rcarlberg Reviews

My Husband Won't Fit (2019– )

It is very.... Japanese

[7/10 · 13 April 2019]

The physical incompatibility of the title is the theme running through this series, but it's not really about that. It's about the Japanese cultural disinclination to discuss delicate matters openly. It's about how Japanese women, in particular, are taught that they should experience a life of depravation and discomfort before they ever deign to bring up something embarrassing. How communication, which is so central to any good marriage, is secondary to cultural norms of subservience and deference.

That's not to say the long silences, and the reluctance of BOTH characters to resolve their physical incompatibility, wasn't aggravating and occasionally infuriating. In this day & age, there are SO MANY options they could have explored -- both to please each other, and to alleviate the wife's discomfort -- but the writers chose not to explore what would be normal, common-sense measures.

I enjoyed the series, even though it occasionally infuriated me, because it gave me such a good insight into a very foreign culture.

Sister Cities (2016 TV Movie)

Excellent But Medically Inaccurate

[7/10 · 2 January 2017]

This movie affected me very deeply because I was the primary caretaker for my own mother, who died in 2011 of a form of ALS. The issues involved were very close to the surface for me (still) and I reacted very emotionally to this beautifully crafted story.

Unfortunately the timeline in the movie was grossly inaccurate. It took my mother eight agonizing years to lose the use of her body, bit-by-bit, and by the end she could neither talk nor communicate. She slowly lost the use of her legs about 4 years after her first stumbling signs of trouble, and lost the ability to write about 6 years in. She was bedridden for the last three years of her life, 100% mentally normal but slowly becoming encased in a body that would no longer respond to her.

She refused a feeding tube when swallowing became a problem, and eventually had to die, three weeks later, from slow starvation. It was horrible. She BEGGED (when she still could) to be hastened toward death but by then there was nothing we could do. Washington's "Death With Dignity" law did not apply to her situation.

So while the story here treated similar circumstances with compassion, there was an unrealistic portrayal of the true horrors of ALS.