Happy of the End Review: Love, Trauma, and Despair Collide
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“I want to die”
Those are probably not the first words you’d expect to hear after a kiss. But, well, the Japanese series Happy of the End isn’t your typical romantic drama either.
Kashiwagi Chihiro is young, beautiful, penniless, disowned by his family for being gay, and thrown to the streets by his latest lover for being unfaithful. One day, at a bar, he meets Keito, a good-looking guy who is exactly his type. Hoping to hook up, Chihiro makes his move, only to wake up in a dumpster with wounds. Thus begins a stormy, violent, uncertain relationship between the homeless Chihiro and the volatile Keito, who was trafficked as a child and has an awfully abusive past. The two start off on the wrong foot, but Keito takes in Chihiro like one does a stray dog, and an unequal affair brews between the two.
Directed by Furumaya Tomoyuki (‘Candy Color Paradox’), the eight-episode series is based on the manga Happy of the End (ハッピー・オブ・ジ・エンド) by Ogeretsu Tanaka. Beppu Yurai plays the 23-year-old Chihiro, who does odd jobs to survive and is known to leech off his lovers. Sawamura Rei is the mysterious Keito, abandoned by his mother as a child and exploited by a violent pimp called Maya (Asari Yosuke), forced into becoming an underage sex worker. However, when Chihiro and Keito meet, Keito has broken from his old life but continues to dabble in illegal street work as a ‘freelancer.’ So, unlike its deceptive title, Happy of the End is about two broken young men starting a parasitic relationship, which eventually leads to love and tears. Keito’s awful past continues to haunt him, and Chihiro becomes collateral damage.
Happy of the End is a bleak, dark, noir-like series, which heavily delves into Keito’s disturbing past, including a lot of abuse as an underage sex worker brutally exploited by adults. Director Furumaya Tomoyuki captures the ugly side of Japan’s illegal sex trade without showing any explicit sexual scenes. Keito’s childhood trauma is hauntingly captured in scenes where he observes his own past like a helpless spectator – a cinematic technique that viscerally conveys what PTSD can feel like. Fujiwara Kiyora plays a young Keito, who looks vacant, defeated, as an abandoned child left at the mercy of the wolfish Maya. Kubota Yuki plays Kaji, another man from the streets, who helps Keito find a new gig and the two become thick friends.
Asari Yosuke is snake-like in his depiction of Maya, an unhinged scummy human who’d go to any lengths for money, which includes forcing orphaned children into the flesh trade. It’s weird that a crook like Maya is shown to be jailed and is let off within a few years, which makes one wonder if it’s simply a convenient plot device to keep the villain out for drama and conflict in the plot, or reflective of how easy it is for sexual offenders to get off the hook by serving a paltry few years in jail. Anyway…
Ironically, even though Beppu Yurai and Sawamura Rei are individually very convincing as Chihiro and Keito, the romantic chemistry between the two is lacking. There’s no sexual tension in the air, and their equation feels more platonic, despite their characters being desperately in need of each other. One would expect the kind of chemistry that exists between Riku Hagiwara and Yûsei Yagi in the Japanese series Utsukushii Kare, which, of course, is a very different kind of drama (twisted in its own little ways) but certainly sets a high bar for onscreen sparks in gay romances.
Happy of the End is ambitious in its plot, but the eight episodes aren’t enough to cover the scale of tragedy in Keito’s life, or his existential crisis and in the process, Chihiro’s character almost feels sidelined. For instance, there’s a scene where Chihiro accidentally runs into his estranged sibling, and there’s very little interaction between the two, which makes the scene feel random and unnecessary. Chihiro simply tells the viewers through his conversation with Keito that he was forsaken by his family; viewers never really get the kind of glimpse they deserve into his life.
Regardless, despite Chihiro’s own personal problems, he is a cheery, laid-back young man, completely smitten by Keito, and can bring some unexpected warmth into the latter’s life. The seventh episode of Happy of the End has an infuriating, horrid twist, which gives the antagonist in the tale unbridled power to mess with Keito and ultimately leads to some unhappy consequences. The series remains consistently glum and slightly noir-like in tone, with the cinematography vividly bringing to life the frugal, fragile circumstances under which the leads live. The climactic episode juxtaposes extreme moments of joy and sorrow experienced by the protagonists but finally closes Happy of the End with an open-ended curtain call that promises a satisfactory conclusion for Chihiro and his beautiful but broken man.
Rating: 6.5/10. You can watch the series on GagaOolala.
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