Ukiwa: More Than Friends, Less Than an Affair, and What Held Them Both Up

Early in the morning, in a block of company flats on the edge of Tokyo, a woman takes the rubbish down, and the man from the flat next door is there too. They say a few ordinary things to each other. For a while those few words are the best part of her day. At night, when her husband has still not come home, the two of them talk across the partition that divides their balconies.

She is Nakayama Maiko, who has lived almost all her life in Hiroshima and came to Tokyo because her husband’s company moved him. He is Futaba, her husband’s boss. Each of them is married to someone who is having an affair. That is the premise of Ukiwa: More Than Friends, Less Than an Affair, a Japanese television series of 2021, and its subtitle announces what it will not do. These two will not become lovers. The broadcaster’s own listings called it a love story one wall away from an affair.

A subtitle like that is a ruler. It measures what passes between two people by how far it goes, and it sets this story at an exact mark: past friendship, short of an affair. Talk about stories like this one usually reaches for the same ruler. Did they or didn’t they. How close did they come. Whose fault was it.

This essay argues that the series spends its eight episodes putting the ruler down and picking up another measure, one it takes from its heroine’s own mouth: the rubber ring of the title, the ukiwa. A ring measures something else. Not how far two people went, but who was holding whom up, whose breath was keeping them afloat, and whether either of them could swim. Measured that way, the series is honest about three things a ruler cannot see. Both of them were holding on. The comfort that kept each of them afloat also kept each of them where they were. And the sentences it gives to the love that never touched have the same shape as the sentences it gives to an affair.

None of this makes the line they kept unimportant; the endings show what it was worth. But the series will not let the line do the thing a ruler does best, which is to put some people on dry land and leave the rest in the water. In Ukiwa everybody is in the water.

The record first. Ukiwa: More Than Friends, Less Than an Affair ran for eight episodes on TV Tokyo, late on Monday nights, from 9 August to 27 September 2021. It adapts Ukiwa, a manga by Nomura Munehiro published by Shogakukan, which first appeared online between 2012 and 2014 and runs to three volumes. Kadowaki Mugi plays Maiko, and Moriyama Naotaro plays Futaba, the neighbour who is also her husband’s boss. Daito Shunsuke plays her husband, Takuya; Nishida Naomi plays Futaba’s wife, Hijiri; Renbutsu Misako plays Fukuda Ayumi, Takuya’s junior at work; and Tanaka Juri plays Tamiya Yu, a young pottery teacher.

Two notes before going further. The series was not screened for this essay. Its scenes are described as the broadcaster’s own episode recaps and published reviews describe them, and what the characters say is given in this essay’s own English, from the Japanese as those pages print it. And the essay discusses the whole series, including how it ends, because the ending is where the ruler and the ring finally part. The section where the ending begins says so, and a reader who would rather meet it on screen can stop there and come back.

Begin with the place, because the series is exact about it. Maiko has lived almost all her life in Hiroshima and thinks of herself as nothing special, neither good nor bad. When her husband is transferred to his company’s head office in Tokyo, she gives up her job and goes with him, into company housing on the edge of the city. The Futabas next door welcome them warmly. Maiko calls her husband Takkun, and by the broadcaster’s own account she arrives looking forward to a new life.

Takkun comes home later every night. One morning he leaves his phone behind, and a message arrives from a contact saved as Car Repair 110, asking whether he is coming round again tonight. His affair is with Fukuda Ayumi, a junior colleague who was once the manager of his university rugby club.

Notice how much of Maiko’s Tokyo belongs to one employer. The flat is the company’s. The neighbours are her husband’s colleagues and their families, and the man on the other side of the partition is his boss. When summer comes there is a festival in the company car park, with the wives from the company housing there as well, and Maiko’s yakisoba stall does good business. Everyone she knows in this city she knows through her husband’s work, including, as it turns out, the woman he is seeing.

It is not only Maiko’s story. In 2017 Takeishi Emiko, a professor at Hosei University who had sat on a Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare study group on transfers, reported on its work at a public forum on labour policy. It had been pointed out, she said, that a spouse’s transfer, and not only one’s own, can hold back a woman’s working life. Maiko’s resignation is one quiet instance of that sentence. She gave up her work so that his could move, and the series begins in the flat the move provided.

It is worth saying what the setting is not, too. Company housing is one particular way of living in Japan, not the way, and the series is not a portrait of Japanese marriage. It uses the company flats for what they do to a story. They put a husband’s boss on the other side of the wall, and they make the employer a quiet third party to every marriage in the building.

Futaba is gentle and quiet, and his marriage has a secret of its own. His wife, Hijiri, is having an affair with Tamiya, her young pottery teacher. So when Maiko begins to talk to him, at the rubbish point in the mornings and across the partition between their balconies at night, she is talking to the one person in the building who knows what she knows from the inside.

The broadcaster’s own column on the series described it exactly: a minimal sort of love, in which the two of them exchange words across a single partition board, minding other people’s eyes as they do. The neighbours are colleagues, and whatever the two of them say, they say minding who might hear.

Listen, too, to what they call each other, because the series is careful with names. At home Maiko calls her husband Takkun, and he calls her Maiko. Next door the names belong to the company. Futaba calls her Nakayama-san, the surname she shares with her husband, since Japanese law has a married couple take one surname between them. He calls her husband, his junior, Nakayama-kun. And Maiko knows him only as Futaba. She does not know his given name.

So the marriage has the intimate names, and the talk across the partition runs on surnames. The man she calls by a pet name is the one she cannot talk to. The man she can talk to is, to her, a surname and a position in her husband’s company. A name that sounds close, the series suggests, is not the same thing as closeness.

It is Maiko who gives Futaba the image in the title. One night, telling herself in her Hiroshima Japanese that she is going to say everything she thinks, she climbs over the partition onto his side. It is his balcony, and nobody has asked her over. What she manages to say is not everything. It is the ring. All along, she tells him, she has felt that he was saving her like a rubber ring: when he listened to her it was like floating on one, and she was being saved. Then she starts back the way she came.

The image will come back to her more than once before the series ends, so it is worth being clear now about what kind of image it is, because it is not a romantic one. A rubber ring is not a boat. It does not take you anywhere. It holds your head above the water while you stay where you are, and it does not teach you to swim. And somebody’s breath is in it. A ring is only as good as the air someone put there, and it goes soft when that someone stops.

Set that beside the subtitle and the difference is plain. The ruler asks how far two people went. The ring asks who is holding whom up, whose breath is keeping them afloat, and what happens when the air runs out. The first question can be answered with a yes or a no. The others can only be answered with a history, and the series spends eight episodes telling one.

It matters that the image is hers. A subtitle, like most talk about affairs, is written from outside, by people standing on the bank and judging distances. The ring is what the thing felt like from inside the water.

The nearest the two of them come to the ruler’s mark is small, and it comes in the fourth episode. They go out together for the first time and sit facing each other, a little shy, and the talk turns to the Futabas’ past. Learning how complicated his feelings are, Maiko acts on impulse and takes his hand.

Afterwards, regretting it and unsure of herself, she avoids him. Coming back from the rubbish point one morning without their conversation, she crouches in the entrance of her flat, and when Takuya, worried, tries to help her up, she shakes off his hand. A few days later Futaba asks her to let it be as if it never happened. He is, he says, only someone she talks to. It is his to ask. It is a no, said gently, to a hand that was taken without asking.

Why does the line hold? Two old words offer themselves, and both are wrong for this series. It is not purity. Nobody here is keeping themselves clean, and the series is too interested in what these two want to pretend they want nothing. Nor is it cowardice. The broadcaster’s own column on the series, written in its second week, put the brake into a single sentence. Because they hate the betrayal that an affair is, even if they come to love someone, they stop themselves: to have a relationship with that person would be to stand in the same ring as their spouses. The column’s word is dohyō, the ring of a sumo bout.

That is a precise reason, and a respectable one. It is a claim about standing. Whoever has been betrayed at least keeps the standing of the one betrayed, and to cross the line would be to give that up and step into the ring with the people who hurt you. The essay “In the Mood for Love and the Desire That Lives in Restraint” argued that restraint is not the same as purity, and that in Wong Kar Wai’s crowded Hong Kong the line two betrayed neighbours keep is held less by either of them than by the watching building around them. Ukiwa has its watching building: company flats, colleagues for neighbours, a partition anyone might overhear. But the column’s reason goes somewhere a building cannot. The brake is not only the fear of being seen. It is a refusal to become what hurt them.

Nor is the line held by one person. He declines the hand; she turns back from his balcony by herself. The restraint passes between them the way the conversation does, first one of them holding it and then the other, and that may be the truest thing about it. Neither of them is simply strong, and neither is simply afraid.

Now the spouses, stated plainly, because the series states them plainly. Takuya is having an affair with Fukuda. Hijiri is having an affair with Tamiya. This essay passes no verdict on either of them as a person, and the series gives both of them more than the part of an obstacle.

Its producer said as much in an interview published as the series ended. She told Real Sound that she had lately felt a fear of the world being tidied up by splitting it into black and white, and had wanted to make something about the parts of people that cannot be tidied away. What drew her to Nomura’s manga, she said, was that its people were not model pupils. They had poison in them, and weakness, contradiction and slyness, and the manga neither denied nor affirmed any of it. It simply drew them honestly.

One detail shows how far the adaptation took that. In the manga, Nishida Naomi said when her casting was announced, Hijiri’s face is never drawn: she appears only from behind. The actor said she hoped to show on screen the expressions and feelings that the manga leaves to a turned back. The series gives the unfaithful wife a face.

It also gives her words, and they turn out to be among the most important in the series. In the fifth episode a group message from the pottery class brings Hijiri a photograph of Tamiya walking with a young woman. At his studio he explains, desperately, that it is not what it looks like. She says she does not mind, then takes it back: she was jealous, and she was glad that he had tried so hard to explain. And then she says that she has no right to be jealous, when he keeps saving her.

In the next episode, at the company’s summer festival, Maiko meets Fukuda, and in the toilets there the two women face each other. Maiko raises a hand. Fukuda shuts her eyes, ready to be slapped. Maiko does not slap her. She says, almost to herself, that she has no right to be angry, and asks Fukuda instead not to tell her husband that she knows.

Put the two scenes side by side. On one side of the partition is a wife who is having an affair; on the other, a wife who is not. By the subtitle’s ruler they stand on opposite sides of the most important line in the series. By the series’ own words they stand in the same place. Each has found someone who is saving her, and each says she has no right. The sentences given to the affair and to the love that never touched have the same shape, and that is not carelessness. It is the series’ argument. Whatever the line protects, it does not protect a heart from needing to be saved, or a conscience from knowing that it does.

The essay “Second Virgin, and Falling in Love With Your Eyes Open” read an affair that happens, and counted most carefully the one person it found paying without ever being asked: the wife. Ukiwa has no such figure. Each of its four married people has given something to someone outside the marriage, two of them their bodies and all of them some part of their attention, and each is married to someone who has done the same. Nobody is standing on dry land. That is how the series can refuse a verdict without refusing to see. There is no dry ground to pass one from.

Even the other woman is given a history instead of a verdict. Fukuda grew up hearing her mother tell her that in her generation women would go out to work too, that she must walk on her own feet, and that she must not lose; her given name, Ayumi, is written with the character for walking. Years ago she won the company’s award for a shining woman. She is seeing a high-flyer at a client firm as well as Takuya, and she has a sentence for the life she has built: a woman needs a great many things if she is going to win. A history is not an excuse. The series shows where the sentence came from.

From here, this essay describes how the series ends.

Both affairs end. On the balcony Futaba tells Maiko that things at his home seem to have settled, as they have at hers: they are both, he says, back to how things were. She asks whether they can be. Next door the Futabas’ life begins to go back to how it was, and Maiko, who can see it happening, cannot bear it. Late one night she runs out of the flat.

Futaba finds her by the river and calls to her from the bridge. There is something he wants to tell her first, he says. The ring she spoke of made him very happy. For him too, she was the ring.

He has also let her husband know where she is, and Takuya comes for her. On the way home Takuya tells her she has been strange lately: if she is thinking something, she should say it properly. She tells him there is nothing. He takes her hand, and they walk on.

It is worth stopping on that walk, because it holds the whole marriage in a few steps. The husband who has been lying to her asks her to be honest. The wife who has just been told that she was someone’s ring tells him there is nothing to tell. Neither of them is a villain in the scene, and neither is telling the truth. And the man who was keeping her afloat has handed her back, himself, to the marriage she needed a ring to stay afloat in. Whatever that is, it is not the gesture of a man who wants her for himself, and it is not simple kindness either. It is a decision about whose water she belongs in.

Afterwards she begins to look up divorce, and wonders aloud whether someone like her could do it, when her life has always been so safe. Then she decides against it. She does not want to be apart from Futaba. She will stay where she is, and support him from a distance.

This is the second thing a ruler cannot see. The ring kept Maiko afloat, and it also kept her exactly where she was: in the marriage, in the flat, on her side of the partition. A comfort strong enough to make a marriage bearable can be strong enough to keep it going. There is nothing cynical in noticing that. It is entirely reasonable, and it is expensive.

It also explains a silence. Maiko has known about Takuya’s affair for a long time and said nothing to him, and at the festival she asked the other woman to keep her knowing a secret. The essay “Asura, and a Place to Say It Without Losing” read a mother’s long silence about her husband’s second household as a method with a rule inside it: a woman who says it, loses. Maiko’s silence has another shape. When she is finally asked why she never said anything, she will answer that at first she was afraid of being hurt, and that this was not the only reason. The other reason, this essay suspects, lived next door. As long as nothing was said, nothing had to change, and she could stay on her side of the partition beside the one person she could talk to. Her silence may have been the rent on the ring.

Then the company moves Futaba. He is transferred to Fukuoka, and the Futabas prepare to leave. He sends Maiko a message: is she free next Tuesday?

The company brought these two together, and the company parts them. The first transfer took Maiko away from Hiroshima and from her job; the second takes the ring away. A transfer is the company’s decision, not anyone’s in the building. It is one of the quietly exact things about this series that a love it never lets become an affair could be ended at any time by a personnel decision, and is.

On the Tuesday she goes, a little nervous, to the place he has booked. It is a karaoke box, room 304. Asked at the desk for the name on the booking, she gives the name of the man she loves, as a critic writing for Real Sound after the final episode put it. Inside, they introduce themselves like two people meeting for the first time. She learns that his given name is Hajime, and that he has two older sisters. They talk about the clubs they belonged to at school. At some point she lets slip that it is nice to be called by her name.

Then he says what he came to say, and calls it the story of their ring, his and hers. A rubber ring, he thinks, if you cannot blow it up yourself, will let you drown in the end; you will not be able to breathe, and it will hurt. So it would be good to be able to blow one up yourself, or, even without one, to swim on your own. When she says she is sorry, that she leaned on his ring for everything, he tells her that her leaning had saved him too. He was glad to be relied on. He had, he says, an ulterior motive: he wanted to be relied on. If anything, he was the one who had leaned, and he is sorry. And he ends with her surname. Nakayama-san. Thank you for the ring, all this time.

Three things happen in that speech, and each is the series’ argument in small. The first is the confession. The man who held the line tells her that he was holding on. The word he uses for his motive, shitagokoro, is the everyday word for a hidden design on someone; the design he confesses to is the wish to be needed. The helper needed the one he helped, and says so.

The second is the name. For one hour the other names are in the room, and she has been called by hers. For the last words of his speech he goes back to her surname, the name she shares with her husband. The line they did not cross is there in the grammar, kept to the end.

The third is the way home. They promise each other that they will live happily, and they take the taxi home the long way round. That detour is the whole of the affair they did not have: a few more minutes together, on the way home.

Before the move, Futaba tells Hijiri that there is someone other than her whom he came to hold dear. He is sorry, he says; if he kept it hidden, he does not think he could smile in front of her any more. Hijiri says that she is sorry too. She also had someone other than him who was dear to her. They apologise to each other, and when they come to say goodbye they are smiling. Maiko sees them off from the balcony.

Then Maiko speaks to Takuya. She tells him she knows he was having an affair, and has known all along. He asks since when, and why she never said anything. At first, she says, she was afraid of being hurt, and that was not the only reason. He asks whether she ever really loved him. She asks whether he has anyone whose happiness makes him happy just to think about, and says that perhaps this is what the two of them lacked. She had loved him, she says, but he had not been taisetsu to her, not someone she held precious.

He answers that he loved her and believed he had cherished her, and that what was missing was her. She was with him but never faced him, and when he told her that she was dear to him, she told him nothing back. She asks about the meals she made every day, and the washing. He says that is just daily life. And she asks him whether daily life is not love. Then she says that perhaps they were more alike than they knew: each thought they were caring for the other, and each was thinking only of themselves. They divorce.

No verdict belongs here. Takuya’s complaint is real: a woman who has been keeping a secret next door has not been facing her husband. Maiko’s answer is real too, and it belongs to one of the oldest arguments in marriage, between love that is spoken and love that is cooked and washed and folded away. The series gives each of them their say, and then gives Maiko the last sentence, which does not accuse him. It includes her.

Set the two endings side by side and they share a move. In each marriage someone admits to being like the other. Futaba tells his wife that he too had someone, and she tells him the same; Maiko tells her husband they were alike. The same admission keeps one marriage and ends the other. Which ending is the happy one, this essay will not say. What the series seems to know is that the admission was the price of both. Neither staying nor leaving well, it suggests, can be built on what is being hidden; Futaba’s own reason for telling was that he could not have smiled in front of his wife otherwise.

Maiko says goodbye at the dry cleaner’s where she works part-time. She finds a flat of her own. She takes off her ring, and cuts her hair. In English the rubber ring and the wedding ring share a word; in Japanese, ukiwa and yubiwa share the written character for a ring. Near the end, the second ring comes off, after the first has gone to Fukuoka.

The subtitle’s ruler is not only a figure of speech. Japanese law keeps one too. The Civil Code’s list of the grounds on which a spouse may sue for divorce begins with futei, unfaithfulness, and when the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 on what that word means, it said: sexual relations with someone other than one’s spouse, entered into of one’s own free will. It is a ruler of acts. The subtitle draws its line, less than an affair, just about where the court drew its own.

What the law would say about any real marriage is a question for a lawyer, not for an essay about a drama. The point here is narrower. The court’s words are about acts. What Futaba tells his wife about is a feeling: that he came to hold someone else dear. He tells her all the same, and she answers with a confession of her own. The love that never touched and the affair that did are set down side by side and apologised for in both directions, as if they belonged on the same scale after all.

In the Mood for Love ends at a temple wall at Angkor Wat, where the man whispers what he could not say into a hollow in the stone and seals it with mud. Wong Kar Wai gives the untouched love to a wall. Ukiwa gives it to a wife. That is the series’ answer to the hardest question it leaves open, whether a love that never touches is a betrayal too. Read this way, its answer is neither yes nor no. It treats that love as something that has to be told to the person it could hurt, and in one of its two marriages it lets the telling be what saves the marriage.

A few details land differently depending on where a viewer stands, and two of them may carry a particular weight for women living in Japan.

The first is a life arranged around a husband’s employer. The series builds its story out of one: a job given up for a transfer, a flat that belongs to the company, a boss next door, a festival in the car park, and a second transfer that ends everything. A woman who has followed a partner’s work to a city where she knew no one, within Japan or into it, may recognise the shape without needing the details to match.

The second is names, and it may reach furthest for a woman whose Japanese was learned in classrooms and at counters rather than at home. The language lets two grown people live side by side for years on surnames alone, and the series shows it: Maiko knows the man she confides in only as Futaba until the last afternoon. What takes longer to learn than that rule is how much the other name can carry when it is finally offered. Maiko is a little foreign in the company flats herself. She speaks the Japanese of Hiroshima in a suburb of Tokyo, saying uchi for I, and in the series’ last hour she learns a man’s given name, gives his surname at a desk, and says that it is nice to be called by her own. A reader who has spent years being addressed by a name that came with a marriage or a job may hear exactly what that line gives, and what it asks.

It may help, too, to say what the series is not. It is not evidence that Japanese marriages run on silence, or that restraint is a national virtue. Its producer wanted people who cannot be tidied into black and white, and the four married people in these flats are exactly that: particular, contradictory, and specific to one building, one company and one year.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first is the one a tired reader may feel most.

First, the restraint was his, and it cost her more. He declined the hand, set the terms of their talk, let her husband know where to find her at the river, and kept his own marriage. She did the reaching, the running out and, in the end, the leaving. He is also her husband’s boss, the person in the building with the most standing to lose. A reader may see a man managing a woman’s feelings for the sake of his own position, and a series that calls it gentleness. This essay’s answer is narrow: the series makes him confess that he was holding on, and makes him tell his wife. The asymmetry is still real, and a reader who resents his gentleness is not wrong to.

Second, the ring may flatter the love it names. To call a love a rubber ring is to turn it into equipment: useful, then deflated, then thanked and put away. A love reclassified as a flotation device is easier to hand back. Thank you for the ring, all this time, can be heard as the most honest sentence in the series, or as a very tidy way for a man to close a door. This essay hears the first. It cannot rule out the second.

Third, the way the story leaves her. A woman in a flat of her own, her ring off, her hair cut: it is a very old picture of a freed woman, and it may be doing more work than the series’ own sentence. The essay “Freedom Does Not Require Pretending You Never Need Anyone” argued that independence is not the absence of need but not being controllable by the supply, and that solitude became the picture of women’s freedom because not depending on anyone has no picture of its own. Futaba’s sentence is more generous than that picture. It offers blowing up your own ring as well as swimming without one, and the series’ ending leans towards the second. A reader who would rather have the first is on firm ground, and the series gives her a witness in Fukuda, who was raised to walk on her own feet and never to lose, and who, after the scene with Maiko in the festival toilets, stops caring what the sidelines shout.

Fourth, convenience. Both affairs end within the same stretch of the story, just when the love next door needs them to, and the spouses step back so that the restraint can have the stage. A series that neither denies nor affirms its people may still use some of them as weather. This essay has tried to give Takuya and Hijiri their own sentences, and the series does give them some. The two on the balconies have more.

Fifth, and aimed at this essay. The series’ producer said that Ukiwa leaves a great deal to its viewers, and that it set out to express the spaces between the lines, and feelings that cannot be put into words, through images rather than by putting them into words. An essay built from recaps of what the characters said is reading exactly the layer the makers chose not to lean on. Whatever the faces did while those sentences were spoken, and whatever the pauses carried, this essay cannot see. It may be right about the words and wrong about the series.

Three things, and none of them is a rule.

How far two people went is a real question, and the line these two kept mattered; the endings show what it bought. But it is not the only question, and it may not be the most useful one. The ring asks the others: who was holding whom up, whose breath was in it, and what happens when that breath is posted to Fukuoka.

Being needed is a need. The man who seemed to be doing all the holding says at the end that he was holding on. A comfort that runs in one direction only is rarer than it looks, and a person who is being leaned on may be leaning too.

And the words matter more than the ruler. The series gives the affair and the love that never touched sentences of the same shape: someone was saving me, and I have no right. That is not a verdict on anyone. It is the plainest description the series can find of four married people in the water together, and of why none of them can pass judgement from the shore.

So, once, to you, if someone is holding you up at the moment: a neighbour, a friend, a voice at the end of a day nobody else asks about. You may have good reasons. The person at home may have stopped coming home, and this one listens. Nobody here is going to tell you to let go. What the series asks is that you know whose breath is in the ring, and that you begin, somewhere, to learn your own. That does not mean needing no one. It means that not all of your air comes from one person, who can be moved.

This is a reading of a television series. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about anyone’s marriage, divorce or legal position. The legal texts named in it are quoted for what they say, not for what they would say about any life.

Who is holding you up at the moment, and whose breath is in it?

Whom are you holding up, and what does being needed give you?

If you have drawn a line somewhere, what were you trying not to become?

Is there something you would have to say, and to whom, before you could smile in front of them again?

Where could some of your own air come from?