Towako Omameda and Her Three Ex-Husbands, and an Alone That Keeps Its People

The small things are what tire her. Switching on the light in a room herself. Choosing the music herself and putting it on. Turning on the air conditioning herself. They are small things, she says, only a button to press, and pressing it makes her a little tired. She says it late in the series, to a man who has just remarked that she, surely, can manage on her own, and it is as exact a description of living alone as a drama is likely to give. Not the silence, not the empty chair. The switch that nobody else is going to press.

What makes the confession strange is who is making it. Towako is forty, newly made president of the construction company where she used to draw plans, and almost never alone. She has married three times and divorced three times, and all three former husbands keep turning up: at the restaurant one of them runs, at her door, in one another’s way. She has a daughter in her last year of junior high school, a friend of thirty years who is family in all but name, and a company full of people waiting for her to decide things. If loneliness were a headcount, she would be the last woman in television drama to feel it.

And yet the sentence the series walks towards is hers. She thinks, she says, that she can be happy on her own, and she means something so precise that it takes an essay to say what.

The argument here is that, in her mouth, alone is not a headcount but a shape. It names one arrangement she is declining, and none of the people she intends to keep. The series draws that line from both sides. The loss that does leave her alone is not the end of any marriage. And the sentence about being happy on her own is spoken in company, to someone, with someone else counted in. Beneath both runs a question her mother put to her when she was small, whether she wanted to become all right on her own or to be cherished by someone, and the child’s answer, which was both. The series takes ten episodes to make that answer sayable at forty. Then it declines to turn it into a rule.

She is not choosing fewer people. She is refusing one more form.

A warning first. This essay discusses the whole series, including a death in its sixth episode and the way its tenth episode ends. The argument lives in those places and cannot be made from outside them. A reader who would rather meet them on screen first may want to stop here and come back.

The facts, once. Towako Omameda and Her Three Ex-Husbands, in Japanese Omameda Towako to Sannin no Motootto, is an original drama written by Sakamoto Yuji and made by Kansai TV for the Fuji TV network, broadcast in ten episodes on Tuesday nights at nine from 13 April to 15 June 2021. Matsu Takako plays Towako. Matsuda Ryuhei, Kakuta Akihiro and Okada Masaki play the three former husbands, Ichikawa Mikako plays her friend Kagome, and Odagiri Joe arrives in the second half. The producer, Sano Ayumi, had made Sakamoto’s Quartet with Matsu four years earlier. The series won the Tokyo Drama Award 2021 for its screenplay, together with an excellence award in the series category and the award for its theme song, and it was among the fourteen prize-winning television works of the 59th Galaxy Awards.

Its manner matters to what follows. A narrator, voiced by Ito Sairi, introduces people and sums up whole weeks with the dry, interjecting distance of the narrator of the cartoon Chibi Maruko-chan, which is what Sakamoto asked for, the producer has said. Big events mostly happen off screen and are talked about afterwards. The critic Fukuda Fukusuke listed some of them: a negotiation with a client, the moment a character dies, even the moments the couples fell in love or decided to divorce. He also quoted Sakamoto’s stated preference, from a 2018 theatre programme, for showing the refuelling rather than the car chase: people at the pump talking about the bend they have just come round. The producer has said the same of Towako herself, who is drawn less through her own confessions than through what the people around her say. This essay follows that lead.

One disclosure governs everything below. The series was not screened for this essay. It was written from the published record: the broadcaster’s announcements, interviews with the producer, and the recaps and criticism published while the series was on air. Scenes are described as those sources describe them. Lines are paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

Her late mother’s computer is locked with a password that one of her former husbands must have set. So Towako has to call all three, and after that they never quite leave.

Tanaka Hassaku, the first, is the father of her daughter, Uta. He runs a restaurant and is so evenly kind to everyone that women fall for him without his trying, which brings him more trouble than pleasure. Sato Kataro, the second, is a fashion photographer who used to chase scandals, until he was sent to infiltrate a ballroom dancing class and met Towako there; he changed careers, married her, and still keeps her portrait in his studio as his masterpiece. He says they split up because he could not stop her hiccups. Nakamura Shinshin, the third, is a lawyer who also advises her company. He cannot show weakness, calms himself with videos of pandas, has lived in the same business hotel for the two years since the divorce, and has a habit, the broadcaster announced, of asking of almost anything whether it is really necessary.

Kataro and Shinshin still miss her. Each is tangled up with another woman, and so, less willingly, is Hassaku. Much of the comedy is the three of them in the same room over a woman they are no longer married to.

The series is merciless about their habits and never about them. In the sixth episode, while Towako is away, the three men and the three women who have been entangled with them end up at her flat making dumplings, in a party that turns into a trial. The women tell the men what they are. One is kind because kindness saves trouble, and for him, they say, relationships are only a service. One wants the game of romance rather than the thing itself. One has made a person invisible by never looking at her. Then Shinshin draws the conclusion none of them expected. In all their years with Towako, she never once reproached them for any of this. They had been leaning on her.

Fukuda read the scene as the series hinting that marriage, as it is usually arranged, asks a woman for devotion and forgiveness, and that only outside the arrangement could Towako and the three men meet as equals. The rest of the series bears him out. The men do not circle her out of grievance. They circle her because the form that made their love expensive to her has gone, and what is left turns out to be something she can have. In the second episode she tells Shinshin that they split up but that she still thinks of them as going through life together. That is the premise in a sentence. A divorce ends a form. It does not have to end a life lived alongside someone.

The stigma arrives in the fifth episode, in a single mouth. The president of a client company begins to court her with marriage in view. He has been divorced three times himself, and at first that seems to be the bond between them. Then he says what he means. His own divorces, he tells her, are something like medals. Hers are wounds. He had proposed, it turns out, out of pity, meaning to rescue a woman who had failed three times.

Her answer is the clearest thing the series says about divorce. There may be failures in a life, she tells him, but she does not believe there is such a thing as a failed life. He takes the refusal badly and makes her pay for it in business. The series does not make him complicated. It lets the stigma be exactly as plain as it is. Sano has said that the series says it again and again, in different mouths and different ways, about divorce and about dying alike: that neither makes a person someone to pity.

The same number reads as a medal on a man and as a wound on a woman, and the series’ own history shows it. It began, as Sano has confirmed, as a story with a man at its centre, a lawyer divorced three times; the protagonist was changed to a woman. When she submitted the proposal, the head of her department at the time told her that a woman of forty with three divorces was a fantasy. This Library found the same asymmetry in Sakamoto’s film of earlier that year. In “We Made a Beautiful Bouquet and the Sadness of Loving the Same Things at Different Speeds”, a young man who gives up everything he cared about for a company is rewarded with a respectable word for it, while a young woman who goes on caring is reproached for not growing up; the essay’s phrase was same behaviour, opposite verdicts. Three divorces is a count kept by the family register. What the series sets against it is a different question: what else a life might be counted by.

It matters, too, where she is standing when the count is read out. Towako is not only a woman with three divorces. She is a woman at the head of a construction company. The makers were wary of labels like that. Sano has said they wanted to avoid calling Towako a single mother or a woman president, because the images those words carry in Japan did not match the person they were making. But the series lets Kagome say, once, why it matters all the same. Just because someone like Towako exists, she tells her in the fourth episode, little girls can picture themselves becoming a company president; whether there is one or none makes all the difference; that is the job Towako has to do. It is one of the few lines in the series that speaks past its characters.

Watarai Kagome, Towako’s friend of thirty years, is free-spirited and uninterested in romance. She knows perfectly well what romance offers, she tells a man who is interested in her. She knows it is lovely, knows the moments that sparkle, knows the pleasure of holding hands and of living together. But between a man and a woman it always turns into romance, and she finds that a pity. She has decided that her life does not need it.

In the fourth episode she decides to try again for the girls’ comics she and Towako drew together as children under a pen name they shared, and to do it alone this time. Whatever comes of it, she says, she will do what she wants, by herself. Of everyone in the series, Kagome is the one who has always known the shape she wants.

Towako divorced Hassaku at twenty-six because she saw that he had married her while in love with someone else, and she could not forgive it. Only now, when a birthday present of socks gives him away, does she learn that the someone else was Kagome.

It would be easy to make a villain of someone here, and the series declines every chance. Hassaku loved a woman who did not want to be loved that way, knew it, and married a woman he also loved. Kagome took nothing from anyone. She wanted a life without romance and lived one. And Towako, at twenty-six, could not live beside her husband’s unrequited love, and the series never suggests she ought to have. Three people, each with their reasons, and the series sits in judgement on none of them.

The makers, Sano has said, tried not to pin names on people or on the relationships between them, because both have a depth and a gradation that a name can flatten. Some critics reached for a word for Kagome; the series never does. This Library argued, in “Kitchen and the Intimacy of Eating With Someone After Loss”, that a relationship can be the centre of a life and still have no name, and that the name was never what made it load-bearing. Kagome is the load-bearing wall of Towako’s life, and the only word anyone has for her is friend.

Towako’s loyalty is not polite. When one of Kagome’s relatives rings to disparage her, Towako shouts idiot, idiot, idiot down the line like a child in a playground and hangs up, and her daughter asks whether she is in primary school. She is defending her friend’s dignity, not her own manners.

Then, in the sixth episode, Kagome dies. It is sudden, and the series does not show the moment. Towako has missed her last call. She walks out of a negotiation to reach her, a negotiation, as it happens, with the president who had called her divorces wounds. Afterwards, as Kagome’s friend, she chooses the flowers and the music for the funeral.

The week that follows is told the way the series tells everything, in its narrator’s brisk summary over light music, and Fukuda asked why. Perhaps, he suggested, because a tragic farewell would not have suited Kagome, and Towako meant to send her off brightly. Perhaps because time goes on at its ordinary pace whether or not a death has been taken in. Sano has spoken of one scene from that week: Towako, after the death, making a meal from the food left in Kagome’s flat. It was, Sano said, what she thought living and dying are like.

Grief gives Towako one sentence, and the series lets her say it plainly: her friend died alone, and she let her. Nothing in it is a symptom, and this essay will not treat it as one. It is the shape guilt takes when a phone rang and was not answered, and it is the one place in the series where the word alone is said with its full weight.

That is where the series began. Sano has said that it started from two things: an acquaintance’s sudden death in 2016, and news, during the pandemic, of people dying alone without being able to see anyone. She wanted to make a drama that could give those left behind a push forward, and she told Ichikawa, when offering her the part, that Kagome would die in the sixth episode. So the series was built around the one kind of aloneness it treats as grave. Not the unmarried life. Dying without your people, and being the person who was not there.

This is where its idea of alone turns over. The world has been counting Towako’s marriages. The loss that actually leaves her alone is one no count records: a friend with no legal standing, no word for what she was, and no line on any form. This Library has argued, in “Having People Around Is Not the Same as Having Someone to Call”, that a large and warm network can still have a hole exactly where one need falls, because most ties are specialised and the gap goes untested until the night it matters. Towako’s network is enormous, and Kagome was the part of it that nothing else covered. The series is exact that the others do not fill the hole. The ex-husbands are still at the door. It is still a hole.

A year later Uta has moved out to be nearer her high school, wanting to stand on her own feet, and Towako lives alone. At morning radio exercises in a park she falls into conversation with a stranger, and it is to him that she speaks of the call she did not answer. Time does not simply pass, he tells her; if she once saw her friend laughing, her friend is laughing still. Life has two rules. Do not think of the dead as unhappy. The living must aim at happiness. Sano has named it as the moment in the series that moved her most directly; it made her feel, she said, forgiven for many things. It is the drama’s own answer to her wish to help those left behind. Grief, the series seems to know, is sometimes easier to tell to someone who never knew the dead.

The stranger is Takanashi Hiroshi, and when he next appears in her working life he is across the negotiating table: legal director of the investment fund trying to buy her company, demanding her resignation. He proposes keeping business and friendship apart, and, improbably, they manage it. He is kind, a little odd, and honest about loneliness. They grow close, and he asks her to come and live with him in Malaysia. Her daughter encourages her to go.

It is the most romantic-comedy thing in the series, and the series lets it be lovely. It also lets one small moment go wrong. He shows her photographs of the house that would be waiting for them. She says she has wanted to build a house like that since she was a teenager. He smiles and says her dream will come true. Her face, one reviewer noticed, registers something the script does not say. Towako was an architect before she was a president. She wanted to make the house. What he is offering is a finished form someone else has arranged, and the reviewer’s gloss is hard to better: moving into a dream another person has prepared is not the same as your dream coming true.

Before she answers him, she says something the series has been careful to let her say. To Shinshin, who has come round to talk her out of the marriage, she admits that she does not want to be alone any more, that she has reached her limit. Shinshin’s reply is a line critics went on to quote. What fills a person’s loneliness is not being loved but loving. And the person she loves, he adds, unfortunately, is not him. It is Hassaku.

Everything that follows depends on this. The woman who is about to say she can be happy on her own is not a woman who needs no one. She has just said the opposite, out loud, to one of the three men who married her. Whatever her sentence turns out to mean, it is not denial.

On the night she gives Takanashi her answer, she looks at her mother’s photograph and remembers a question from her childhood. Which was Towako, her mother had asked. Did she want to become all right on her own? Or did she want to be cherished by someone?

She parts from Takanashi warmly and goes straight to Hassaku’s restaurant. She has just said goodbye, she tells him, to a man she thought was lovely, someone she felt safe with. Why, then? Because she wants to get the things she wants for herself, she says; perhaps that is just her awkward nature. Hassaku, who is kind to everyone and sometimes says exactly the right thing, answers that it is more fun to gaze at what you cannot have than to fit yourself to what you have been given. It is also, the series lets us notice, a description of his own life.

Then she says the thing the series has been walking towards. She can live on her own, but it is lonely, and she does not like being lonely. And yet if she were with someone and could not like herself, she would be alone in the end anyway. She wants to be with a self she can like, and she thinks she can be happy on her own. Is that impossible? You easily can, he says.

Look at what the sentence counts. It admits loneliness; it does not deny it. It names company, a self she can like, as the thing she is choosing. And it measures being alone not against being with people in general but against one particular alternative: being paired with someone at the cost of liking herself. That is not an argument against living with anyone. It is an argument against a form of it that would take her from herself.

Then she goes further. She tells him she is glad she married him and that she still loves him. It is mutual, he says. She has chosen him, she tells him, and decided to live on her own. Kagome feels as if she is still here, and with the three of them there, it cannot turn into romance. Let us live, she says, the three of us. She asks him what he loved about Kagome, and the two of them lie back and imagine the marriage they might have had if they had stayed together: the silly quarrels, being Uta’s parents, getting better at making up. A married couple, Hassaku says, is joined at its weak points rather than its strong ones.

Kagome’s complaint had been that between a man and a woman it always turns into romance. Towako’s answer to it, a year after her death, is arithmetic. Add a third. With Kagome counted in, what Towako and Hassaku have cannot collapse back into the form that failed them, and it does not have to end either. In a conversation in the arts magazine Eureka early in 2021, which Fukuda quotes, Sakamoto said that two people make a shape that can run all the way to the end even when they are in conflict, while a third keeps things unsteady, with a lingering sense that it will not finish like this. The series is full of threes, and this is the one that matters: a triangle whose third point is a woman who has died, which stops the other two from becoming a couple again and keeps them together.

This Library argued, in “Being Good at Solitude Is Not the Same as Needing No One”, that the sentence I do not need anyone is sometimes not a refusal of intimacy at all but a specification of the terms on which a person wants it. Towako’s sentence is that idea at its most exact. It specifies against one arrangement, a fourth marriage and a new life abroad, and against no one already in her life. She keeps the man she loves, and keeps him as the one she loves, by choosing not to marry him again. Alone, in her mouth, is a shape. It is not a subtraction.

The childhood question had an answer, and the series gave it long before the end. The child Towako said that she would be all right on her own, and that she wanted someone to cherish her. She refused the either-or before she knew it was one. The last episode suggests where the question came from.

Among her late mother’s things, Towako finds a letter her mother never posted, addressed to someone called Kunimura Makoto. It is full of regret. At Uta’s suggestion the two of them go to find the address, and Makoto turns out to be a woman: someone her mother loved from girlhood and gave up in order to marry. When Uta asks, with a teenager’s plainness, whether they were lovers, Makoto smiles and says it is lovely that she can ask so simply, and leaves the word where Uta put it.

Towako has carried a private question of her own: whether her mother, by marrying and having her, was kept from living as she wished, and whether it was good that she was born. Makoto sees it. You were anxious, weren’t you, she says; it is all right; your mother loved you. Her mother, Makoto says, regretted all her life that the two of them had parted so that she could marry, and she loved her family, and both are true. Everyone, she goes on, is born with a hole in the heart and flails through life trying to fill it, wanting to protect love, wanting to drown in it; one person holds many such things, and none of them is a lie. Towako weeps.

The series could have made Towako’s mother a lesson in either direction: a warning about a life given up to convention, or a vindication of the family chosen over the woman she loved. It refuses both. The series gives her no label, and neither will this essay. What it gives Towako is permission to stop asking which of the two was the true one.

It is worth noticing where the series puts this. The letter is found after Towako has made her choice, not before, and it is not offered as the reason for it. It arrives as a second life set beside hers. Her mother kept the form and carried the person she had given up inside it for the rest of her life. Her daughter declines the form and keeps her people, a man she loves and a friend who has died, outside it. The series does not rank the two lives. It lets Makoto say of the mother what the child once said of herself. Both.

Uta, who had given up studying to become a doctor, takes it up again after meeting Makoto. And Towako’s father, who had known all along that his wife loved someone else, apologises. He and her mother, he says, made her into a child who gets up on her own when she falls. She answers with thanks. She has been helped up by plenty of people, she tells him: by the three men, and by him.

That exchange holds the series’ whole account of being alone. Her father believes he raised a woman who manages by herself. She corrects him with a list of names. Three divorces, counted by the register, turn out, counted by her, to be three people who picked her up.

The last episode brings the three men to her flat for a party, Shinshin sunburnt from Hawaii and handing out souvenirs, which is funny in a man who asks of everything whether it is necessary. Her first love, a helicopter pilot, has just told her, kindly, that he feels only friendship for her. One by one the three propose to her again. They all love her, they say. Asked what her own kind of love is, she says it is wanting the other person to be smiling; if they are smiling, everything else is fine.

Shinshin, of all people, tells her the clearing up after a party ought to be hard work. The corks lined up for no reason, the rings the glasses left on the table: all of it is proof that she lives surrounded by love.

The men are not only devoted. They are lonely too. Kataro has wondered aloud why people go on getting lonely at any age, and the critic ANAIS, writing for Real Sound, suggested that Shinshin’s line about loving rather than being loved may describe the three of them: they fill their own loneliness by going on loving her.

Then she falls asleep, and the three of them say quietly to one another that things cannot stay like this for ever. The women who had been tangled up with the men are seen once more, each going her own way, as Towako passes them on her way to work; the series pairs none of them off with anyone. Near the end we hear that she likes the view from her own home better than the night view from the sky. Her days go on.

It would be easy to read all this as a verdict: the single woman vindicated, surrounded by devoted men, happier than any marriage could have made her. The ending refuses that reading twice. It gives her refusal of a fourth marriage no speech and no triumph; the decision was made in a restaurant an episode earlier and is not argued over again. And it hands the last word on the arrangement not to her but to the men. The series knows what it has built: something unsteady by design, a moment rather than a model.

Singleness is not the moral. There is no moral. There is a woman who has said what she wants, and three men who know it cannot last for ever and want it for her while it does.

The series went out in the spring of 2021, in the second year of the pandemic, and chose not to show the pandemic at all. Asked just before the final episode about her wish to make a drama that would cheer on people who live alone, Sano said she did not mean alone as a status: single men and single women, a household’s composition, what the family register records. Being alone and not alone, or not alone and yet alone, can happen to anyone, she said, and she wanted to show that people who seem to live alone are in fact living inside many connections.

What the series adds to her account is precision about how. The word Towako uses, hitori, is also simply a count: one person. English alone names an absence of company; the Japanese word counts heads. The series lives in the space between the two senses. Its heroine is one, and she is not without company, and it takes both languages to say so.

None of this is a portrait of Japanese women, and it should not be read as one. It is one woman’s life, in one class, in one city. Its pressures are recognisable, though. A woman’s life can still be counted by its marriages. A friend, however central to a life, has little standing on the forms a life requires. And Sano, asked about the women of the series, pointed to the fact that letting married couples keep separate surnames had been put off once again, as one sign of how hard it remains for a woman to live simply as an individual. The series does not campaign about any of this. It builds a heroine for whom all of it is true, makes her funny, and lets her decide. Its message, Sano has said, if it has to be put simply, is that your happiness is yours to decide.

A reader living in Japan far from her own family may recognise the shape faster than most: a life whose people are mostly chosen, whose most important relationship may have no official name, and whose loneliness, when it comes, comes not from an empty flat but from one particular absence.

There are several ways this essay could be wrong, and the first is the most serious.

First, her solitude is resourced. Towako can say she will be happy on her own from a comfortable flat in Tokyo, as the president of a company, with three former husbands who are doing well and turn up unasked. Fukuda noted early in the run that the main characters’ standing and comfort were unusual for Sakamoto, whose earlier dramas had often followed people pushed to society’s edges, and Sano has said the series chose to be a little removed from reality. A woman alone with no money, no restaurant to walk into at night and nobody at her door is not in Towako’s position, and a reading that turned Towako’s sentence into advice for her would be cruel. The series may simply be kinder than her life.

Second, the premise can be called a fantasy, as the producer’s department head called it before a single scene was shot. Three former husbands who never stop adoring her, who arrive with souvenirs and propose again, and who come with none of a marriage’s costs: the series half-admits it. Some of the bill is paid by the three women in the men’s lives, who tell them the truth and then leave, and the series is at least careful to give those women endings of their own.

Third, the series does not always keep its own promise not to label. The critic Komeka, writing in Gendai Business, noticed that after Kagome says she does not want relationships between men and women in her life, the script has her add that she knows such thinking is lonely, and asked why. Is not wanting romance really lonely? It is a fair objection. In a series that took pains to leave Kagome’s life unnamed, it is the one line that makes her apologise for it.

Fourth, the reassurance in the last episode is given to someone from whom it asks a great deal. ANAIS called it the saddest moment of the finale that Makoto, the woman who was not chosen, is the one made to say it was right that she was not. The series gives the person who was given up the task of consoling the daughter of the woman who gave her up. It is generous. It may be too much to ask.

Fifth, this essay’s own reading may be too neat. Shinshin tells her she still loves Hassaku, and she tells Hassaku she has chosen him. It is possible to read her alone less as a shape she chose than as the only way of staying close to a man she cannot live with, and calling it independence. Both could be true. A series that has just spent an episode insisting that one person holds many things, none of them a lie, would not object to both.

This Library’s position, stated plainly. Being alone and being lonely are different measurements, and the count of a woman’s marriages is a third, which measures nothing that either of the others does. A woman who says she thinks she can be happy on her own deserves to be heard as having said a complete sentence about the shape she wants her life to take. It is not a confession of lack, and it is not a recommendation to anyone else. Towako’s version is unusually honest. It admits the loneliness, keeps the love, and declines only a form.

The series’ deepest point goes back to its heroine’s childhood, and to the answer she gave her mother: both. Adult life tends to hear that answer as greed or confusion and to press for a choice: the work or the marriage, independence or a partner, the friend or the husband. The series spends ten episodes suggesting that the child was right, and ends without making her answer a rule for anyone.

If you have been asked, at a family table or by your own reflection, which one you are, the one who manages on her own or the one who wants to be cherished, you are allowed the child’s answer. You are allowed to count differently, too: not the forms your life has taken and left, but the people who helped you up. The list may be longer than the count suggests. It may include someone who is no longer here.

Who would be on it? Which of them has no word for what they are to you? And if you said one day that you thought you could be happy on your own, who would you want to be sitting with you when you said it?