Solo Life for Women
ソロ活女子のススメ
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
One woman, one activity, alone and delighted — the drama that made solo pleasure aspirational.
Megumi Saotome is a contract worker in the editorial department of a publisher, Digest Publishing. When the working day ends she turns down the after-work drinks and leaves on the dot, because she has plans with herself. Each episode sends her on a 'solo activity', something people usually do in company, done alone and done properly: yakiniku, a zoo, a planetarium, a love hotel, a night cruise past lit-up factories, a hot-air balloon, a bowling alley, a public bath. Her inner voice works out what she likes, and a narrator voiced by Akio Otsuka frames each outing. Along the way she meets other people out on their own; she calls them fairies, because they tell her something and then vanish.
Every year she celebrates her birthday a little more lavishly: a limousine in the first season, a helicopter in the second, a cruise in the third. The third season takes her to Chichibu in Saitama and Miyakonojo in Miyazaki; the fourth, made with the Taiwanese company Chunghwa Telecom, to Taiwan; the fifth to Melbourne, where she drinks the city's coffee, learns about Aboriginal history and culture, and walks the tram streets comparing them with an old book of photographs. Her boss, Ayako Kuroda, and her colleagues Yohei Ishioka and Haruka Aoki make up the office she leaves every evening, and in time, inspired by her, they try solo outings of their own.
The fifth season, broadcast in spring 2025, is the latest so far, and its final episode returns to where the first began. Having glimpsed the Kawasaki factories from an aircraft hangar at Haneda, Megumi joins a restaurant-bus tour of the factory lights. At a photo stop she meets the two women from the factory cruise five years earlier, a solo veteran and a newcomer. Breaking their usual rule, they sit together. Five years ago it was the pandemic; now women on their own on a night tour are nothing unusual, and fewer people talk about this or that kind of 'girl'. The talk turns to respect, and Megumi remembers that the same word carried her through her first outings. They part without swapping numbers. The next day she hands in a manuscript gathering her solo outings, as Ayako had suggested, only chapter one, she thinks, because solo life goes on, and accepts the offer to become a permanent employee. Her colleagues go their own ways for a while: Ishioka takes leave to travel, Haruka studies alongside her job, and Ayako works mostly from home for her family.
Starring
Noriko Eguchias Megumi Saotome
A contract worker at a publisher who spends her evenings, weekends and birthdays doing alone what others do together.
Megumi Saotome’s story
Megumi turns down the after-work drinks and leaves on the dot, because she has plans with herself. Her inner voice weighs what she likes, and the people she meets out on their own, the ones she calls fairies, tell her something and vanish. Each birthday is grander than the last, and the outings carry her from Chichibu and Miyakonojo to Taiwan and Melbourne. Watching her, her boss and colleagues begin to go out alone too. In the last episode of the fifth season she meets again, on a bus tour of the factory lights, two women she first met on a factory cruise five years earlier, and they talk about respect. The next day she hands in a manuscript of her outings, only a first chapter, she thinks, and accepts a permanent post.
Kinako Kobayashias Ayako Kuroda
The head of Megumi's editorial department, who suggests that she write up her solo outings.
Kento Shibuyaas Yohei Ishioka
A permanent staff editor in the department, who in time tries solo outings of his own.
Haruka Sasakias Haruka Aoki
A fellow contract worker in the department, who comes to try solo outings too.
Akio Otsukaas Narrator
The voice that introduces each of Megumi's outings and, at the end of the fifth season, says goodbye.
Why it matters
The series takes something many people still find faintly embarrassing, eating or travelling or celebrating a birthday alone, and treats it as a pleasure worth doing well. Mayumi Asai, whose essay book it adapts, has said that doing things alone is too often read as lonely and pitiful, when it is open to anyone, married or single, of any age or gender. The drama makes that case as gently as possible: a woman does what she likes, carefully, and is never punished for it. In its last episode, three women who first met alone five years earlier notice that a woman on her own no longer draws stares, and wonder whether the change goes deeper than the words people have stopped using. It leaves a quiet question: how much of loneliness is being alone, and how much is other people's pity?