Coffee Spoons

Kou Kou Kyoushi [高校教師], translated into High School Teacher, is about, surprisingly, a high school teacher and his relationship with his student. Koga Ikumi is the docile new teacher at an all-girls high school. The day before school officially starts, he meets a pretty stranger at a game arcade. And such is his luck, the next day said stranger shows up in class as one of his students.

I love this series for the unconventional subject matters that it deals with. I love that it’s not afraid to delve into taboos like: teenage prostitution, bullying, extortion, rape, sexual relations between student-teacher, abuse of trust between patient-doctor, and… you get the gist of what I mean.

Although to be fair, I wouldn’t like KKK [lulz!] so much if it merely exhibited these taboos as a shock factor to its audiences. The series actually performs a significant labor in carrying out a functioning dialogue between the multiple themes that it presents. One such theme is the responsibility of the professional to his/her patron. An obvious example is the role of the teacher that Ikumi struggles to maintain while dealing with his own physical sickness and mental torment derived from his feelings for Hina.

One of the best things about KKK is that even while it’s juggling all of these weighty issues, it still manages to depict its characters as incredibly human in their fallibility. Ikumi not only succumbs to his temptations, he goes beyond that and lies to Hina, telling her that she has a fatal illness and manipulating her fears in order to make her codependent on him for his own unwarranted catharsis. He dangles her mortality in front of her, exploits her despair, traps her in her own insecurities, and remakes her into the perfect companion for himself. He does so because he’s the one who’s close to dying and he’s helpless and so, so incredibly lonely that he wishes he were dead already. When faced with his own mortality, things like ethics and responsibilities and become trivial. What does any of it matter when you’re so close to death and there’s no one else who could possibly understand the horrible fear that’s potent within you at all times, when you’re so painfully aware of all your frailties? What does it mean to look into the darkness and find it staring back?

These kinds of questions – the stripping down of the human soul, your humanity laid bare by circumstances that are all out of your hands, and the hard-earned answers that are even harder to swallow – enthrall me to no end. I am a complete SUCKER for existential angst fodder. I love that KKK merely sets up these character molds only to smash them to smithereens and remake them into something profoundly beautiful and disturbing. KKK surpasses any other dorama that I have seen in its emotional complexity and depth.

Another WIN for this dorama is Hiroki Narimiya’s character, the Never-Never-Land villain, Yuji. Besides the fact that Narimiya is one of my favorite J-idols, the character that he plays is even more intriguing. Heartbreaker, host, extortionist, pimp all rolled into one bad boy archetype that also functions as an insightful critique of the same stock character. Critique, because ultimately the series facilitates an impressive character study that unravels the power-play that he attempts to engage in and reveals him to be the perpetual boy who obstinately refuses to grow up. Yuji is always seen playing video games in the background while his crew rapes and videotapes his latest victims. To him, life IS a game and his only objective is not to get a GAME OVER. With this kind of childish mentality, his acts of malice are given another depth of cruelty, pathologized because of his inability to empathize or even care about the interpersonal consequences of his actions.

Of course, he gets the proverbial comeuppance of dorama antagonists and by the end of the series lands his ass in jail for the murder of a teacher. The punchline comes when one of his subordinates, a very scary [and by scary I mean incredibly hot] girl [played by Aoi Yu – who also played sweet, little Hagu in the H&C live action movie], pulls a Brutus and switches his plastic knife for a real one; thereby causing him to commit a murder that he never intended for [all because he cannot handle the responsibilities and heaviness of a real penis maturity].

I will now wrap up this post [highly recommended, go watch] and leave you with this:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.