of ウザイ (uzai) and 死ね (shine), and her friendship with Shizuka. A little sappy at the end, but that’s the way dramas are.
Shinnosuke is a bit of an interesting character, being a Japanese cowboy from America. His limited verbal and cultural understanding causes a lot of misunderstandings, some of them funny. Fujiki Naohito did a pretty good job acting the part. I laughed every time he said “shit” and mixed English and Japanese.
I assume the future episodes will take a Shinnosuke-solves-girl’s-problems approach while he continues his search for Imoko. I’ll probably keep watching this, but I most likely won’t keep blogging it. This was basically a one-shot entry to introduce people to an interesting series.
