In 2016, a Japanese drama called "Tokyo Women's Picture Book" went viral on the Internet.
The heroine Aya came to Tokyo from her hometown to work hard, counterattacked all the way, joined the upper class, and gradually saw the truth of life in the twists and turns of love and career.
The drama truly restores the love and desire of urban women, and has triggered many topics of discussion in China, and even appeared in the "Chinese version" of "Beijing Women's Illustration" and "Shanghai Women's Illustration".
For a time, the derivative content of the "xx picture book" was flooded, and the strange things and strange phenomena in urban life were excavated, becoming the "reference answer" that attracted attention and numbered seats.
At the same time, some netizens put forward soul torture, "Since they have all taken pictures of women's pictures, can they also come to a men's picture book?" ”
Unexpectedly, it really came ——
Tokyo Men's Illustrated Book
01
Yuki Takeshi starred. Japanese drama fans should be very familiar, he once played the role of novelist Ritsuo Kijima in the large-scale Japanese drama "Erotic Novelist". In this film, he delicately and deeply created a seductive and lustful male protagonist image, high cold and emaciated, people can't help but want to lick the screen.
This time, Taketomi Keinosuke incarnated as Shota, an elite trading company in Tokyo, and from university to society, he has been up and down for 20 years.
Zhu Cai also contributed excellent acting skills in the play, and portrayed a sleek and shrewd urban office worker in a three-point way.
Like "Tokyo Girl's Illustrated Book", this drama also starts from the protagonist's student days. At that time, Shota was still an aspiring college student, his peers were already preparing for graduation, and he was still indulging in pleasure and wasting time.
Through friendship, Shota made a beautiful girlfriend, and skipping class and falling in love became the norm. Although the two are in love, the pursuits of the girlfriend and Shota are actually very different.
The clothes that his girlfriend took him to visit cost 1 million yen (about 63,800 yuan) a set of clothes, and the restaurant he patronized was 30,000 yen (about 1,900 yuan), and his girlfriend wanted a luxurious material life.
Not long after dating, Shota also found that her beautiful girlfriend had betrayed her and found another older rich man.
Shota, who has never thought much about the future, has since set a grand ambition: to break out of the world in Tokyo, take a salary of 10 million yuan, and let the gold worshippers fall at their feet.
After graduation, Shota tried her best to squeeze into a big company in Tokyo, the annual salary was getting higher and higher, and his girlfriends changed one by one, but the people who wanted to marry still felt that he was not rich enough.
After more than ten years of career struggle, he waited for a promotion opportunity, but he was replaced by other colleagues, and even his juniors surpassed him. Do you want to take a pay cut and jump to a small company or continue to suffer in a large company? It became a difficult problem in front of Xiangtai.
I thought that coming to Tokyo could achieve a reversal of life, win a white rich beauty, and go to the peak of life, but in the end, I found that the life in Tokyo was not easy to mix...
02
It is not difficult to see that this "Tokyo Men's Picture Book" is in line with the previous "Tokyo Women's Picture Book" on many levels.
Both male and female protagonists come from small cities, have a "hard- and enterprising" ambition, and have clear goals and plans for how much money they make, where they live, and what kind of social status they achieve.
The partners around them are changed in turn, and they are equally shrewd and sophisticated in love and career paths, and there is an attempt to jump up the class.
At first glance, the male protagonist is a replica of Aya.
However, if you think about it carefully, you will find that the two actually have an essential difference.
The biggest difference between "Tokyo Women's Picture Book" and "Tokyo Men's Picture Book" is that the object of desire of the female protagonist Aya in the city is full of clear directions, such as the material level such as wearing, eating and drinking, and the emotional level such as marriage; but as the male protagonist, Shota, his desire object is mainly concentrated at the level of work and social status.
In "Tokyo Women's Illustrated Book", Aya eventually becomes an enviable urban ol, from Sancha to YoyoGi Uehara, achieving a perfect class climb, but in the face of worldly marital pressures, she still has a feeling of loss and incompleteness.
This is because society's expectations of women still regard family as an important factor, and if you can't realize your ambitions at this level, you can't achieve Aya's original ambition of "I want both sides".
On Shota's side, this drama sets the main criterion for men's social status as annual salary.
Therefore, you will find that Shota repeatedly emphasizes his annual salary of 12 million yen (about 766,000 yen) in the friendship, and he hopes to win the favor of the women around him, but at the same time, in the words of a female friend in the play, he is also secretly screening women with this standard.
All women have been stereotyped as "gold worshippers" in his eyes, so the girlfriends found by this standard naturally cannot have any good results.
In his third relationship, the pragmatic girlfriend gave him a critical blow, and Shota, who originally planned to propose, was bluntly responded by his girlfriend: "My husband's annual salary must be at least 30 million." ”
It was not easy to meet an elite woman who was in love with herself, but at this time Shota began to feel inferior, and as soon as she heard that the other party's annual salary was much higher than her own, she immediately gave up the pursuit and used "already beautiful girlfriend" to forcibly save herself.
Although the "Tokyo Men's Picture Book" uses salary as the specific goal of the male protagonist's struggle, such a simple attribution is actually a bit narrow.
In real life, urban men face not only the struggle in salary, but also the judgment of other aspects such as education, family, appearance, etc., and the unfolding of the series in these aspects is obviously not as detailed and meticulous as the "Tokyo Women's Picture Book".
In addition, the series spends a lot of ink to describe Shota's situation in career development, women seem to go through the motions, commenting on the time spent with Shota in an outsider's way, and the human settings are basically negative, with an obvious male perspective.
The history of women's struggle is the love choice between different men, and the history of men's struggle is the career promotion record. This is obviously a one-sided interpretation of the urban life of men and women by the creators.
Although both works explore the choices of individuals in the face of money, love and desire, "Tokyo Women's Picture Book" is very grounded in both the play and the lines, cutting through the dark psychology of urban women at present, dissecting their choices and dilemmas at different stages of life, and causing people to think deeply.
The "Tokyo Men's Picture Book" is a little far away, the character portrayal of Shota is slightly thin, the whole drama looks more like a "Scumbag Picture Book", the male protagonist's quick success and deformed values run through the whole play, and do not let people see the arc of the characters on Shota.
So far, the only details that have found interesting are two:
One is the male protagonist's discussion about cricket women and ant men when he first entered the workplace. The male protagonist compares the young women who will be sought after without hard work to cricket women, and the men who work honestly to ant men, and believes that cricket women will only think of the good of ant men when they are old.
At this time, Shota already had a prejudice against women because of his past experience, and he implied that he was an ant man, and the surrounding women were cricket women, but in fact, as Shota said at the same time, Shota was the cricket.
He currying favor with his boss inside and outside the company, trying his best to show himself, and even harming his colleague Kojima, such ambitions are no different from the cricket women in his mouth, and the diligent and earnest, but the island that buries his head is the real ant man.
Therefore, in the final promotion campaign, Kojima, who had always been despised by him, was finally identified by the leadership as a reliable candidate and had the opportunity to be sent to Singapore, while Shota, who had always been scheming, failed to do so.
The setting of this plot not only makes Shota's human weakness shake to the ground, but also exposes the unspoken rules of the Japanese workplace from the side, which can be described as quite realistic.
The other is a scene in which the male protagonist participates in the classmate association. Shota had originally gone to show off as a trading company elite, looking for a sense of existence, only to find that after another topic figure appeared, he immediately became a marginal figure and awkwardly fled the izakaya.
The series traces Shota's previous memories through interpolations, and in high school, Shota was actually a single person who was excluded from the circle. And now, he desperately wants to be the central figure that he once hated.
Shota in high school contrasts with the scenes at the classmates' meeting, one after the other, revealing his vanity essence to the fullest.
This scene can be said to be both funny and poignant, and Taketori Nobusuke portrays the role of Shota, a strong and ambitious boy, very realistically through various subtle eye movements and words.
In fact, when you see the end, you will find that whether it is Shota or Aya, under the proud winning heart is the fragile self-esteem that has been broken.
This self-esteem has become the driving force for them to strive and strive, and it has also invisibly distorted their values and hindered them from achieving true happiness.
Although the Tokyo Men's Illustrated Book does not have a meticulous, objective and comprehensive observation of women in the Tokyo Women's Illustrated Book, from this point of view, it presents a cut-off aspect of male survival in urban life.
They tumble in the wave of desire, sometimes feel that they are the tip of the wave, sometimes thrown back to the beach, the sense of superiority and loss are bubbles, and what is left behind after the wave may be the most important warning and thinking that this kind of urban inspirational drama wants to give us.
(b station can be seen)