Second Virgin, and Falling in Love With Your Eyes Open

On the plane home from Singapore, Nakamura Rui decides to end it. When she lands she will go back to being the woman she was before she met him. She is forty-five. She has been divorced for twenty years and has not loved anyone since. She is the managing director of a publishing house that she and its president built into one of the biggest in the business, and for two decades she has lived for her work.

Deciding is what she does. A company does not grow like hers without someone at the top who can settle a question and then act on it, and her life so far may have given her little reason to think that a decision, once made, could simply fail to hold.

This one does not hold. In a sense that is the whole of Second Virgin, the NHK drama of autumn 2010: a woman of forty-five falls for a married man seventeen years younger, tries more than once to end it, and cannot. It could have been told as a story about weakness, or as a story about a late awakening. The series tells it as neither, and this essay argues that the refusal is the point.

The title calls her a second virgin: a woman so long without love or sex that she is, in effect, a beginner again. That word turns out to be the least accurate thing about her. What arrives in Rui’s life is not innocence restored. It is an adult’s desire, and it arrives with its eyes open, into a life so full that there is a great deal for it to break. The series honours that desire as desire, not as a late bloom and not as a scandal. It also refuses to let the honour excuse the cost, and the cost does not arrive at one address. His wife, Marie, pays first, and without ever being asked: with her marriage, her safety and a friendship that had barely begun. Rui pays with her position and her name. And from its title on, the series names both women by where they stand relative to one man, a thread worth following to the last episode.

The facts, once. Second Virgin ran for ten episodes on NHK’s main channel, in the Drama 10 slot at ten o’clock on Tuesday nights, from 12 October to 14 December 2010. It was an original script by Ōishi Shizuka. Suzuki Kyōka plays Rui, Hasegawa Hiroki plays the young man, Suzuki Kou, and Fukada Kyōko plays his wife, Marie; Ayano Gō plays Rui’s son, Ryo, and Danta Yasunori plays Mukai, the president who built the company with her. The episode titles are given here in translation.

Its first episode drew a household rating of 5.5 per cent in the Kantō region, by Video Research’s count, the weakest start the slot had had. The figure climbed as the run went on, and the last episode drew 11.5 per cent, the slot’s best, a record another drama in the same slot passed in 2012. It was also the slot’s first long drama, after a run of stories in five or six episodes. Hasegawa, barely known on television, had been cast on Ōishi’s recommendation, and NHK’s own archive now names the series as the role in which he broke through. In 2011 the story became a film, again written by Ōishi and moved to Kuala Lumpur; the film is not discussed here.

Two notes before going further. The series was not screened for this essay. Scenes are described as the published episode summaries, the broadcaster’s archive and the reports of the time describe them, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. 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.

Begin with the word, because the series chose it. It is not an English phrase but a Japanese coinage made from two English words, and Japanese dictionaries give it two meanings. The Shogakukan dictionary Daijisen describes a woman whose first experience of sex stayed with her as an unpleasant memory and who has since come to fear men’s bodies. A dictionary of current usage describes a woman who has had sex but has been away from it for a long time, often with the sense that the gap has left her with something close to a virgin’s nervousness. In one definition she is afraid. In the other she is out of practice. In both she is defined by what she has not been doing.

In English the nearest phrase means almost the opposite. A secondary or born-again virgin, in the language of the American abstinence movements, is someone who has had sex and has pledged not to again, often until marriage. A viewer who knows only the English will hear a vow of abstinence in the title of a story about a woman stepping into her first love in twenty years.

On paper Rui fits the Japanese word, and the series knows it. But watch what the word does to her twenty years. It turns them into a blank, a long pause after which she must start again from the beginning. The series spends ten episodes showing that there was no blank.

This Library argued, in “First Times Do Not Belong Only to the Young”, that the culture supplies one script for a first time and writes it for sixteen-year-olds, so that an adult who does something for the first time at forty is handed a verdict along with it: she is late. The title of this series is that verdict in two words. The story shows where the verdict goes wrong. Rui is not a beginner. She is the adult that essay described, leaping with a detailed map of the ground she is leaving, and able to see exactly what this would touch: a son, a reputation, a job in a small industry. The map is precisely her difficulty. She can see everything this will cost, and seeing it does not stop her.

Nor is it a late bloom, the other easy phrase. A bloom implies a bud: a woman who has been waiting, unripe, for this. Rui was not waiting. She was working, raising a son and running a company, and when desire came it did not complete her. It interrupted her.

The series introduces her through her work. In the first episode she is sick of an editorial meeting with no life in it. At a wine society she meets a young official from the Financial Services Agency who says he wants to change Japan’s financial markets, and, interested, she proposes a book. Whatever else this relationship becomes, it begins with her professional eye. She is the one who sees what he might be, and she is the one with the power to make it public.

That changes the shape of everything that follows. The familiar version of an age gap runs the other way: an older man with standing takes up a younger woman with promise, and the story, whatever else it says, treats the pairing as natural. Here the one with the standing is a woman of forty-five and the one with the promise is a man of twenty-eight. Her book makes his name; within the series he becomes a media figure, the finance prince. A good part of what reads as scandal in this story is simply that reversal. A woman is choosing, rather than being chosen.

The twenty years also had a particular loneliness in them, and the series names it exactly. Its published summary says that Rui has never had a friend, and that what she begins to feel for the young woman who moves in next door, before she knows who that woman is, is friendship. She gives her neighbour a key and asks her to look after her pet. That is how the series introduces the wife. Not as an obstacle. As the neighbour who was becoming a friend.

So the twenty years were not empty. They were full, and they were narrow: full of work, narrow in who could come close. Desire does not arrive in a blank. It arrives in a life already crowded with things it can damage, and some of them it will.

The third episode is called An Honest Body. On a business trip to Singapore he turns up at her hotel room and tells her plainly how he feels. She does not know what to do with it. Late that night, on an impulse, it is she who goes to his room.

It matters that the series gives her that step. It could have made her the one who is swept away, talked round, overcome, which is how stories have often protected a woman’s reputation from her own wanting. It does not. The move it records is a woman of forty-five walking to a man’s door. Nor is it the first time she says no and then goes: in the second episode she turns down his request to meet, and that same night goes to his office to find him. She knew he was married. She did not yet know that his wife was the neighbour who held her key. The want was hers, and so was the choice to act on it.

The next day, on the plane, she decides to end it. This Library argued, in “Why Competence at Work Does Not Make Private Desire Easier”, that work rewards producing outcomes reliably and that desire is not an outcome anybody can produce on demand. Rui’s flight home shows the other half of that argument. Desire cannot be cancelled on demand either. She treats it the way she treats everything, as a matter to be settled, and it does not stay settled.

The fifth episode is titled A Foolish Woman, without saying which woman it means, and this essay will come back to the word. For now it is enough to say that a woman who cannot talk herself out of a feeling is not foolish. She is a person. What she does with the feeling is another question, and the series asks it at once, because the next thing Rui learns is who his wife is.

It should be said, too, that loneliness is not what moves her. Later, while she is keeping Kou away, the series offers her what the world would call a suitable alternative: Akio, a writer who is also a doctor, introduced to her by the grand old novelist who has supported her company since its founding. He wants her, and he takes her to Hokkaido. She goes, and she cannot stop thinking about Kou. This is not a woman taking the first man who asks. It is a particular want for a particular man, which is much harder to brush aside.

Press reports gave their ages as forty-five and twenty-eight. Seventeen years is a wide gap in either direction, and everyone watching knew which direction made it a story. An older man with a much younger woman is something television has long shown without comment. An older woman with a much younger man has more often been made into a story about her. Perhaps the best-known version in American film is Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, the wife of the young man’s father’s law partner, whom the film sees from his side, as a danger he drifts into and then escapes. Second Virgin tells it from the woman’s side and asks the viewer to stay there.

Ōishi was candid, later, that the gap was a device. Asked in 2016 about a new love story, she said that for Second Virgin she had built in the difference in age as the obstacle, since without some such fetter a love story comes to little more than a passing flutter, and that the times had since leapt past it: there were plenty of couples with that sort of gap now. A writer who says her obstacle has aged is telling us something about her audience too. In 2010 a woman choosing a man seventeen years younger was still, on its own, enough to carry a drama.

The most interesting thing the series does with the gap is to put it inside Rui. In the same episode as Singapore, her son brings home his girlfriend, Aiko, a woman more than ten years older than he is and of Rui’s own generation. Rui is cool with her. The arithmetic she is about to break for herself, she applies at once to somebody else. Then, in one of the kindest movements in the series, the two women become friends; Aiko, who once sang in a band and now runs a small bar, becomes the person Rui can talk to about love. The series does not lecture Rui for her first reaction. It lets her outgrow it.

No lecture is needed here either. The difference in their ages harms no one in this story. The harm has another source, and a name: Marie.

Suzuki Marie is the daughter of the owner of a noodle company, raised by indulgent parents in a small world and married to a man she believes is hers. She moves in next door to Rui by chance. She keeps Rui’s key and looks after Rui’s pet. She does not know that the woman she is befriending is in love with her husband, and for a while Rui does not know who Marie is either. By the time Rui finds out, after Singapore, she has already begun to think of her as a friend.

It is easy to see Marie as the series’ villain, or as its joke, and plenty of people have. When the film was announced, a sports paper described the role as a spiteful villainess, and a recap site still presents the performance as a kind of horror. The word villainess is the paper’s, not this essay’s. When things go against her, Marie says she will die. She says it often enough that it can start to sound like a catchphrase.

This essay will not hear it that way. A person who says she will die is taken at her word, every time, and the series shows why. When Kou asks her for a divorce, she smashes his phone, calls her parents up to Tokyo, and harms herself. This essay will not describe it. What matters is that a threat that could so easily have been heard as temper was not only temper.

No one is diagnosed here. What can be said is narrower and more useful. Marie’s world is small, and it has given her one role, wife, on which the whole of her standing rests. When the role is threatened she has no other ground to stand on. That is not a verdict on her. It describes how little room she had been given, and the series takes it seriously enough to give her, in the end, more.

And she was betrayed twice over. Her husband deceived her, and so did the woman next door whose pet she was feeding. Whatever Marie does next, and some of it is cruel, begins there.

Then Marie announces that she is pregnant. It turns out to have been a mistake, but by then Rui has heard, and has cut off all contact with Kou. For a while the affair is over, and Rui is the one who ended it.

It does not stay over, and when Marie sees her husband going into Rui’s flat, she turns on them both. What she does should be named without softening. She sends Rui’s office photographs of Rui, defaced. She takes Rui’s cat. She gives the affair to a weekly magazine. And in the end she informs on her husband, and he is arrested.

Some of this lands on people who did nothing: the people at her office, a cat. Some of it lands on the two who did. None of it is justice. It is injury looking for somewhere to go, and finding the nearest thing it can break.

This Library argued, in “An Affair Is a Badly Told Story About a Need.”, that the two ready-made readings of an affair, the romance and the verdict, both end the inquiry, and that explaining a thing is not excusing it; somebody is paying for a decision they were not consulted about, and has had the terms of their life changed without being asked. Marie is that person. Her cruelty is real, and she answers for it. It is also true that nobody asked her anything before her life was rearranged around her, and an honest reading has to hold both.

While Kou is in custody he asks her for a divorce, and she refuses. A mistress can never be a wife, she tells Rui.

It sounds like triumph, and it is. It is also a statement of fact, and the series makes the fact concrete. When Kou is arrested, Rui goes to the prosecutors’ office where he is being held and is not allowed to see him, because she is not his wife. When he dies, his body and his ashes will be Marie’s to refuse or to claim. Rui has his love. Marie has the standing, and wherever standing is what counts, Marie wins.

Behind her sentence is a structure, not only a mood. In Japan a couple may divorce by agreement, or else through a court, and an affair is one of the grounds on which the spouse who was wronged may sue for divorce. For the spouse who had the affair, the road is narrow. In 1987 the Supreme Court’s Grand Bench held that a divorce such a spouse seeks may be granted over the other’s objection where the couple have lived apart for a long time measured against their ages and their years together, there are no children still dependent on them, and no special circumstance, such as extreme hardship for the other spouse, would make granting it grossly unjust. Marie’s refusal was not only spite. It was a real power, one the law gave her, and she used it. What the law would allow in any actual marriage is a question for a lawyer, not for an essay about a drama.

The same structure holds her too. The word that protects Marie also keeps her married to a man who is living with someone else. Each woman holds what the other lacks, and neither holds enough to live on.

This Library read another affair drama, in “Hirugao and the Only Unscheduled Hour in a Life”, as a story in which the bill arrives at one address: the woman at its centre loses her marriage, her standing and her neighbourhood, while the man moves away with his wife and keeps his name. That essay also noticed that a married man in that position acquires an episode, and a married woman a category. Second Virgin is less tidy about the bill, which goes to Marie, to Rui and, for reasons of his own, to Kou. But it is just as generous with categories. Rui is a second virgin in the series’ title and a mistress in Marie’s mouth, and the fourth episode is called The Second Woman. Marie is, to the end, the wife.

The public side of the story works through Rui’s name. Before any magazine prints a word, the grand novelist Shūgetsu, whose books have carried the company since its founding, withdraws every one of them out of jealousy when Akio, the writer she introduced to Rui, proposes to Rui. Rui, whose standing was bound up with those books, loses her post as managing director and is sent to a desk in general affairs. Then the letters start arriving at her office, and the defaced photographs. Then the magazine.

Notice where the letters go. They go to her workplace, and they are about her. When Kou’s public fall comes, the charge has nothing to do with love. It concerns his business.

Notice, too, what the magazine does for Marie. It gives her an audience, and it takes something from her. Private grief taken to a weekly magazine becomes a story in which strangers own a share. Whatever the magazine gave Marie, it did not give her back her marriage; it could not. Exposure is not repair, and nothing in the story suggests that it repaired anything.

From here, this essay describes how the series ends.

Kou deserves more than the role of prize, and the series gives him more. The story half admires his ambition: a young official who wanted to change Japan’s financial markets, whose book made him famous, who left government to found a securities firm. When he decides to leave Marie and Rui cuts him off, he keeps after her; at one point she runs into her flat and he follows her in. The story offers that persistence as proof of feeling. It is worth calling it what it is: the pursuit of a woman who has already said no. In life, a woman who has cut off contact has answered, and having once said yes does not reopen the question; following someone who is running from you into her home is an intrusion, not a love scene. The series does give Rui the right to answer again, differently, and she does. That answer is hers, and it does not turn the pursuit into courtship after the fact. He leaves home, and they live in hotels while he pushes a takeover to the edge of the law.

He is arrested on suspicion of breaking the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act. He suspects that Rui gave him away; it was Marie. Released, he moves in with Rui, but men he lost money for in his business are pressing him to join them, and he grows cold with her; she cannot bring herself to give him up. He is given a suspended sentence, and the next morning he is gone.

Two years later, in Singapore on business, Rui sees him attacked by gangsters in front of her. She stays at his hospital bedside until he dies.

That death has to be read carefully, because an old story is waiting to receive it. In many older tales of love outside marriage someone must die before the story can end, and very often it is the woman. Here the woman lives. The man dies, and nothing in the series makes his death a sentence for loving her. His troubles, from the takeover to the arrest to the men pressing him, came from his business, not from his heart. This essay will not read his death as punishment. But it will say what the death does. It ends the love without anyone having to end it. Nobody has to choose. That is a mercy the series grants its lovers, and a convenience it grants itself.

By then Marie has gone home to her parents in Nagasaki and started a business in natural food for pets. She will not collect her husband’s body, so it is Rui who brings his ashes home; Marie then claims them for a funeral. When the two women meet again in Japan, Marie is surer of herself than before.

A year later Mukai, the partner who stood by Rui through the scandal, retires to open a restaurant with the man he loves and makes Rui president. Almost at once a major book distributor collapses and the company is in danger. Rui saves it by humbling herself before everyone she has to: Shūgetsu, who withdrew her books; Akio, who loves her; and Marie, whom she asks to write a book. Marie writes it, pours into it everything she has been carrying, and moves on.

Look at what the publisher does at the end. At the start of the series she gave a young man’s ambition the form of a book, and it made him. At the end she gives a wronged wife’s grievance the form of a book. The injury that had gone into defaced photographs and a magazine goes, at last, into Marie’s own words. The series could have dropped Marie as a threat that faded once it was no longer needed. It gives her a business and a book instead.

And look at the titles. For ten episodes the series has named women by where they stand relative to one man: a second virgin in its title, the second woman in its fourth episode, a foolish woman in its fifth. The titles do not say which woman they mean, and the not saying may be part of the point. The eighth, in which Marie refuses the divorce and Rui cannot get past the prosecutors’ door, is called, roughly, The One Who Loves Him Is Me, and either woman could claim it. The last episode names them without reference to any man. Proud Women, in the plural. Rui has just bowed to everyone she had to, the wife included, and the series calls them proud. Pride, it seems to say, is not refusing to bow. It is knowing what you are bowing for.

The last word on Rui’s desire goes to her son. Ryo, who lived off her and resented her divorce, is now in a steady job, and he tells his mother to find herself a man; it would put his own mind at rest. A late bloom blooms once. This is a son telling his mother that her wanting is not over, and that it is hers.

Where this was shown matters. NHK is Japan’s public broadcaster, and the series went out on its main channel at ten on a Tuesday night. The press remarked that it was unusual for NHK to make an affair its subject at all, and that its bed scenes were bold by NHK’s standards. The audience began small and grew as the weeks went on, and by the time the film came out the film press was describing the enthusiasm as centred on women of Rui’s own generation.

The word for those women had arrived two years earlier. In 2008 one of the two top prizes for the year’s new words and phrases went to arafō, around forty, which the organisers described as a word spread by a television drama and used especially of women; they noted, too, the products being aimed at that generation. The published summary of Second Virgin describes it as the forbidden love and suffering of a single arafō woman. In two years the word had gone from naming a market to naming a heroine, and the series did something a market does not do. It gave the woman around forty a desire of her own, and let the desire drive the story.

Ōishi said, at the press conference a few days before the first episode, that she did not personally believe in platonic love, so naked intimacy would naturally be part of it, though it would be a problem if that were all anybody expected; the report of the day added that she had written the drama with the thought that love is one of life’s trials. Six years later, speaking about her work more broadly, she said she thought the truth lay beyond common sense and ethics, that people found out in an affair have fallen in love because they could not help it, and that there is no lie in that urgent feeling; and, in the same breath, that this did not mean everyone should go ahead and do it. The series holds both halves of that sentence. So should any reading of it.

One more thing: the story keeps leaving Tokyo. The affair begins and ends in Singapore, where Rui is nobody’s managing director and no one on the street knows her name, and where she first acts on what she wants. Marie finds her feet again in Nagasaki, at her parents’ home, in a business of her own. Each woman does something far from the city that watches her that she could not do inside it. Anyone who has lived away from home may know that particular freedom, and its catch: what you do where nobody knows you still has to be carried home.

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

First, the series may romanticise what it claims to examine. Its bed scenes were reported as close to the limit of what a public broadcaster would show, and while the film was being made a television magazine summed the whole story up as a scandalous pure love. A reader might say that an essay honouring Rui’s desire is only repeating the series’ glamour in a more serious voice. There is something in that. Desire filmed beautifully is an argument, and a viewer is entitled to resist it.

Second, the series may be harder on Marie than this essay is. The press called her role a villainess, and much of what the series gives her to do is cruel; this essay’s insistence on counting her may be a kindness the series does not share. Against that stands the ending, which gives her a business, a voice and a way forward of her own. Perhaps the fairest account is that the series uses her as a threat for most of its length, and remembers her as a person at the end.

Third, the death may be the series’ way out. It ends the affair without anyone having to end it; it turns Rui from a mistress into a mourner, a far easier figure to feel for; and it spares the story from asking what a life with him would have been once the hotels were over. A reader who finds the ending evasive is not wrong.

Fourth, the bowing may be penance in business dress. A woman who wanted too much ends by bowing to everyone, the wife included, and the book she asks Marie for is also, plainly, something a struggling publisher can sell. Pride, penance and commerce are all present in the last episode, and its title chooses one of them. A title is not an argument.

Fifth, and aimed at this essay. Its position, honour the desire and count the harm, may be a comfortable middle that lets it avoid the hardest question, which is whether Rui should have stopped. The series gives her several places to stop: on the plane; at the family gathering she was pressed into joining in the fourth episode; when she heard about the pregnancy. Once she decided to stop and could not. Once she did stop, cutting him off entirely, and went back. This essay does not say she was right to go back. It says that the want was hers, and that the going back had costs which fell, for the most part, on someone who was never asked.

Desire at forty-five is desire. It is not a second anything, not a late bloom, and not in itself a scandal. A woman who has spent twenty years building a life has not been waiting, and when she wants someone the want is hers; she needs nobody’s permission to have it. The series knew that in 2010, at ten on a Tuesday night, on the public broadcaster, and it deserves credit for saying so where it did.

What a person does with a want is a separate question, and the series never lets the first answer the second. Marie was not asked. Her marriage, her safety and a friendship that had barely begun paid for a decision that was not hers, and her cruelty afterwards, which is real, does not cancel that. Honouring Rui’s desire and counting Marie’s injury are not in competition. An honest reading needs both, at full strength.

And a woman is not measured by where she stands relative to a man: first or second, wife or mistress, chosen or left. The series spent ten episodes giving its women those names and its last episode taking them away. It ends with Rui grieving and in charge, measured by her work, and with Marie writing her own account. That is not a happy ending. It is a fair one.

A few questions, for anyone who recognised a year of her own in this story.

What have you been calling the years you spent alone: an absence, or a life? If a want arrived now, and you could see what it might cost, could you still call it yours? When you decided to stop wanting something, what happened to the decision? In the story you are living, who has not been asked? And what name has somebody given you for where you stand, and does it measure anything you would recognise as yourself?

If you are forty-five, or fifty-five, and something has woken that you had assumed was finished, nothing about your age makes it foolish. You are not a beginner, and you are not late. You know more than you did at twenty, including what a want can cost other people, and that knowledge is not a reason to stop wanting. It is a reason to want with your eyes open, and to count everyone.

This is a reading of a television drama. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and nothing in it is advice about anyone’s marriage or anyone’s divorce.

If this story, and Marie’s part in it, has brought thoughts of hurting yourself closer than you would like, that is something to tell a person rather than an essay. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page Mamorouyo Kokoro lists services for talking by phone or in writing, many of them free; one of them, the Yorisoi Hotline, answers around the clock, and its line in other languages keeps shorter hours.