Even If You Don't Do It, and a Pain That Is Nobody's Fault

Early in the first episode, in a lunch hour, Yoshino Michi stands at the lingerie counter of a department store. She is thirty-two and works for a construction firm, and she has let a younger colleague press something flashy on her, on the cheerful theory that it is about time her husband had a little excitement. That evening her husband, Youichi, who has been awkward with her for days, holds her and makes a promise. Not tonight, it is late. Another day. On the promised night, going back to the office for a phone she forgot, she finds a message from him. He is going to be a little late.

Later, drinking a can of beer on her own in the night air, she is joined by a manager from her firm, Niina Makoto, who happens to be passing, and she tells him what she has carried alone. She and her husband have been married five years. They get on. They sleep in the same bed every night. He has not touched her in two years.

Nothing in that evening has a villain in it. He promised. He was late. That is the difficulty. There is nobody to shout at.

Even If You Don't Do It, the Fuji Television drama of spring 2023, follows four people in two marriages that have gone without sex, and one sentence in the broadcaster’s summary of its second episode carries the whole series. At a cherry-blossom party, Michi and Makoto find that they are in the same situation, and confide in each other a pain that comes precisely from loving the people they married. They become what the series calls comrades.

This essay argues that love does something exact to that pain: it takes away the one person you could be angry with. When the partner who does not touch you is kind, and loved, and loves you back, the absence is nobody’s fault, and a pain that is nobody’s fault has two places to go: inward, where it becomes a verdict on yourself, and sideways, towards the one other person who has it too. The comradeship that follows is loyal in its way, and becomes the most truthful relationship either of them has, which is why it costs what it costs. Nobody is to blame for the absence. Everybody answers for what they do with it.

The facts, once. Even If You Don't Do It ran for eleven episodes in Fuji Television’s Thursday Theatre slot, at ten at night, from 13 April to 22 June 2023; a special a week later, about the months between the last two episodes, is not discussed here. Nao plays Michi and Nagayama Eita her husband, Youichi; Iwata Takanori plays Makoto and Tanaka Minami his wife, Kaede. Sato Honami plays Mishima Yuika, who comes to work at Youichi’s café, and Takeda Rena plays Kitahara Hana, Michi’s younger colleague. The series adapts Haruno Haru’s manga of the same name, which began in Futabasha’s Manga Action in 2017.

It was made by people who had been here before: the director Nishitani Hiroshi and the staff of Hirugao, the affair drama that ran in the same slot in 2014, together again after nine years. When it was announced, its producer said that she had fallen for a story of two couples in which not one of the four is truly a villain. Haruno Haru said in 2024 that she takes care never to make any one person a complete villain, because there are as many ideas of what is right as there are people. This essay takes them at their word, and asks what a story with no villain does to the people inside it.

Two notes before going further. The series was not screened for this essay: scenes are described as the broadcaster’s own episode summaries and published reports of the last episode describe them, and what the characters say is given in paraphrase. And this essay discusses the whole series, including how it ends, because the ending is where its argument is decided. A reader who would rather meet the ending on screen first may want to stop here, and come back.

Youichi runs a café that belongs to somebody else, and it is not doing well. He loves Michi, who has always accepted him, the useless parts included; she is the one person he can be with without having to try. When the moment comes, though, he feels the pressure of it and slips away with some vague excuse, and he believes that the two of them have built a good marriage without sex. Michi cannot share that belief. She has tried everything she can think of to make him want her, every attempt has ended in disappointment, and she has begun to wonder whether she is simply not attractive enough.

Makoto is the man the office talks about: good at his job, easy to like, known as a devoted husband who does the housework. His wife, Kaede, has just been made deputy editor of a fashion magazine, and she feels that this is the make-or-break point of her career. She knows that she is where she is because he supports her, and she has no room left for anything else; she often treats him carelessly, and she has not noticed what he really feels. People who meet them see an ideal couple.

Every one of those descriptions has a reason in it: pressure behind his evasions, a career at stake behind her distraction, a devotion that is real, an effort that is real. The absence in each bed has a history. It does not have a culprit.

That is what makes the story so hard to bear, and it is a choice. A cruel husband would have given Michi a door, and a cold wife would have given Makoto a grievance. The series withholds both.

Look at what the word love is doing in that sentence. If you are not loved, an absence of touch is information: it tells you something about the other person, and it gives your anger somewhere to go. If you are loved, and kindly, by someone you love, the absence becomes a riddle, and the only answer left to it is you. That is where Michi’s pain goes first. What is wrong with me. She buys the lingerie. She reads the silence as a judgement on her body, because there is nobody else it could be a judgement on.

This Library has described that sorting from the outside. “Sexless Is a Category, Not a Verdict” followed a woman who meets the word in a magazine and hears a count as a sentence passed on her, and insisted that the category sorts marriages by one observable fact and says nothing about anyone’s worth. The series shows the same sorting with no magazine at all. Michi is the magazine, and love is what makes the verdict feel plausible: he is kind, he tells her she matters to him, so the fault must be hers.

Love does a second thing, and it is worse. It forbids the sentence. To tell a kind man that he is hurting you is to hurt him, so the sentence comes out as lingerie, or as a joke, or as a promise extracted for another night. Makoto has the same difficulty from the other side. He cannot tell Kaede what her absence costs him without becoming the husband who resents his wife’s success, and supporting her in that success is what he has made the point of his days. So he says nothing, keeps the household running, and waits.

A pain that cannot be blamed on anyone, and cannot be said to the one person it is about, does not disappear. It goes sideways.

At the firm’s cherry-blossom party Makoto, who has already heard Michi’s secret, takes her aside because he is worried about her, and when they are alone he tells her that his marriage has gone without sex too. She cries, and without thinking he holds her.

The series’ word for what they become is senyū, and the broadcaster’s summaries call them comrades in sexlessness. It is a soldier’s word, and a Japanese dictionary gives it a figurative sense as well: people who have been through a hard contest together, at work or in sport, like colleagues who shared the struggles of a company’s early years. These two are colleagues, and the word fits them. A comrade is not a lover. A comrade fights on the same side, and here each of them is fighting to be wanted again by someone else.

At first the comradeship is loyal to both marriages. Before his wedding anniversary, Michi urges Makoto to tell Kaede what he feels. When Youichi brings Michi flowers and reaches for her, for the first time in two years, she asks Makoto what a sudden present means, and he tells her it is a man’s way of wanting to make someone he loves happy; when she reports progress, he congratulates her, smiling. She notices a shadow in the smile, and does not yet know why.

It is easy to see how it drifts, and the series never pretends that anybody decided anything. The comrade is the only person who hears the true sentence. A spouse has to be managed; a comrade only has to be told. Being understood without having to explain is one of the most intimate things one person can give another, and these two can give it to each other precisely because each of them loves someone else. That is the trap inside the series’ key sentence. The love for their partners makes the comradeship feel safe, and the safety is what lets it deepen.

The shadow has a reason. On the night of the anniversary Kaede, held up at work, missed the restaurant, came to the hotel room very late, tired and still at work in her head, and turned her husband away. He walked the streets in a daze and called Michi. She did not answer.

Then the two of them go to an aquarium, and on the way back what they feel spills over and they kiss. On a company training trip they find themselves alone in a room, laying out constellations with little sugar sweets. He pulls Michi close, and she lets herself go and thinks: this is how I wanted to be loved. Then she notices that she is crying. He sees it and lets her go. However drawn she is to him, her husband has not left her heart.

The next day he gives her an hourglass shaped like Orion and asks for something extraordinary. He will not touch her again, not with so much as a finger, if only she will stay beside him as before. She knows she should say no. She says yes.

Hold that request up to the light. A man whose marriage has had no sex in it asks another woman for a closeness with no touching in it, and means it; the broadcaster’s summary of the next episode says that she has become so necessary to him that he wants her near even if they never touch. Whatever he had been missing with Kaede, then, it was not only the act. What both comrades were starving for was to be on somebody’s side, and to have somebody on theirs: to be known in the exact shape of their trouble, and not left alone inside it.

Much later, Kaede will give that closeness a name that is cruel because it fits: a sex of the heart. The comrades cannot afford to hear it. An essay can. What the two of them built was not an affair of the body, and the series takes care over the difference; it was an intimacy made of telling, out of exactly the things their marriages lacked. Neither spouse knew, and neither was asked. That is not a verdict on two lonely people. It is a fact about who was left out of a decision that was changing their lives.

Youichi’s side is harder to see, because he says so little. When he brings the flowers and reaches for Michi, he cannot go through with it, and it preys on him. Looking at a jigsaw of cherry blossoms in the café, a keepsake of their past, he remembers that from the day they met it was always Michi who fitted herself to him; he had assumed that balance would hold. Then he promises to face her, sex included, and Michi breaks off with Makoto to face her marriage. On the day they are to set off on their first trip together in a long while, he tells her the truth. It is only with her that he cannot have sex. And he has betrayed her, once.

The first half of that confession is the strangest sentence in the series, and the most painful, because it holds the verdict Michi feared and its opposite at the same time. It is you. It is not your body. The series gives no cause for it, and this essay will not supply one: no label, no diagnosis, no theory about his childhood. What can be said is narrower. His desire exists, as the one night proves, so whatever this is, it is not a shortage.

This Library argued, in “The Desire Gap Is a Difference of Context, Not of Quantity”, that a gap in desire between two people is usually a difference in the conditions under which desire becomes available to each of them, not in its quantity, and that conditions can often be changed. Only with her is that argument at its hardest, because the condition here is not a schedule or a child asleep in the next room. It is the marriage itself. One reading, and it is only a reading, is that the very thing that makes Michi precious to him, that she is the one person he never has to try with, is what he cannot turn into desire, because sex is the one place where he feels he has to try. The series does not confirm this. It does show a man who feels the pressure of that moment, and a woman who has always adjusted herself to spare him it. A schedule can be rearranged. What a marriage has made of two people is harder to rearrange, and one of them cannot do it alone.

And no gentleness in the telling can give back what the sentence takes from Michi. For two years she has been asking what is wrong with her. Now she has an answer that is about her and is not her fault, and there is nothing she can do with it.

On the night of the aquarium kiss, Youichi sleeps with Mishima Yuika, on impulse. She had come to help him run the café, and her way with customers had begun to fill his empty tables. The next morning Michi has a fever, and Youichi, guilty, turns back on his way to work to nurse her. Later he asks Yuika to treat the night as though it never happened; she tells him, to his surprise, that she had meant to anyway.

It would be easy to write Yuika off as a device, the other woman who exists to test a husband. The series refuses that too. Three years earlier she had an affair with a man who was then her boss, and now his wife is claiming damages from her. When Youichi tells her that he has confessed to Michi, she is furious: he did it to make himself feel better, his wife has been deeply hurt by hearing it, and in the end a wife’s anger turns on the other woman. Then her former lover’s wife comes to the café. Yuika apologises and says she has not seen him since, and the wife says that in these three years she has not laughed from the heart, has not even been angry, and has not touched her husband. Youichi is standing close enough to hear it.

Inside a story in which a sexless marriage leads to an affair, the series has placed a woman for whom an affair led to a sexless marriage. An affair is no remedy for the absence. It can be the cause of one.

So name what everyone paid. Yuika pays twice: once in a claim over an old affair, and again by becoming the once in someone else’s confession, a woman turned into evidence in another couple’s reckoning. Her former lover’s wife has paid with three years. Michi pays with a sentence she cannot unhear, and Youichi with a night he cannot take back. What the law in Japan allows a wife to claim, from whom and in what circumstances, is a question for a lawyer, not for an essay about a drama.

The series puts the question of confession to two women, who answer it in opposite ways. Yuika’s anger is at a confession made for the relief of the one confessing. Hana, who has already asked Michi whether she is really the only one wronged, tells her that the truth would only hurt her husband, and that carrying it hidden for life is the price of what she did. This essay will not settle which of them is right. Each answer has a cost, and in both cases part of it falls on someone who was never asked.

For most of the run Kaede had few defenders among viewers, and the series spends its second half making her harder to blame. Begin with her reasons, before any verdict. Her promotion came in a fiercely competitive business, under an editor-in-chief who is both her idol and her goal, at the point in a career when work asks for everything. None of that is coldness, and the series does not make her a villain for it.

Her refusal on the anniversary was hers to make, and a no on one night is not a verdict on a marriage. What turns it into one is that nobody says what it meant. Afterwards she apologises and sets out food she has bought; he says he understands what her work means to her, goes to bed without eating, and she feels, in the broadcaster’s words, that her treatment of him has been handed back to her. When she finds the aquarium in the car’s navigation history, and he will not say who he went with, her first thought is not that he is betraying her. It is that she is the reason.

Then she confronts Michi, in a scene viewers named the lunch from hell. After a long silence Kaede asks her questions, and Michi can only apologise. Kaede tells her that without her there would have been no problem at all, and Michi, cornered, says what her own trouble had been: that she and her husband were sexless. Kaede, shaken, asks whether this is all over something as small as that.

That question is the whole Niina marriage in a sentence. What had been, for him, the centre of his pain was, for her, a small thing, not because she is cold but because he never told her how large it was. The comradeship had heard the sentence that the marriage never did.

The first sign reached her from a screen in a car; the rest reached her last. When her husband redoes their anniversary and she is ready for him, he goes to bed alone. She moves into a hotel to see whether he will ask her home, and no message comes. When he asks for a divorce she agrees at once, so quickly that he is taken aback. None of this is a punishment she earned. It is what it costs to be the person in the story who was not told. By the last episode, a report on the finale noted, viewers had begun to cheer her on.

Then the series does the thing that makes it more than a drama about affairs. The two spouses who had held back reach, at last, for the ones who waited, Youichi for Michi and Kaede for Makoto, and the two who had spent years wanting exactly this find themselves, in the middle of it, saying no. They are shaken by it. The broadcaster’s summary adds the line that turns the scene into the moral centre of the series: Youichi and Kaede, in their turn, get back what they had done, and learn what the other had been living with.

It would be easy to read the refusals as revenge, and nothing in the broadcaster’s account of them invites it. They read more like what happens when a reach arrives too late and for a different reason: after a confession, after a threat to the marriage has been felt, as repair. It is the reach of someone who wants to keep you, which is not the reach of someone who wants you. And a body that has spent years learning to stop hoping does not open again on command. None of this needs a clinical word, and it should not be given one.

Nor does it need an excuse. A marriage, a long wait, even one’s own old wish, oblige nobody’s body on a particular night. Kaede’s no on the anniversary was hers, Michi’s no now is hers, and Makoto’s is his. A refusal is information, not failure. And the scene completes the series’ symmetry with something close to grace: by the end of it, every one of the four has been the one who waited and the one who could not. Nobody in either marriage can claim any longer to be only the injured party. That is not a humiliation. It is the first thing all four of them have in common.

Under the silence in the Yoshinos’ bed there was a second silence, and the series uncovers it with a floor plan. The café’s owner tells Youichi that his wife has found out about an affair. The last time she found out, he says, he bought a house and she forgave him: a house is the purchase of a lifetime, a great big love letter to a wife.

That night Youichi suggests that they stop renting and buy a flat, and he has already booked a viewing. Perhaps he means it as a love letter. The plan has one bedroom. It tells Michi, as plainly as any sentence could, that he has never pictured a child in their future. On the day of the viewing he asks to see a bigger flat as well, to meet what she wants, and she stands in what would be a child’s room and wonders whether, if they had not been sexless, they would have a family by now.

This is the harder question underneath the whole series, and the one nobody had said aloud. The sexlessness had been sitting on a disagreement about the future: a future with a child in it, which was hers, and a future without one, which was his and was never spoken.

On Makoto’s last night at the firm, before he leaves for a new job, Hana arranges for the two of them to eat ramen alone. When they part, he takes Michi’s hand and runs. They reach a bus stop, and a bus, and they are about to get on, and they stop. Neither of them, they find, wants to run anywhere any more. They go home, each to face the person they married.

It is the best thing the comrades do, and it is a refusal. The comradeship ends as it began, in loyalty, but loyalty now to the truth rather than to the arrangement.

Makoto asks Kaede for a divorce. Michi tells Youichi that she has something to say, and before she can say it he tells her that if it is about a child, they can have one. The words hurt her all over again. She tells him that she does not want to wear herself away any longer, and asks for a divorce. He asks whether there is someone else; to spare him, she keeps Makoto hidden and says there is no one. He tells her he will not divorce.

His offer should be honoured for what it was, and it may have cost him something to make. But a child offered in order to keep someone is a yes given to a fear, not to a want, and Michi will not be given a child the way someone gives in at the end of an argument. The series is right that she could not accept it, and right that saying so is what finally ends the pretending.

From here, this essay describes the last episode.

Once both divorces are final, Makoto takes Michi back to the aquarium. He has put his own feelings last all his life, he tells her, and this one he wants to treasure; he asks her to stay with him. She tells him she cannot return it: she wants to live on her own, relying on no one. He thanks her for turning him down properly, and they part, telling each other that they regret neither the comradeship nor having loved each other.

Months pass, and living alone turns out to be more inconvenient than Michi expected, and lonelier. Youichi sees her in a café with another man, on a date she is covering as a favour to Hana, and summons Makoto in a temper: surely Michi needs somebody looking out for her? Makoto, just as irritated, tells him that she is living on her own.

Kaede, now editing a magazine for parents of babies, learns that Makoto and Michi are not together. When he calls Michi his comrade, she asks how long he means to keep up what she calls a sex of the heart, and says it gives her the chills. The next day she calls Michi a thieving cat to her face, takes her for a drink at a standing bar, where the two women talk about what each had thought about marriage and about sex, and then marches her to Youichi’s café, where Makoto has come to settle things.

Makoto says that he could not fill the hole in Michi’s heart, and wishes the two of them happiness. Youichi says nothing. Michi urges everyone to leave; outside, she says that she has forgotten something and goes back in, and she and Youichi decide to try again. Watching her go, Kaede tells Makoto that she will be his comrade. The last image, the two of them walking up a slope and looking happy, left viewers arguing over whether it showed them reunited or remembered; Nao has said that when it takes place is not made clear, and that she hoped each viewer would find an ending of her own in it.

Look at where the word has travelled. It began as the name for an alliance outside two marriages, and it ends as an offer between two people who were married to each other. That is the series’ answer to its own title. What both marriages lacked was not only sex. It was what the comrades found in each other: standing on the same side of the same problem, rather than on either side of it. The comradeship grew outside the marriages because nobody inside them could say the sentence it was built on. Kaede’s offer puts the word back where it belonged, too late for her marriage, and perhaps not too late for the two of them.

Why does Michi go back? The kindest reading is that a marriage may be worth repairing precisely because both people now know what it cost. By then she knows what a comrade can and cannot do, and that living alone is lonelier than her resolve had allowed for; perhaps she has also seen that the man who could not touch her had not stopped worrying about her. That is not a proof, and the series does not offer one.

The manga found a large audience on phones: in 2018 it topped the annual ranking of an e-comics service used mostly by women in their twenties and thirties, and drew more than 14,300 reviews there. The company behind the service said that people with this trouble seem to carry it wanting someone to hear it and unable to tell anyone, and that this wish was what turned into the reviews. Five years later the drama did the same. Its audience on the night was modest, but it set record after record on catch-up viewing, a report on the last episode said, because so many people wanted to watch it alone rather than with the family; TVer, the commercial broadcasters’ free streaming service, named it the drama of the year for 2023, with more than fifty-six million plays. Nao said that a phrase, secret viewing, grew up around it, and that she had played Michi hoping that three viewers in every hundred would think: this is me.

A story about a pain with nobody to tell found its audience one screen at a time. Its reviewers and secret viewers were doing what Michi and Makoto did, finding somewhere outside the marriage to put the sentence, and for some of them the series may have become a comrade.

This Library read the husbands of Hirugao, in “Hirugao and the Only Unscheduled Hour in a Life”, as absent in a way nobody would name as a wrong, and the lack in those marriages as a deprivation without a perpetrator. Nine years later the same director and producer went a step further: here the partners are present, kind, loved and loving, and the bed is still empty. And “1122: For a Happy Marriage, and the Sentence the Rule Stood In For” read a couple who could talk about anything except sex and made a rule instead. The couples here make no rule at all. Their talking happens outside the marriage, with a comrade, and the series asks what that costs.

None of this makes the series a portrait of Japanese marriage; a reader anywhere will recognise the absence at its centre. For a woman living in Japan in a second language, the comradeship may be familiar in another form, as the friend who shares your language or your situation, with whom you do not have to translate your life. The series understands the relief of such a person, and the risk: the one who hears the true sentence is not the one who could answer it.

There are at least five ways this essay could be wrong.

First, the ending may be surrender rather than repair. A report on the finale noted that many viewers were confused because neither of them seemed to feel any differently about children when they got back together, and another recorded the reactions more bluntly: no way, I can’t understand it, it leaves me uneasy. Loneliness is a poor reason to go back to anyone, and a series that returns a woman to the man who could not touch her may be rewarding endurance and calling it love. This essay cannot answer that. The series leaves the question of a child open, and a viewer who thinks Michi went back to the same problem is not wrong.

Second, no villain can mean nobody accountable. People lied in this story: Makoto hid from Kaede whom he had gone to the aquarium with, Michi told Youichi there was no one else, and Youichi asked Yuika to act as though their night had never happened. The costs fell hardest on the people outside the comradeship: Kaede, Yuika, the wife who had not touched her husband in three years. A story without villains can still show wrongs, and this essay has tried to name them. But the series surrounds the comradeship with lovely things, an aquarium, a constellation of sugar sweets, an hourglass shaped like Orion, and loveliness is a kind of argument.

Third, the word comrade flatters. It is the comrades’ own word, and the series adopts it; Kaede’s word is harsher, and may be more accurate. In the last episode criticism turned on Michi herself. Having turned Makoto down, she took him back as her old comrade when he got in touch, and having said she would live alone, she was close to Youichi again within the year. Some viewers were irritated by her inconsistency, and they were noticing something real. Loneliness does not keep its resolutions, and an essay that calls her choices comradeship may be doing for her what the word did for the two of them.

Fourth, this essay’s thesis may be too tidy. Love is not the only thing that made the pain unsayable. So did pride, and fear of the answer, and exhaustion, and a disagreement about a child that neither of the Yoshinos could bring themselves to open. A reader who thinks love is only the most flattering of these may be right.

Fifth, and aimed at this house. This house sells private companionship. It therefore has an interest in any reading in which someone outside a marriage, who listens and understands, becomes the hero of a sexless marriage’s story. The series refuses that reading in its most honest sentence, spoken by the man who came closest to being that person: he could not fill the hole in her heart. This house could not either, and it will not describe itself as an answer to sexlessness, or as the comrade who hears what has not been said at home. Nobody in this story needed a service. They needed to stand on the same side as the person they loved, or to stop pretending that they did.

The absence of sex in a loving marriage is often nobody’s fault, and it is still somebody’s pain. Love does not cancel that pain; it only takes away the person you could be angry with. The place the pain most needs to go is the place it can least easily reach: the person it is about, if the two of you can stand on the same side of the problem.

A late reach may be refused. A child is not a concession. A confession is for the person it concerns, not for the relief of the one making it. The people outside a comradeship, and outside a marriage, pay for what happens inside them, and they should be counted. A marriage can be honoured without being saved, and looked at honestly without being ended. The series does not claim that its ending is the right one. What it seems to say is only that the word comrade belonged at home all along.

A few questions, for anyone who recognised a bedroom in this story.

Who hears the true sentence about your marriage? Is it the person you are married to? If your partner is kind, where has your anger gone: inward, into a verdict on yourself, or sideways, to someone who understands and cannot answer? What would it mean to stand on the same side of the problem, rather than on either side of it? If a reach came now, late, what would your body say, and could you let that be information rather than failure? And what does a plan you have made together, a floor plan, a budget, a calendar, say about a future you have not discussed?

If you have been asking what is wrong with you, the series has an answer that is neither a comfort nor an accusation. Perhaps nothing is wrong with you, and something is still wrong. Both can be true at once. The absence may be nobody’s fault. What you do with it is yours, and it may begin by turning to the person it is about and asking whether the two of you can stand on the same side of it.