Bugiugi (2023)

A fantastic tale of the life of a singer

Boogie Woogie is the fictionalized biography of Kasagi Shizuko who was a popular jazz singer from the early 30s through the 50s who was a major muse for the songwriter Hattori Ryouchi. The production made the wise decision to focus on her career as a singer, but Kasagi continued to work as an actress through the early 80s. And so we get to see the life of "Hanada Suzuko" from middle school through her early 40s when she decide to retire from singing and focus on acting instead.

Suzuko is deftly played by Shuri who pretty much nails the acting, singing and dancing that the role demands. The series concludes almost every week's episodes with a production number of one of the actual songs of Hattori. As you can imagine, a Japanese woman singing an American subgenre of jazz had to face some challenges when Japanese nationalism hit its heights during the wars in China and the Pacific. However, her brother was killed in battle, and one of the most moving moments of the series occurs when she sings a song written by Hattori about her brother's service which had been presumed lost until a few years before this production started. More central to her story is the love affair she had with her life partner who fathered her daughter but died of an illness during the war.

Hattori is played by Kusanagi Tsuyoshi, and is one of the more persistent characters in her life. However, like most asadoras the cast is huge, and so we also get to meet many others of Suzuko's family and friends (and at least one frenemy) along the way.

Most biographical asadoras have a hard time with the fact that most lives are not uniformly interesting throughout their span, and so often the series have to resort to significant time leaps to get to the juicy parts. There are indeed a few such leaps in this series as well, but the series does a better job than most at maintaining its pacing throughout the series and limiting this series to Kasagi's career as a singer helped to do so.

If you enjoy boogie woogie as a genre or asadoras in general, then this series is almost certainly for you. I think Japanese drama watchers in general would enjoy the acting of Shuri, and I would place it fairly high in the rankings of assdoras in general. It is certainly well worth watching despite being quite a time investment (like all asadora). Unfortunately, at the time of my writing this review most of the RAWs no longer appear to be available even to torrent. We shall have to wait and see if the RAW again make their way online once all the dvds of the series are out in Japan. In a happier world NHK would make their flagship series available for streaming and downloading internationally for a reasonable price.

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