My Precious, and What Came Before the Lie

On 19 December 2024, the night its last episode went out, My Precious was billed as the ending of a story that had begun with takuran. The word comes from birds. A cuckoo lays its egg in another bird’s nest and leaves the raising of the chick to that bird, and in Japanese the word is used, by extension, for a wife raising another man’s child as her husband’s. The broadcaster had announced the series on that word at the end of August, and it was still the word in the listings on the night of the finale.

By the series’ own account, the story did not begin there. It begins five years into a marriage. Miwa Kanzaki gave up a career she was good at to keep house. Her husband, Hiroki, who is doing well at a trading company, is charming to everyone except her. At home he tells her not to smile and treats her like a servant. He also pays for her sick mother’s care in hospital, which is part of why she stays. She hopes a child might mend things between them, and he asks whether she wants one because she has nothing to do. Then, one night, he rapes her.

Everything the series was sold on comes after that night: the other man, the pregnancy, the lie, the child. This essay is about that order, and about the words that were attached to each part of it. For what Miwa does, the series and its publicity had a full vocabulary: takuran, a wicked woman, a forbidden decision, a sin. For what Hiroki did first, the introduction the broadcaster published before a single episode had aired used a phrase. It called it a certain action of his.

Two things happen inside this marriage that the series asks its audience to weigh. A husband rapes his wife. A wife tells her husband that a child is his. The argument here is that the two cannot be weighed against each other, because neither is payment for the other. The rape does not license the lie. The lie does not make the rape smaller. And the tenderness the husband later shows a baby girl is not a payment on either account. By published accounts of its episodes, the series understands this better than its publicity did. In its last minutes, it comes close to forgetting it.

What follows tries to keep each thing under its own name and in the order it happened, and to hear Miwa’s reasons, as she had them, before judging anything she did.

My Precious, Watashi no Takaramono in Japanese, my treasure, ran in Fuji TV’s Thursday ten o’clock drama slot from 17 October to 19 December 2024, in ten episodes. It is an original script by Takayuki Ichikawa, produced by Reiko Misao and directed by Toshiyuki Mitsuhashi, among others. Wakana Matsumoto plays Miwa, Kei Tanaka plays Hiroki, and Tatsuya Fukazawa plays Ryo Fuyutsuki, the friend from her schooldays whom she meets again. Honami Sato plays Risa Mizuki, Ryo’s business partner; Yuri Tsunematsu plays Makoto Komori, Miwa’s closest friend; Kazuki Kitamura plays Tadayuki Asaoka, who runs the coffee shop where Hiroki goes to talk; and Yumi Takigawa plays Miwa’s mother.

The broadcaster presented it as the third in a line of dramas from the same producer, each built on what it called a marital taboo: Hirugao in 2014, about affairs conducted on weekday afternoons, and Even If You Don't Do It in 2023, about marriages without sex, which Ichikawa had also written for. It was also watched in very large numbers after broadcast. On TVer, the commercial broadcasters’ catch-up service, its episodes were played 34.58 million times between October and December 2024, more than any other programme on the service in that quarter, according to the ranking TVer published the following January.

A note before reading on. This essay discusses the whole series, including how it ends. It also discusses a rape within a marriage, which it names plainly and never describes, and a moment in which a baby’s life is in danger, which it states once, in a single sentence. The series was not screened for this essay. It rests on what the broadcaster published about the series, on the published words of its producer and of Wakana Matsumoto, and on published accounts of the episodes, and every line of dialogue it mentions is paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

In outline: at a library she loved as a girl, Miwa meets Ryo again, her gentle friend from junior high, who now runs a fair-trade company, is about to leave to build a school in Africa, and tells her she was his first love. The morning after Hiroki rapes her, she goes to Ryo, and they spend the night together. The pregnancy, the lie, the child and how it all ends are taken up below, in the order the argument needs them.

Before there is a lie, there is a household, and the series is exact about how it holds her.

It holds her first by contempt, and the contempt is quiet. Hiroki does not need to shout. He tells his wife not to smile. He treats her as staff. When she says she would like a child, he asks whether it is because she has nothing to do, a question that lands harder once you know that she gave up her work, the broadcaster says, because she wanted a child. None of it happens in public, where he is the pleasant, successful husband other people might envy. It happens in a flat, to one person, on ordinary evenings. The broadcaster’s introduction says she lived her days there like a bird in a cage.

It holds her second by money. Miwa has no income of her own, and her mother is ill in hospital. Hiroki pays for the care. No one needs to spell out what that arrangement does. A woman who cannot keep her mother in a hospital bed without her husband has had a price put on every door out of the flat, and she knows the figure.

The Japanese government’s own description of violence between spouses is worth setting beside this. Not to put a label on a fictional man, but because the list is so ordinary. The Cabinet Office’s page on the forms such violence takes defines its psychological form as heartless words and behaviour that wound a partner, and among its examples is speaking in the tone of an order. The same page brings money into it: refusing living expenses, or telling a partner not to work, which it notes are sometimes counted separately as economic. It adds that its examples are matters a person may bring to a consultation, not all of which meet the legal definition. Hiroki’s version of money is the reverse of withholding. He pays. And paying can hold a person as firmly as withholding, when what is paid for is her mother’s bed.

The series is careful to give Hiroki a life of his own. At work his boss berates him, the people under him talk behind his back, and attacks of panic keep him from the office. At a coffee shop called TOCA, its owner, Asaoka, listens to him and tells him that he plainly loves his wife. In an interview Real Sound published on the day of the first episode, Matsumoto said that Hiroki had a history of his own, played persuasively enough by Kei Tanaka that a viewer going back to the first episode might find parts of it making sense. That is a fair ambition for a drama, and this essay does not brush it aside. But an explanation is an account of how something came about. It is not a permission, and it is not a discount.

Then Hiroki rapes Miwa. This essay says it in those words because the series’ publicity did not, and because the difference is not a matter of taste.

The introduction Fuji TV released when it announced the series, on 30 August 2024, sets out the premise at some length: the wife who gave up her career, the husband who plays the ideal man in public and is harsh at home, the childhood friend who was always the one who came when she was in trouble. Then it says that Miwa, who had at first thought a connection of the heart would be enough, at last spends a night with Ryo, and that what set it off was, as nearly as English allows, a certain action of Hiroki’s. The action is not named.

Some of that is the ordinary discretion of an announcement, which does not give away a first episode. But look at what the sentence does with the night. It makes Hiroki’s act the trigger of Miwa’s affair, a cause in her story rather than a thing done to her. The rape becomes the reason for the adultery, and so it enters the account on her side, as the first step of her transgression. That is the shape this essay wants to undo. Not by softening anything she does next, but by putting his act back where it belongs, as his.

The law in Japan had been moving on exactly this point. Since 13 July 2023, the Penal Code has said in its own text that the offences of non-consensual sexual intercourse and non-consensual indecency are committed whether or not the two people are married. The Ministry of Justice explains that even before the amendment the prevailing view was that marriage made no difference, but that the statute had never said so, and some legal scholarship read offences between spouses narrowly; the words were written in to confirm the point. The Cabinet Office’s page on the forms of violence between spouses puts it more plainly still: forcing sexual acts on a partner who does not want them is sexual violence, and intercourse within a marriage can be the offence of non-consensual intercourse. My Precious went on air fifteen months after those words entered the law. Nothing here applies the law to fictional people. It is set down because a viewer is entitled to know the name for that night.

The essay “A Couple Is Two Consents, Not One” made the same point without any statute: whatever two people do together, each of them is agreeing to it separately, and a “we” can make one of the two agreements disappear. A marriage does not fold two consents into one. A husband does not hold his wife’s consent on account. Nothing about the five years before that night, or the child she hoped for, or the vows, stood in for hers.

What Miwa does the next morning is go to Ryo. She finds him at the library of her girlhood. He gives back the embroidered bookmark she lost when she was young; they spend the night together; he promises to come back for her. It is hard not to see what that morning may have been: a woman going, after the worst night of her marriage, to the one place where she had once simply been a girl with a book, and to the one person there who had never asked anything of her. That reading explains the night with Ryo. It does not make that night a remedy for the one before it, and it does not need to. The two nights keep their order. What Hiroki did came first.

Weeks later Miwa learns she is pregnant, and at around the same time the news reports that Ryo has been killed in a bombing in Africa. A DNA test tells her the child is Ryo’s. Take stock of where she is standing. She has no income. Her mother is in hospital, and the bills are more than she could pay alone. Her husband despises her, and he has raped her. The father of the child she is carrying is, as far as she knows, dead.

The broadcaster’s own introduction states her reasons plainly. Having left her job, it says, she had no road left to divorce and bring up a child alone; and if Hiroki learned the truth, there was no telling what would become of the child. She resolves that this child, at least, she will make happy. So she tells Hiroki that the child is his, and she burns the DNA result together with the divorce papers she had signed.

Stay with those two documents for a moment, because the series puts them in one fire. One was the truth about the child. The other was her way out. She destroys them together, and the gesture shows what the lie costs her before it costs anyone else: the exit and the truth go at the same time. She does not lie to stay comfortable. She lies in order to stay, and staying is what she had signed a paper to escape.

Her makers were clear about who they meant her to be. Reiko Misao, the producer, wrote in a comment released with the announcement that Miwa is a woman who had no choice but to choose to become a wicked woman; that she tells a lie that cannot be taken back, knowing it is selfish and will hurt people; and that she goes on struggling with what she has done, unable to become a wicked woman all the way. Matsumoto said that she could not cheer Miwa on from the heart herself, that Miwa does not want anyone to rescue her, and that she was playing her so as not to look like a tragic heroine: as a woman prepared to take the punishment her choice has earned.

Hear those reasons, and then look again at the word the series was sold on. The broadcaster’s introduction explains takuran from the natural world: a habit of some animals, which leave their eggs, and the raising of the young, to another; the cuckoo lays in another bird’s nest and has that bird raise its chick. As a description of Miwa, the metaphor gets one thing right. The man raising the child is not its father. Nearly everything else it gets backwards. The cuckoo leaves; Miwa stays, and does the raising herself. The cuckoo is a stranger to the nest; Miwa made this one, and paid for it with the work she gave up. And in the metaphor, the bird whose nest it is has simply been wronged. In this nest, that bird is the man who raped her.

None of that makes the lie right. It makes it legible, which is a different thing, and the first thing a reader owes her. The lie was made of money, fear and love for a child, not appetite. It was told to keep a child fed and housed in the only household she could see a way to live in, by a woman who had reason to fear the man she told it to. Only once that has been heard does the next question have any honesty in it: what the lie then did to everyone else.

This Library has a precise way of putting the difference between a secret and a private matter. The essay “A Secret Changes the Terms. Privacy Was Never in Them.” separated a secret, a change to what another person is relying on, kept from them, from privacy, which is everything that was never part of what they relied on in the first place. By that measure, what Miwa keeps is not privacy. A child’s paternity is not a drawer of her own. It changes the terms for three other people at once, and it is worth going through them one at a time.

For Hiroki, the secret becomes the ground of his change. When the baby is born he weeps holding her, names her Shiori, a word for both a bookmark and a guide, and asks to be allowed to be her father. It is the turn on which the series builds his change, and it rests on something he has not been told. His fatherhood is real. The floor under it is not. And a secret of this kind does not stay still while it is kept: every day of his tenderness adds to what the truth will cost him when it arrives.

There is a detail the series lets a viewer hold that Hiroki cannot. The name he chooses is the word for the thing Ryo gave back to Miwa at the library, on the morning after Hiroki raped her. A viewer knows where that bookmark came from. The man who chose the name does not.

For Ryo, the secret is a door closed without his knowing there was a door. He comes home alive, finds Miwa at the library, and is told she has a family to protect. He lets her go, and he does not know that Shiori is his. He has lost, without being told, one of the things a person might most want to be told about himself. The series will give him the chance to ask. The answer he gets is taken up below.

For Shiori, the secret is not a change to her terms. It is her terms. She is the only person in the story who never relied on anything and never agreed to anything, and the lie rests on her life more heavily than on anyone else’s. Whatever the adults decide, she will one day be a person with a right to her own story, and it will have been arranged before she could speak.

The secret reaches Hiroki through Makoto, who is the next section’s subject. He takes a paternity test, and when he has the result he comes close to ending his own life and Shiori’s, and turns back. That is all this essay will say of it. What Miwa had feared when she chose to lie was that if Hiroki learned the truth, there was no telling what would become of the child, and what happens next does not make that fear foolish. That is not a defence of the lie. It is one of the reasons it was told. When Miwa confesses, Hiroki tells her to leave. Then her mother dies. Out of the marriage, and without her mother, Miwa resolves to raise Shiori on her own.

Two other women decide what the men in this story will know.

Risa Mizuki is Ryo’s business partner, and she loves him. When he is caught in the bombing, she lets a dead colleague be taken for him, so that the world, and Miwa, believe him dead; her reason, as the series gives it, is that she does not want him to go back to Miwa. Her lie is as heavy as Miwa’s, and it lies underneath Miwa’s: the child was declared Hiroki’s in a world where Ryo had been reported dead. Ryo, home again, forgives her.

Makoto Komori, Miwa’s closest friend, is a single mother whose husband was unfaithful to her, and who has hated infidelity since. When she sees Miwa in Ryo’s arms, she goes to Hiroki. She tells him that she has long adored him, and she tells him that her instinct, as a woman, is that the baby is not his. It is a betrayal of her friend, and this essay calls it one. It is also, from where Makoto stands, a refusal to keep quiet about the kind of thing that was once done to her, and her own history is in the story alongside her feeling for Hiroki. Neither Risa nor Makoto is a villain. Each changes another woman’s life for reasons that are her own.

Set the three of them side by side and a pattern appears that the series may not have meant to draw. The lies and the tellings belong to women: Miwa’s, Risa’s, Makoto’s. The men are the ones lied to, and the one who is told. The introduction’s vocabulary ran the same way. Miwa decides to become a wicked woman, it says, and her forbidden decision throws three lives into turmoil. Set beside those words the phrase the same text chose for Hiroki: a certain action. A story in which women’s secrets drive the plot, and a man’s rape is an action left unnamed, has a grammar before it has a moral. The episodes, as they are recounted, give each of these women reasons of her own. But the grammar was handed to the audience first.

The series asks its audience for sympathy for Hiroki as he changes, and it works to earn it, beginning with his tears over a baby he believes is his. After the truth arrives, and after the worst of it, he throws Miwa out, and then begins, slowly, to give things up. He learns that the other man is Ryo, whose company he had been about to fund, and withdraws the money; later he offers it again. He signs the divorce papers. He gives up seeing Shiori. And he sends Ryo to meet Miwa and the baby, thinking the child may be better off with her real father. Each of these is a step away from the man of the first episode.

It is also the series’ strongest argument about what makes a parent. Hiroki is not Shiori’s father by blood, and in the months after her birth he does more of the daily work of being her father than anyone but her mother. A drama that wanted a villain could have kept him one. This one does not, and the refusal is to its credit.

But a change moves forward. It cannot reach back. Whatever Hiroki becomes to Shiori, he is still the man who raped her mother, and nothing he does for the daughter is a payment toward the mother. The series may invite a viewer to feel that his tenderness has settled something. This essay declines the invitation, not because the tenderness is false, but because it is addressed to someone else. A debt to one person is not discharged by kindness to another.

One line shows how far the series is prepared to go. When Hiroki cuts off the money, Ryo bows to him and tells him that it was Hiroki who saved Miwa. Whatever Ryo means by it, a viewer who remembers the night the series began from may hear it differently, and is entitled to.

By the last episode, Miwa is waiting at the entrance to a zoo for what she believes will be the last meeting of the three of them, her, Hiroki and Shiori. It is Ryo who comes, sent by Hiroki. Ryo holds Shiori and asks whether she is his. No, Miwa answers, in substance: she is my child.

It is the sentence the title was waiting for. Watashi no takaramono: my treasure. The series is named in the first person, and the first person is Miwa’s. At the zoo she turns it on both men at once. To Ryo, who asks about blood, she gives an answer that is false about blood. And she does not say the child is Hiroki’s either. She says the child is hers.

As a statement about biology, the sentence is untrue, and it closes a door on Ryo that was as much his as hers. He accepts it. He tells Hiroki that Hiroki is Shiori’s father, and he goes to build his school. The series gives him grace, perhaps more easily than a man in his place would find it, and what he gives up is no smaller for the grace. As a statement about the months since the birth, the sentence is simply true. Miwa carried the child, fed her and kept her, and paid for the keeping with nearly everything she had. The one sentence is a lie and a fact at once, and this essay cannot make it only one of them.

And again it is said over Shiori’s head. She is held by the man who is her father while her mother tells him that he is not. Whatever else that moment is, it is adults settling a child’s story in a place where she cannot yet hear it.

On 7 January 2025, in the series’ own calendar, Miwa sets off to file the divorce papers. Hiroki runs after her. He wants to raise Shiori with her, he says in substance, and to carry what the two of them have done, together. She wants to stay with him too, and the three of them begin again.

It would be easy to call this a reward: the cruel husband made good, the lying wife forgiven, the child given a family. It reads better as a decision. Nobody in the last scene is paid for anything. Two people who each know exactly what the other has done choose, knowing it, to stay. This Library said in “Thappad, and the Question Nobody Asked Her” that what a woman does in her own marriage is hers to decide, with knowledge no one outside it has. Miwa’s choice is owed the same courtesy, and this essay does not overrule it.

What it will not accept is the arithmetic of that last sentence. To carry what the two of them have done makes a pair of two acts that are not a pair. One is a rape. The other is a lie told, in part, because of the life that rape belonged to. They are not two halves of one account, and they do not balance. The only version of Hiroki’s sentence this essay can accept is the one in which each carries what he or she did, under its own name, beside the other: not one account with two entries, but two accounts, kept open.

The previous drama in the same line, which Ichikawa had also written for, was read here, in “Even If You Don't Do It, and a Pain That Is Nobody's Fault”, as a story in which nobody was to blame for the absence at its centre, and everybody answered for what they did with it. My Precious changes one term of that and keeps the other. Here the first harm has an author. And everybody still answers for what they do next, Miwa included. That is the whole of the argument. The series comes very close to it in its last minutes, and then, in one sentence, adds the two acts together into a pair.

The series ends at the beginning of whatever the two of them now build. Whether they can build it is outside the frame, which is the right place for it. What is inside the frame is a child; two adults who know the truth about her, and a third who asked and was given another answer; and a truth she does not yet know.

The drama’s makers were candid about where it came from. Misao wrote that she first came across takuran while trying to decide how to end Hirugao, and had kept the idea ever since; that the more she read about women who had done it, the more the stories she found were tales of frightening wicked women; and that she did not want to make only a wicked woman’s story. She added that the drama might let viewers feel, beyond the love story, something a little frightening that lurks close to home: human karma, and desire.

Something does lurk close to home in this story, though perhaps not where the publicity pointed. A viewer who recognises something in Miwa’s choice may also recognise Miwa’s marriage before the choice, the part the introduction passed over with its certain action. The figures that exist suggest that part is not rare.

In the Cabinet Office’s national survey on violence between men and women, carried out in the 2023 fiscal year and addressed to 5,000 people aged 18 to 59 chosen at random, 27.5 percent of the women who had ever been married said a spouse had subjected them to at least one of the four kinds of violence the survey asks about, and 13.2 percent said it had happened many times. The four are defined in terms a viewer of this series will recognise. Psychological attack includes abuse that denies a person’s worth. Sexual coercion includes being forced into sexual acts against one’s will. And among the women who said they had been subjected to non-consensual intercourse, 9.2 percent named a spouse, counting partners in common-law marriages and spouses living apart, and 8.5 percent a former spouse. A complete stranger was named by 10.0 percent.

Those figures need their limits stated. They describe the people who answered one survey, not women in Japan as a whole. The last three rest on 130 women, each of whom could name more than one person, so the shares cannot be added together. What they can show is narrower, and it is enough. In these answers a spouse is named about as often as a complete stranger, though it may be the stranger that people picture.

The other structural fact in the series is one the introduction does name: a woman who had left her job had no road to divorce and to bringing up a child alone. That is a fictional woman’s arithmetic, and it is ordinary arithmetic all the same: an income given up, a parent in hospital, a child on the way, and the question of who pays for what.

For a woman whose right to live in Japan rests on her marriage, the arithmetic has one more line. The Cabinet Office’s page for victims who are foreign nationals says that the law on spousal violence covers them too, and that staying in Japan after a divorce involves a procedure concerning residence status. A door out can have a form attached to it. And a woman far from her own family, living in a second language, may be further than Miwa ever was from anyone who would think to ask how she is.

There are at least four ways this essay could be wrong, and two of them are serious.

First, the genre. My Precious is a melodrama, and it said so: its trailer had Miwa resolve to become a wicked woman, and it was made for Thursday nights. Melodrama runs on exactly the imbalance this essay objects to. A heroine’s transgression is the engine, and an engine needs fuel. Reading the series as a lesson in naming things may be asking a Thursday-night drama to be something it never claimed to be. The genre explains the shape. It does not decide what a viewer owes the night the shape was built on.

Second, and seriously: the certain action was written before broadcast, when naming the night would have given the first episode away. The series itself may put that night on screen as exactly what it is. This essay read words about the series and did not watch it, and a reader who has watched it is better placed to judge whether the series itself is more careful than its publicity was. If it is, the grammar described above belongs to the marketing more than to the work.

Third, and more seriously still: Hiroki’s wish to carry what they have both done can be heard as no sum at all. On that hearing, a man is including his own worst act among the things that must be carried, when he could have made the whole story about her lie. It would then be the most accountable thing he says in the series, and this essay has been unfair to it. That hearing is available, and it may be the better one. The objection here is only to the other hearing, the one in which the two acts cancel.

Fourth: an essay that hears Miwa’s reasons at such length may be doing for her what it accuses the series of doing for Hiroki, letting an explanation work as a discount. Ryo lost the knowledge of his own child. Shiori will grow up inside a story arranged without her. Neither of them had any reasons of their own in it. A reader who finds this essay too gentle with the lie has a point. The only answer is the one already given: reasons are heard first, and hearing them does not stop the judgment. It only comes before it.

And a smaller fifth, which bears on everything above. This essay’s sympathy for care over blood, for the father who does the work over the father who does not know, suits the series’ ending a little too neatly, and the cost of that neatness falls on Ryo.

Not a verdict on Miwa, which would be the least useful thing an essay could offer her. What it takes is a habit: put each thing under its own name, in the order it happened.

A harm done to you does not license a harm you do. A harm you do does not make the one done to you any smaller. Both can be true inside one marriage, in the same season of one life, and it is the second truth that tends to go missing. Once a woman has done something wrong, what was done to her is easily reclassified as her motive, and then quietly dropped from the account.

If you have ever found that the worst thing someone did to you had become, in other people’s telling, the reason for something you did, you are allowed to keep both accounts open. What you did is yours to answer for. What was done to you is not made smaller by it, and it was never yours to carry.

And a child is owed her story in the right order, whenever she is old enough to hear it.

This is a reading of a television series. It is not legal, clinical or therapeutic guidance. It diagnoses no one, the characters included, and nothing in it is a statement about any reader or advice about any marriage.

The series was not screened for this essay. It rests on the introduction and the producer’s statement that Fuji TV released when it announced the series, as the press printed them that day; on the listings and synopses published for its episodes; on an interview with Wakana Matsumoto that Real Sound published on the day of the first episode; on TVer’s published ranking; and on published accounts of the episodes. Lines of dialogue are paraphrased, never quoted as exact, and phrases from the broadcaster’s introduction are translated as closely as English allows.

The figures come from the Cabinet Office’s 2023 survey on violence between men and women, as the government’s 2026 white paper on gender equality reports them, and they are given with their limits. The law is described from the Ministry of Justice’s own explanation of the 2023 amendments, and the forms of violence from the Cabinet Office’s page on them. No law is applied to any fictional person.

It offers no advice on paternity, on divorce or on any other legal question. Those belong with a lawyer and, where there is violence at home, with a spousal violence counselling and support centre.

No broadcaster, producer, writer, performer, streaming service or government office named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

When a story tells you what a woman did, what does it tell you happened to her first?

Is there a word someone has used for what you did? Is there one for what was done to you? Are they the same size?

What would it take for a kindness done later to count as an answer, and to whom would it have to be addressed?

Who in this story never had a say, and what will she be owed when she is old enough to ask?

If a friend saw something in your life of the kind she had once been hurt by, what would you want her to do with what she knew?

If any of this is close to what happens in your own home: in Japan, the Cabinet Office’s Domestic Violence Hotline Plus takes calls in Japanese at any hour on 0120-279-889, and its chat service works in ten languages, English among them. Dialling #8008 connects to the nearest spousal violence counselling and support centre during its opening hours. In an emergency, the number is 110.