Towako Omameda and Her Three Ex-Husbands
大豆田とわ子と三人の元夫
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
A thrice-divorced company president and the three ex-husbands who won't quite leave — Sakamoto Yuji on being alone and not lonely.
Towako Omameda, forty, has just been made president of Shirokuma Housing, the construction firm where she worked as a designer, and lives with her teenage daughter, Uta. She has been divorced three times. Her late mother's computer is locked with a password one of her former husbands must have set, so she has to call all three: Hassaku Tanaka, Uta's father, who owns a restaurant; Kataro Sato, a fashion photographer; and Shinshin Nakamura, a prickly lawyer who is also her company's counsel. From then on the three keep turning up, at Hassaku's restaurant, at her door, in each other's way. Kataro and Shinshin still miss her, and each is tangled up with another woman.
Towako's friend of thirty years, Kagome, is free-spirited, uninterested in romance and family to her in all but name. Towako divorced Hassaku because he married her while in love with someone else; now she learns it was Kagome. A client company's president who courts her turns out to look down on her as damaged goods for her three divorces. Then Kagome dies suddenly. Towako, who missed her last call, chooses the flowers and the music for her funeral.
A year later Uta has moved out and a fund is trying to buy the company. Hiroshi Takanashi, a man who comforted Towako about Kagome in a park, reappears across the negotiating table as the fund's legal director and demands her resignation. They keep business and friendship apart, grow close, and he asks her to come and live with him in Malaysia. Shinshin tells her she still loves Hassaku. Towako moves to buy back the company's shares, turns Takanashi down, and tells Hassaku she thinks she can be happy alone: the three of them, she, he and Kagome, can go on as they are.
At the end she finds a letter her mother never posted, to someone called Makoto Kunimura. Towako and Uta go to meet her. Makoto is a woman her mother loved from girlhood and gave up in order to marry; her mother regretted it all her life and loved her family, Makoto says, and both are true. Uta goes back to studying for medicine, and Towako's father apologises for not supporting her; she thanks him. The three ex-husbands come round with souvenirs from Hawaii, throw a party, and tell one another what their kind of love for her is. While she sleeps they agree that things cannot stay like this for ever. And her life goes on.
Starring
Takako Matsuas Towako Omameda
A newly appointed construction-company president, three times divorced, raising her daughter and still bound up with all three ex-husbands.
Towako Omameda’s story
Towako has gone from drawing plans to running the firm, and misses the colleagues the job has put at a distance. The hunt for her late mother's password brings her three ex-husbands back into her life. She learns that the woman Hassaku loved when he married her was her closest friend, Kagome. Then Kagome dies suddenly; Towako walks out of a negotiation to reach her, and chooses the flowers and the music for her funeral. A year later, fighting a takeover, she grows close to Takanashi and almost follows him to Malaysia. Instead she turns him down and tells Hassaku she can be happy alone. She meets the woman her mother loved and gave up, thanks her father, and when her ex-husbands propose again, says her kind of love is wanting them to smile.
Ryuhei Matsudaas Hassaku Tanaka
Towako's first husband and Uta's father, a restaurant owner women fall for, who has long loved Kagome.
Hassaku Tanaka’s story
Hassaku is kind to everyone, so women fall for him without his trying. He loved Kagome before he married Towako, and Towako left him when she saw it. Pursued by his best friend's girlfriend, he tries to make himself repellent, fails, and falls out with the friend. A birthday present of socks gives him away, and Towako learns that the woman was Kagome. When Kagome dies suddenly, he hurries to the hospital. A year later Towako comes to his restaurant to say she has turned down another man and can be happy alone; she asks what Kagome was to him, and together they imagine the marriage they might have had. At the end he and the other two propose to her again at her home, and agree, while she sleeps, that things cannot stay like this for ever.
Akihiro Kakutaas Kataro Sato
Towako's second husband, a fashion photographer who has never got over her.
Kataro Sato’s story
Kataro was a scandal photographer until he met Towako at a ballroom dance class he had been sent to infiltrate; he changed careers and married her. He still keeps her portrait in his studio as his masterpiece, and says they split because he could not stop her hiccups. When the actress Mirei seems to fall for him he is delighted, but she wanted a stand-in for a married lover who looks just like him. Touched by how hard he tries for her, she comes to want an ordinary love with him; he cannot return it, and she leaves. When Towako's first love reappears, Kataro is jealous all over again. At the end he and the other two propose to her again at her home, and agree, while she sleeps, that things cannot stay like this for ever.
Masaki Okadaas Shinshin Nakamura
Towako's third husband, a prickly, sarcastic lawyer who is also her company's counsel.
Shinshin Nakamura’s story
Shinshin cannot show weakness, soothes himself with panda videos and has lived in the same business hotel for the two years since the divorce. A young woman, Tsubasa, asks him to take her case against the company that dropped her, but her story keeps changing. She turns out to be the cleaner at his hotel, whom he has passed for two years without noticing; she tells him he took something precious from her, and leaves to run her family's inn. It is Shinshin who tells Towako, when Takanashi proposes, that she still loves Hassaku. At the end, sunburnt from a trip to Hawaii, he and the other two propose to her again at her home, and agree, while she sleeps, that things cannot stay like this for ever.
Mikako Ichikawaas Kagome Watarai
Towako's friend of thirty years, free-spirited and uninterested in romance, family to her in all but name.
Joe Odagirias Hiroshi Takanashi
A man Towako befriends in a park, who turns out to lead the takeover of her company and later proposes.
Why it matters
This is a comedy about divorce that refuses to treat divorce as failure. Its heroine has married three times, runs a company, raises a daughter and is not lonely, and her ex-husbands orbit her out of affection, not grievance. Beneath the banter it is built around parting and absence: the producer, Ayumi Sano, has said that a friend's sudden death, and news of old people dying alone in the pandemic, made her and the writer Yuji Sakamoto want a drama to steady those left behind, and that Kagome's death was planned from the start. Its relationships are deliberately left unlabelled: a mother who loved a woman, a friend who wanted no romance, three men whose love has no name. It won, among others, a Galaxy Award prize and the Tokyo Drama Award for its screenplay. What it leaves is a question about solitude: whether a woman alone, with the right people near, can simply be well.