A refreshing drama with a mr and mrs smith vibes. The leading lady was superb, especially with the action scenes. He performance was the best out of the entire cast. The plot, moreover, combined the spy training of the main character with her new role as a housewife splendingly. Also, the friendship between the housewives was really heart warming and entertaining, as each one provided the drama with a nice side story. My only regret about this drama is the ending, that was open and didn't conclude the story nicely. So, seven out of ten.
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PennyReviews24 November 2018
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lyntonadam23 October 2020It's really hard to be original, no matter the genre, so the best we can usually hope for is old ideas done with energy & perhaps a slightly new angle here & there. Such is the case with this likable, 10 ep J Drama about Nami ( Haruka Ayase ), who grew up an orphan, became a secret govt agent & then swapped it for marriage because she craved the warmth/love of a family. Despite scoring a handsome husband & a house in an up-scale suburb, she soon discovers life as a housewife is pretty dull. So armed with her agent skills & with the help of two neighbour friends, Nami proceeds to explore a range of contemporary issues in the area & intervene where required. We know from "American Beauty" that suburbia is often a hotbed of drama seething under a benign exterior & Tokyo is no different, while the concept of exceptional people forced into an average life is also nothing new. What makes this series interesting/watchable is crossing the two narratives & viewing events from a female perspective. After all, it's the wife whose usually stuck at home caring for children & fighting boredom while the man escapes to go to work. Each ep features a different incident & most are well-written, with periodic surprises & a sense of humour. What made me sad ( & I'm sure it's realistic ) is that the husbands of Nami's two friends basically ignore their wives apart from eating the food that's prepared for them. There's minimal conversation, let alone a hug/kiss or saying "I love you" occasionally. No wonder the Japanese birth rate is dropping. Who you select as the lead in a show like this is crucially important & in the enthusiastic Ms Ayase we have an immensely affable character eager to do the right thing & help people ( & bash wrongdoers if necessary ). The rest of the cast is good, with guest actors also popping up regularly/effectively ( it took me a while to recognise Kana Kurashina as a glammed-down victim of DV ). The direction/photography is functional without offering any real style, but you can't have everything. And I think the primary villain needed a LOT more punishment ( especially since a woman is badly beaten in unnecessary detail; suggestion was easily feasible ).
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Gordon_Harker11 November 2020Back in Europe in the 1960s, if a key agent resigned, you abduct them and imprison them in a picturesque village while trying to tease out their inner motives. In Japan in the 2010s, you let them settle down as a dutiful wife in an upmarket suburb... or do you?
Ex-secret agent Nami Isayama, a fragment of whose past life as a top operative we glimpse in the action opening scenes of the first episode, is a devoted housewife living a dull life in a select residential area where her days consist of cleaning, cooking (running gag: not very well) and spending time with her nextdoor neighbours, Yuri and Kyoko. Afternoons are often spent attending local classes in anything from flower arranging and cooking to yoga and how-to-wear-a-kimono lessons.
The women-who-lunch classes are a useful dramatic device for the hyper-perceptive Nami to uncover crimes and injustices, e.g. wife-beating, kidnapping, blackmail, extortion etc, which would otherwise remain undetected and onto which she can bring to bear her formidable retributive skills. As Nami has no wish for her past life to be revealed, she has to go about her activities in the utmost secrecy and this adds to the challenge of some of the cases that she takes on.
Nami even has to keep her clandestine past hidden from Yuri and Kyoko with whom she evolves an ever closer relationship during the course of the series. This results in Nami having to develop an ever more complex edifice of cover stories to explain certain skills that come to light, e.g. she once worked as a boxing instructor, as a travel agent, in a tax office etc.
As the series progresses we are fed snippets from Nami's backstory at the beginning of each episode and so learn more about how she became an agent. Ultimately Nami's past catches up with her and the series reaches an open-ended conclusion, the implications of which are explored in a spin-off feature length special released three years after this series.
Caution, Hazardous Wife is a well-made and upbeat thriller with both comic and serious threads running through it. The sexual politics aren't always easy to judge from a European point of view but, by setting the drama in a conventional middle-class milieu, the writer is able to satirise a relatively universal form of gender stereotyping as well as highlight some typical deficiencies in Japanese men's expectations around marriage.
Nami Isayama is played by Haruka Ayase who made her breakthrough back in 2008 with a starring role as the eponymous lead in Cyborg She (2008) for which she learned Karate, a skill which she regularly demonstrates throughout this entertaining series.
As can be deduced from a couple of previous reviews, this series is not recommended for Incels. -
gamyrgyrl19 January 2021Come on!! Super cute show showing that housewives want some thrills in their life. Its truthful, haters are reading to much into this one. Worth a watch and its fun!
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stevexarek14 August 2022... is slit eyed and thin....which American women are not. Otherwise mis-andrist.
Even the teen boy is evil and it takes a woman to set that right too..
so much hate in this world. Why add to it? -
gee-1525 April 2022The premise is interesting: a former secret agent leaves her exciting life behind to become a housewife but finds it boring and so uses her spy skills to address social issues in her suburban neighborhood. This she does with the help of two other housewives ( who don't know her real identity) and occasional support from her husband who seems ignorant of her past.
It's an uneven combination of comic juxtaposition ( spies in suburbia) and serious social issues ( spousal abuse, bullying, etc). As a result the comedy is watered down (the lead is supposed to be bad at being a housewife but the only evidence of that is her inability to make a salad in her immaculately clean kitchen). And the social issues become hard to take seriously when the problems are so quickly resolved by some good old fashioned "butt-kicking" by the former spy. And the series ends on a weird cliffhanger. ( I think it's followed up by a movie where they finish out the story line but I doubt I'll try and watch it).