The spring television season has arrived, and with it a new crop of dramas. Most of the leading characters are women, but whereas heroines once meant romance or family themes, this year the theme is work.
"Tokyo Love Cinema" (Fuji TV) premieres this Monday at 9 p.m. with a special 69-minute opener. Naomi Zaizen plays Haruko, an employee of one of Japan's major movie distribution companies. In the first episode, she travels to an international film festival and successfully acquires a number of major movies for the Japanese market. However, later, in a corporate reshuffle, she's transferred to the "mini-theater" department (a Japanese word best represented by the English term "art house," meaning movie theaters that don't play major Hollywood movies) department, a move that she interprets as a demotion.
On her birthday, she dejectedly goes by herself to a mini-theater to take in a movie and there runs into Masaki (Yosuke Eguchi), who runs a very small film distribution company that happens to have its office in the same building where Haruko's company is headquartered. Masaki's company, however, is on the verge of bankruptcy, and he's bet everything he has on a small Turkish film he acquired at the same film festival where Haruko made her big deals.