Sexy Tanaka-san, and Respect Before Love

In the accounts department of an ordinary company there is a woman the office has decided is odd. She is forty. She dresses plainly, she does not do small talk, and nobody at work has any idea what she does in the evenings. The office calls her Tanaka-san, as it would call anyone, and it stopped looking at her a long time ago.

Akari works on the same floor. She is twenty-three, a temp placed by an agency, and everybody looks at her. Most evenings she is at a group date, a gōkon, one of the dinners friends arrange so that a few women and a few men can meet, and her plan is clear to her even if she does not much like it: to marry while she is still young and pretty, and settle for an ordinary sort of happiness.

One night Akari goes to Sabalan, a Persian restaurant, and watches a belly dancer who performs as Sali. She cannot look away. Sali is Tanaka.

That is the first episode of Sexy Tanaka-san, and in it the series sets out its first idea. Between them, the two women are two ways of not being seen. Tanaka is the woman nobody looks at. Akari is the woman everybody looks at and nobody hears. The office has a reading ready for each of them, and neither reading has anything to do with what either woman does, or wants.

What the series offers them is not, in the first place, a love story. In the seventh of its ten episodes, Tanaka passes Akari a line from a film: that she does not need love, and that what she wants is to be respected. This essay argues that the series means the order in that sentence. Every look it trusts begins by taking seriously what a woman does. Akari’s look at the dance becomes a friendship, and then a trade. A man’s look, which begins with an insult, turns into lessons on a drum. Love, where it comes at all, comes second.

Sexy Tanaka-san is a Japanese television series in ten episodes, broadcast by Nippon TV in its Sunday-night drama slot from 22 October to 24 December 2023. It adapts the manga of the same name by Ashihara Hinako, serialised in a Shogakukan magazine from 2017 and still unfinished when the series was made. Kinami Haruka plays Tanaka Kyoko, forty; Nukumi Meru plays Kurahashi Akari, twenty-three; Maiguma Katsuya plays Shono Kosuke, thirty-seven, a trading-company man. Maeda Goki plays Shono’s colleague Konishi Kazuki, Yasuda Ken plays Miyoshi Keito, the owner of Sabalan and the drummer Tanaka dances to, and Kawamura Kazuma plays Nakahara Shingo, Akari’s friend since their student days. The scripts of the last two episodes are credited to Ashihara herself.

Three notes before going further. The series was not screened for this essay. Its scenes are described as published recaps and reviews describe them, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. The essay discusses the whole series, including how it ends; the section where the ending begins says so, and a reader who would rather meet it on screen can stop there and come back. And the series is remembered, too, for what happened after it was broadcast, including the death of the woman who wrote the manga. One section near the end is given to that. The death is stated there plainly, and nothing about it is described.

Start with the office, because the series does. Tanaka works in accounts, and her colleagues have made up their minds about her: the plain clothes, the absence of chatter, the lack of any visible life. She is the colleague people describe by what she lacks. The series tells us, too, that she has never had a friend or a boyfriend.

It would be easy to read that as the wound the story exists to close, and the series is more interesting than that. It does not make her pitiable. She is not waiting at her desk to be noticed, and for a woman with a second life, being overlooked has its uses: nobody asks where she goes at night. What she lacks at the start is not a partner. It is anyone who knows both halves of her.

It is worth being exact about what kind of invisibility this is. It is not that nobody sees her. It is that everybody sees the same thing, and the thing they see is a category. This Library argued in “What Changed Was the Reading, Not the Body.” that what changes for a woman with the years is the reading strangers impose on her: at one age she is read as an invitation, at another as a function. At forty, Tanaka has been filed under function. The file says nothing about her. It says a good deal about where an office spends its attention, which is on the young, the loud and the useful, with little left over for a quiet woman in accounts.

Akari has the opposite trouble, and it is one of the series’ kindnesses that it gives her trouble equal weight. She is looked at wherever she goes, and the looking is so constant that she has built a plan on it. She will marry while the look is still worth something. The series is clear that she does not much like herself for it.

Being looked at, though, is a poor substitute for being heard. Shingo, her friend from student days, turns up at her flat when it suits him and never says what he feels, and the arrangement is convenient for him and costly for her. At the group dates the men are choosing and she is being chosen, and the whole exercise depends on her staying pleasant, easy and young. Nobody in that arrangement asks what she wants to do with her life, and for most of the first half, neither does she.

Put the two women side by side and the series’ first idea is plain. The office reads one of them as a function and the other as an invitation, and both readings are ways of not seeing. One woman goes unseen because nobody looks. The other goes unseen because everybody looks and nobody listens. The readings are opposite. The silence is the same.

Then the night at Sabalan. Akari, who has spent her adult life being looked at, looks, and cannot stop. What she sees is a woman completely at home in something difficult: a dance she has plainly worked at, in a restaurant whose owner plays the drum for her dancing.

It matters who is looking, and how. This is not the look Akari knows from group dates, the one that appraises and chooses. It is admiration, the look of someone who has seen a thing done well and wants to know how it is done. In the sixth episode Tanaka puts the series’ own theory of that look into words: what draws people is not youth, and not beauty, but energy, and energy that rests on technique and hours of practice does not fade. It is a claim about the dance and a claim about age at once, and the series spends ten episodes making it good.

Tanaka’s first response to being seen is to beg for silence. Nobody at work must know. Out of that plea grows the series’ central relationship, a friendship between two women more than a decade apart, and it begins with one woman keeping another’s secret. Akari becomes Tanaka’s devoted fan. She signs up for belly-dance lessons herself. When Shono insults Tanaka, Akari plots her revenge on him. The loyalty is comic, and it is real.

Later Akari notices something the office never has: that people respect Tanaka because Tanaka respects them. The observation is Akari’s, and it is the hinge between the series’ first idea and its second. Being looked at is something that happens to you. Being respected, the series suggests, is something that passes between people, and it begins with attention to what somebody does.

Now the dance, which deserves to be described the way the series describes it, because the series takes care not to make it a costume or a mystery. Tanaka’s belly dance is a practice. It has lessons and rehearsals, nights on stage, and a drummer to dance with. It can be injured, and it is: for part of the series a frozen shoulder stops her dancing altogether. And it has a future, in the person of Aiko, a veteran dancer past sixty who is still dancing.

Why she took it up is at the centre of the first episodes, and her reasons deserve to be heard before anyone explains them. She says she decided to hold her head up, and to straighten herself again as many times as it took, and that the dance cast a kind of spell on her. What she wanted from it, the series makes clear, was to think for herself and to stand on her own feet. In the second episode she says that people hesitate because there is no right answer, and that the only thing to do is to choose, yourself, the right answer for the person you want to be. A conclusion you have reached by thinking it through, she says elsewhere, does not waver, whatever anyone says.

None of this is about how she looks, and this essay will not describe her appearance. The series does not need it to be about how she looks. Its theory of the dance is energy built on practice, and practice is something a woman of forty may have more of than a woman of twenty-three, not less. Tanaka has her own arithmetic for it: work three times as hard as the young ones and you catch up, ten times as hard and you overtake them. It is not a boast. It is a schedule.

When she dances again, still not fully recovered, it is at a show in her home town of Matsudo, and her parents come. What they tell her may be the quietest moment in the series. Her father says they did not come to see Kyoko dance well. Her mother says they came to see the Kyoko of today, who practised as hard as she could, and wanted to run away, and stayed. It may be the kindest look anyone gives her in the series, and it is a look at effort, not at performance. It sees what she does.

It would be possible to read the dance as an escape from her real life, a secret glamour kept in a drawer. The series reads it the other way round. The dance is where she practises being the person she has decided to be. The office is where she hides it. The question is not whether she will be found out. It is whether anyone will see her on terms she has chosen.

Enter Shono Kosuke, thirty-seven, a trading-company man who wants to marry, keeps a long list of conditions for a wife, and says what he thinks about women out loud. At Sabalan he calls Tanaka an old woman to her face.

The word in Japanese is obasan, and the English makes it sound at once harsher and simpler than it is. Obasan is the ordinary word for a woman of a certain age, and in some mouths it is affectionate. Said to a stranger’s face by a man sizing her up, it files her. It tells her she is past the age of being looked at. It is the office’s reading, said out loud.

The series does not agree with him, and it does not lecture him either. It does something slower: it lets him keep coming back. After a night spent hunting for her lost hamster, and too many mojitos, he wakes up beside her in her flat. Nothing has happened between them, and he assures her that he has no designs on her at all. It is played for comedy, and like much of what he says it is meant kindly and lands a little like an insult. The comedy rests on a fact the series never blurs, and neither will this essay: nothing happened.

Then he starts bringing her food. When she admits that she loves Miyoshi, Sabalan’s married owner, he runs Miyoshi down, and she throws him out, as is entirely her right. And then he does the thing this essay turns on. He asks Miyoshi to teach him the darbuka, the hand drum Miyoshi plays for her dancing, because he wants to understand what she loves.

Be precise about what that is. It is not, or not yet, courtship; the teacher he goes to is the very man she loves. It is attention to her world before any claim on her. He learns the instrument that plays for her. A man who began by filing a woman under her age sets out to learn the thing she does, and the series makes that its answer to his word. It never has to argue about her age. It shows him discovering that her age was never the point.

A critic writing for Real Sound as the series ended read Shono as a man steeped in prejudice about women, prejudice shaped by the home he grew up in, whom meeting Tanaka changed, and who had kindness and candour in him all along. That is the series’ reading of his word, and it is this essay’s. The prejudice is his to carry and his to unlearn, and the series gives him the whole season to do it. On their first date, when men insult her, he is hurt defending her, and the series lets that be sweet. But the respect was the drum lessons.

In the sixth episode the two halves of Tanaka’s life meet, and not on her terms. At a show given by Aiko, the veteran dancer, Tanaka ends up on stage beside her on the spur of the moment, dancing in her everyday clothes and without the make-up she wears as Sali. It is filmed. The clip spreads online, and the office finds out.

Notice what the clip shows. Not Sali, with the stage name and the stage face, but Tanaka as the office knows her, dancing. The secret that gets out is not that the plain colleague has a glamorous double. It is that the plain colleague and the dancer were always the same woman.

What follows is not a catastrophe, and the series is kind about it. There are stares at work. At her next show she cannot go on, and Shono and Miyoshi play to hold the room. In time the colleagues who stared come round to the dance. But a kind ending does not change how it began. This Library argued in “Being Seen Is Not the Same as Being Available” that the whole difference between being looked at and being seen is authorship: whether the person being looked at can still say what the looking means, redirect it, or refuse it. A clip on somebody’s phone takes the authorship away. Tanaka did not decide that her office would watch her dance. Somebody else did.

The series knows this, and its answer is not to send her back into hiding but to let her take the authorship back, slowly, by going on stage again. Visibility, in this series, is not the prize. Choosing it is.

In the seventh episode Akari is low. She has fallen out with Konishi, Shono’s colleague, a practised charmer who has fallen for her in earnest. Tanaka, who has never had a boyfriend, is not the obvious person to advise her, and she does not try to. What she gives her instead is a line from a film she has borrowed from Shono.

The film is an Indian one of 2012, English Vinglish, released in Japan in 2014 as Madame in New York: the story of a wife and mother whose husband and children tease her for being the only one in the family without English, and who, sent to New York to help with her niece’s wedding, quietly enrols in a class. The line Tanaka passes on is, in substance, that she does not need love; what she wants is to be respected.

Look at the route the line takes. A man who began by calling Tanaka an old woman lends her a film about a woman her family does not take seriously. Tanaka, who has built a life on taking herself seriously, hands its best line to a woman who has spent her early twenties being wanted and not heard. In this series respect travels from hand to hand, and it travels before love does.

It is easy to hear the line as a consolation: a woman who has been told she is too old for love decides she would rather be respected, the way a person denied one thing learns to prefer another. The series has a better reading, and it comes through Akari. In the world she started from, being wanted was tied to being young and pretty, which is to say it came with an expiry date. Being respected is built, and it holds. This Library argued in “Loved and Respected Is Not the Same as Wanted” that being loved, being respected and being wanted are three separate needs that do not always travel together, and that feeling respected is often not desire’s rival but its precondition. The series takes a view on the order. Respect first. Then, perhaps, the rest.

The second half of Akari’s story is about her eyes, and it may be the series’ most original idea. Akari is expert at one kind of make-up: the kind that works at group dates, made to be looked at by men and chosen. When Tanaka overdoes her own make-up for her first date with Shono, so thoroughly that he is taken aback, Akari tries her own technique on her friend. It does not work. What suits a twenty-three-year-old at a group date does not suit a woman of forty, and Akari, to her credit, does not decide that the fault is Tanaka’s.

So she goes and learns. She studies what suits Tanaka at forty, rather than what would make her look twenty-three, and in the course of it she finds the work she wants to do.

Here the series quietly turns the direction of looking round. The essay “Cléo from 5 to 7, and the Hour She Stops Being Looked At” described a singer whose whole competence was knowing how she would be received: a real skill, built under conditions she did not set, with only one direction, outward, towards the people watching. Akari begins the series with the same competence. Her make-up, her pleasantness and her timing are built for the eyes of men across a table. Working for Tanaka, the skill turns round. She looks at another woman in order to serve what that woman wants to show, and the looking becomes a craft.

It is also, not by accident, the moment Akari’s romance begins to go right. Konishi gives her a set of make-up brushes, and she tells him she adores him. It is a small gift and exactly the right one: he has noticed what she wants to do, and handed her the tools.

In both of the series’ slow romances, then, the turn comes when a man takes an interest in the woman’s work: Shono in the drum that plays for Tanaka’s dance, Konishi in the brushes for Akari’s trade. Neither man begins well, and the series does not pretend otherwise. But respect arrives first, and the love follows it.

From here, this essay describes how the series ends.

Shono’s mother collapses, and he agrees to meet a woman she has chosen for him, Fumika. He begins seeing her with marriage in view and stays away from the rehearsals for Sabalan’s Christmas show. The news shakes Tanaka.

Then Miyoshi, the married man she has quietly loved, at last leans in to kiss her. In that moment she thinks of Shono, and she pushes Miyoshi away. It is the series’ clearest statement of where her heart has gone, and it is also, simply, a woman saying no, which is hers to say. For a while afterwards she cannot dance at all.

It is Akari who brings her back. The friendship that began with a secret kept has become, by now, the steadiest thing in either woman’s life, and it does what no romance in the series does: it gets Tanaka dancing again.

After an operation, Shono’s mother tells him to go where he wants to go. He ends it with Fumika, and on the night of the Christmas show he plays the darbuka while Tanaka dances. The drum lessons arrive where they were always going. A man who called her an old woman now keeps time for her.

And then she leaves. With Aiko, the dancer past sixty, Tanaka goes abroad to study dance. At forty she leaves the country to become more fully a dancer, and the series lets that be its climax, not a detour on the way to a wedding. It matters that the person she leaves with is a generation older and still dancing. The series stretches a woman’s working life well past the age at which an office would have filed her away.

Akari has her own ending in the same episode. She promises Tanaka she will be on her side for life, whoever she chooses. And when Konishi gives her a ring, she puts her work first.

Two years later, at the wedding of Akari’s friend Hana, the series gathers everyone one last time. Akari is working as a make-up assistant. Konishi is still waiting to marry her. Shono is still single. The guests begin to dance to Shono’s drumming, and Tanaka, home for a visit and late off a delayed flight, arrives in time to join them. Whether she and Shono become a couple, the series does not say.

Stay with that last picture, because it holds the series’ argument in one frame. A woman arrives late, from somewhere else, where she has been getting better at the thing she loves, and joins a dance that has already begun. The man who loves her is not waiting at the door with a ring. He is playing the drum. The series ends on accompaniment: a man keeping time, and a woman joining in on her own schedule. The love story is not denied. It is left where the series has kept it all along, second.

A viewer who wanted the kiss may feel cheated, and the case against this reading, below, takes that seriously. But the order is the point. Each romance that goes right in this series goes right the same way, through respect for what a woman does, and the series declines to crown it with the old ending, the one that would put her life back in second place.

None of this makes Sexy Tanaka-san a portrait of Japanese offices or of Japanese women, and nothing here offers it as one. But some of its details carry a particular weight for a woman living in Japan, and some carry a different one for a woman who came here from somewhere else.

Start with Akari’s calendar. She wants to marry while she is still young and pretty, as if twenty-three were already late. By the health ministry’s preliminary figures, the average age at which women in Japan married for the first time in 2025 was 29.7; in 1995 it was 26.3. Akari is not late for anything. She is racing a deadline that the country’s own figures do not keep. The average counts only the women who married that year, and it says nothing about who wants to marry or about the women who do not. What it can show is that the clock in Akari’s head is a script, not a fact, and the series knows it. It is the same script that calls a woman of forty an obasan.

Japanese also has a word that puts her decade on an ailment. A painful, stiffening shoulder is commonly called shijūkata, the forty-shoulder, and that is what stops Tanaka dancing for a while. Here the vocabulary of her age does catch up with her, and what it names is an injury, not a verdict. She dances again.

Twenty-seven years before this series, Japanese cinema already had a famous secret dancer. In Suo Masayuki’s Shall We Dance? (1996), an accounting section chief glimpses a woman at the window of a dance school from his train, starts taking lessons, and hides them from his family; at the studio he runs into a colleague the office mocks, who turns out to dance in secret too. The shape is the same: the accounts department by day, the dance by night, the office that must not know. What has changed is the direction of the look. His way into the dance is a look at a woman. Hers is a decision about herself, and the look that finds her is a younger woman’s admiration.

The line Tanaka borrows adds a thread for readers who came to Japan from elsewhere. Its film is about a woman far from home who learns, in a class of strangers, the thing her family laughed at her for lacking, and near its end the series sends Tanaka, at forty, abroad to study. A woman who learned Japanese as an adult, in rooms full of people younger than she was, may know Tanaka’s arithmetic from the inside: three times as hard to catch up, ten times to overtake. She may know, too, the particular relief of being taken seriously by the people who have watched her work at it.

The series is also remembered for something that happened after it, and an essay about the series should say so plainly, once.

Sexy Tanaka-san was adapted while the manga was still being written, so the series needed an ending of its own, one that would not settle what the manga had not yet settled. Ashihara had asked that the adaptation stay faithful to her work, and she came to write the scripts of the last two episodes herself. In January 2024, about a month after the final episode, she published her own account of how the adaptation had been made, and then withdrew it. Within days, she had died. Her death was reported as an apparent suicide.

Nippon TV published the results of its internal investigation on 31 May 2024, and Shogakukan published its special investigation committee’s report on 3 June 2024. The publisher’s report says it set out to establish the facts and propose improvements, asking what the company should do so that authors can approach the adaptation of their work with less worry, and concentrate on writing and drawing. It keeps individuals’ names out. Among its recommendations are agreements put in writing early, and not leaving an author or an editor isolated if they end up at the centre of a dispute on social media. It also records that the two companies disagree about what had been agreed at the start. And the case opened a public argument in Japan about how adaptations treat the people who created the story: about contracts, and about an author’s right to the integrity of her work.

No one else involved is named in this essay. Blame aimed at individuals was part of what followed, and nothing here adds to it. Nor does the essay try to explain her death. What it can do is read the work she made with the care the work asks for.

If any of this touches thoughts of dying, your own or someone else’s, that is a matter for a person rather than an essay. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page “Mamorouyo Kokoro” lists telephone and chat lines.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first is the one the series invites most.

First, the title. Sexy Tanaka-san sells a reveal: the plain woman in accounts is secretly sexy. However kindly it is handled, that is the old story of the transformation, in which a woman is rewarded for becoming visible, and the series does reward Tanaka, with an admiring office, two men and a stage. This essay has leaned on the series’ own theory, that what draws people is energy built on practice and not youth or beauty, and on its refusal to change her for the office. But a comedy built on a reveal still needs the reveal, and a reader who finds the word in the title doing more work than the theory is not wrong.

Second, and this one comes from inside the series: Shingo’s. When Akari tells him she is done being used, he answers that she has only moved her dependence on to Tanaka. It is a mean thing to say and not a stupid one. Admiration can be another way of not having a self, and a fan is not yet a friend. The series answers it, this essay thinks, by what it lets Akari do with the admiration: she turns it into lessons, into work and into a trade of her own. But the objection holds for the early episodes, where Akari’s devotion does look a little like a new place to lean.

Third, the line itself may be a consolation after all. A woman who has been told, in one word, that she is past being wanted might well decide she would rather be respected, and call the choice a principle. Tanaka does fall in love; the series gives her the moment with Miyoshi and her thoughts of Shono. It is possible that the series means “instead” where this essay has read “before”, and that the line is a defence she outgrows. This essay prefers its own reading. It cannot prove it.

Fourth, a good deal of the series’ time goes on a man’s education. Shono’s change from prejudice to drum lessons is charming, and it is also a familiar shape, in which a woman’s story is organised around a man becoming worthy of her. Respect in this series is still, often, something men learn to give. Neither man begins well, one with an insult and the other as a practised charmer, and the series does not hide it. The ending’s refusal to crown either romance is this essay’s answer. It is not a complete one.

Fifth, and structurally the strongest: the ending may be a matter of craft rather than meaning. Because the manga was unfinished, the series needed an ending that would not decide the manga’s, and a couple left untold is exactly what such an ending needs. This essay has read the untold couple as the series keeping love second. It may be only the shape an unfinished story required. And the essay reads a broadcast adaptation whose making its author disputed. It cannot say which choices in it were hers, beyond the credit on the last two episodes, and it does not try.

Three things, none of them a rule.

Being looked at and being seen are different, and a woman can be failed by the first in either direction. The series puts the two failures in one office and shows that they are the same silence.

Respect is not the consolation for not being loved. In this series it is the ground love has to stand on, and it looks like attention to what a woman does: a drum learned, a set of brushes, a mother and father who came to see the effort and not the result.

And the look worth trusting is one that can turn into work. Akari’s admiration became a craft. Shono’s attention became accompaniment. Neither asked the woman it was aimed at to be younger, or other, than she was.

So, once, to you, if you are the one the office decided about long ago, or the one everybody looks at and nobody listens to. You are allowed to want respect first. It is not the smaller thing to ask for. It is the one the rest has to stand on. And the people worth letting close may be the ones who want to learn the thing you love before they ask you for anything at all.

This is a reading of a television series. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about work, marriage or anyone’s body. The only figures in it are the health ministry’s, given with their years; they describe the women who married, not anyone’s life.

Who in your life looks at you, and who listens? Are they the same people?

Which reading has been put on you, the invitation or the function, and has anyone ever asked what you actually do?

Is there something you do, a practice, a language, a craft, that lets you stand on your own feet? And who would you want to decide when you are seen doing it?

Who has taken an interest in your work before asking anything of you, and who asked first?

If someone told you that respect is what a woman asks for when she cannot have love, what would you say?