Despite a Masters in Psychology, Mikuri can’t find work. She’s even fired from her temp job, since her employers assume her level of education means she’ll leave anyway. Her father finds her extremely part-time work as a house cleaner for an acquaintance – a shy but serious systems engineer named Hiramasa.
Mikuri can’t afford to live alone, so when her parents suddenly decide to move to the countryside – where she’d have no hope of finding work in her field – she makes a proposal to Hiramasa. They’ll enter a common law marriage, no romance intended. She’ll take over the cleaning, cooking, and laundry at an agreed-upon rate.
The premise may seem regressive, but writer Nogi Akiko turns that expectation on its head. It becomes a framework to recognize the unpaid and undervalued household work that women are often burdened with. When Hiramasa brings a contract proposal to Mikuri, it details the value of everything she would do, a value that often goes unseen.
It wouldn’t work if there weren’t fully realized characters going through all this. Above all, Mikuri cares about putting her heart into her work. Whether it’s psychology, a temp job, or a contracted wife, she cares about doing it well and having that work be appreciated and noticed. She regularly envisions herself as the subject of a documentary or news interviews as a way of reflecting on her own sense of self-worth. Even if her bosses and coworkers don’t notice, the care and effort she puts into perfecting daily tasks is often greater than those bosses and coworkers put forth. She values herself, and considers her effort important and worthy of focus whether anyone sees it or not.
It’s rare we get a character who blends impulsiveness and creativity with great care and attention to detail – and even rarer still when the character’s a woman. We get tons of quirky, capricious women characters and stiff, detail-oriented stereotypes, but rarely do writers imagine a woman is complex enough to be capricious and careful, self-fulfilled and longing, aimless yet direct, tenacious and relaxed. It’s as if all the things a human being is capable of are things a woman character can be capable of, too – which is such an obvious statement that it shouldn’t be impressive when it’s realized. And yet, it’s so rare when women are allowed to be written this way all the way to the screen that it does stand out. Aragaki Yui does a great job embodying Mikuri as a realistic character with a full internal life who can feel and act on all these complexities – and she does it while shifting between broad comedic and nuanced dramatic moments.
Hiramasa is imperfect, but he’s introspective and works to improve. Early on, when he realizes an act of casual homophobia’s hurt one of his friends, he works to change. Even though Mikuri and Hiramasa agree to no romance as part of their arrangement, we are in a romantic comedy, so expect complications. That said, the approach here is incisive. Hiramasa values many of the overlooked things typically asked of women from the start. Part of the reason Mikuri even proposes marriage is that Hiramasa noticed and thanked her for something easy to overlook, and he communicated what an improvement it was and why. He understood intrinsically that this was work, he was grateful for the effort, and he praised the real, noticeable difference it made in his life.
Hoshino Gen plays Hiramasa and he does a very capable job of realizing a man who’s content to be alone, but isn’t stereotypically set in that lifestyle. It’s just what’s easy and comfortable for him, and he makes an argument at one point that if being married for convenience is what’s easiest for two people who both want and consent to it, why wouldn’t they do it? What’s wrong with making life easier on both of them? We pretend marriage is a purely emotional thing removed from practical considerations, but overlooking and not solving the practical and lived-in are what lead to partnerships failing. By looking at the parts of marriage that are increasingly and aggressively dismissed as they begin to matter, “The Full-Time Wife Escapist” asks what gender roles are assumed without thought, challenge, or discussion.
There’s a reason Hiramasa is a systems engineer here. The job entails designing and managing both the technical and practical aspects of complex systems from origination throughout implementation. He brings this perspective back to his life – he understands the real value of work typically loaded onto women, how the system falls apart if no one does it, and thus, how the system is broken at design if the person who does that work isn’t recognized, valued, and compensated for it.
This systemic viewpoint may seem cold, but it relentlessly argues that household work has tremendous value and that overlooking it disempowers and devalues those who do it. The series doesn’t argue that women should be doing that work, but it recognizes that women are overwhelmingly the ones expected to do it and burdened with it in reality, so at the very least it should be recognized and treated with the same value as any other work.
That’s how Nogi inverts the out-of-left-field premise of contractual marriage. It reflects on a genre of 60s “marriage of convenience” sitcoms; it even namedrops “Bewitched”. The stories that arise lean toward episodic and comedic bits. It’s adapted from a manga by Umino Tsunami, and sometimes asks characters to overplay their role for comedic effect. Between Umino and Nogi’s writing, though, it always manages to find the human being in that overplayed moment. There’s a tender way of conveying how and why people are comfortable around each other, why they seek each other specifically out, and what they discover in communicating with each other that creates a safe space.
Aside from some genre-necessary romantic comedy complications, Mikuri and Hiramasa communicate fantastically. They listen, they place themselves in the others’ shoes, they compromise from the others’ standpoint. The entire point is that this is an incredibly healthy marriage before any romance is introduced to it, and that argues that these are the elements of equity that are as fundamental to a partnership as emotion.
I’ve lauded Nogi’s writing in the past. Just as “MIU404” and “Unnatural” tackled police, justice, medical, and work reforms within strong, standalone mysteries, “The Full-Time Wife Escapist” tackles the overlooked work women are asked to do while developing a strong, situational romantic comedy. It might seem dry to highlight how extraordinarily researched her work is, but through her characters holding this information so closely, we’re asked to understand why. She takes this dry, often statistical information about systemic realities and makes it matter to how we live our daily lives and how we treat other people. Her ability to streamline why a piece of information directly impacts our quality of life, our well-being, and the norms we expect of each other is one of the most remarkable things I’ve seen any writer consistently do. And since stories are all about how people treat each other and challenge each others’ norms, it takes these already real characters and grounds the weight of where their lives go. The story about whether they’re able to overcome a system is one in which we’re also emotionally invested. They’re finding a way to personally overcome and rewrite it is the drama, and how nonsense that system is to begin with and how it asks us to act as a result is the comedy.
The dialogue enables entire ensembles of characters to differentiate themselves and shine, regardless of whether there are two people in a scene or eight. This is an absolute feast of character reactions, but what I like is that there are few close-ups. We don’t get individual cutaways that make each reaction obvious, but instead we’re treated to four or five characters in one shot. Our eyes dart between reactions – it’s the type of simultaneous ensemble acting an older cinematic comedy like “The Thin Man” might favor, albeit with cultural differences and more modern sensibilities in framing. By doing this, we’re enjoying the timing of the actors as they play off each other with fewer interruptions, an approach that can often feel more natural and comforting than relying on editing to create the timing.
These reactions also reveal aspects of character that are hidden in dialogue. Mikuri’s mother, Sakura, is way ahead of other characters in terms of catching on to what’s unspoken – but always keeps it unspoken, letting them reveal what they want on their own terms. Mikuri’s aunt, Yuri, is quick to react – but the moment she understands she might be running counter to what her niece needs, she shifts into whatever that need is. There’s utterly nuanced work across the board.
It’s the overall feeling of “The Full-Time Wife Escapist” that I love most, though. There’s a heartwarming glee to watching it, perhaps because all of me is watching it. I don’t have to turn off any part of myself to enjoy it. From my emotional investment in these people all the way up to the systemic arguments about inequality, it’s all of a piece.
There are comedies out there that are broadly reassuring and nice to watch but can feel non-specific and therefore a little hollow in those reassurances. But this is specific in its criticisms, in its eye for what needs improvement in the world, and so its reassurances and hopes feel more substantial. It sees people who care about doing a good job in a system that de-prioritizes those people. It conveys why a woman might feel safe sleeping in the home of a man she barely knows and why the man – knowing that – feels happy about the choices that have made him the kind of person who can be trusted that way. It argues for fairness, for perspective, for valuing overlooked work, and like all Nogi’s work it does so in specific terms with specific grievances and solutions, with lovely people who never lose their sense of humor about it all.
Part of the joy of watching her work is that I’m never getting some generalized sense of consolation as if kindness is a plaque on the wall. I’m witnessing compassion with pinpoint direction and application, kindness as an action that has context and needs work put into it, ways of being that are real and actionable and both systemically and individually argued. And all that can still fit into something that’s a bigger blanket of reassurance, that’s a successful romantic comedy, and is funny enough to have me reeling throughout.
“The Full-Time Wife Escapist” is on Netflix, or can be watched free with ads on Viki TV, which specializes in East Asian series.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 