J-Wednesdays 水曜日だ！: Summer Nude (J-drama 2013)

Summer Nude is a Japanese drama that aired last summer 2013. It stars Yamashita Tomohisa or as we like to call him, YamaPi. Together with YamaPi, whom I really miss, is Toda Erika and Karina. These three make up the lead characters in this summer drama. I shall now introduce you to the story and the main as well as the supporting characters.

Like in the subtitle above, it is indeed, Asahi's (YamaPi) third (lonely) summer since the girl on the billboard vanished from his life. Why and how did that happen? Let's find out later in this post.

The lady in the wedding dress is Natsuki (Karina), a respected chef who initially just got married in the first part of the first episode. The man standing, just on the right corner of the screenshot, is the official photographer of the wedding and our male lead character, Asahi.

Just after getting married and in their reception area, Natsuki's husband ran away, and didn't want to continue with the marriage anymore. Asahi also captured this moment, and also the start of Natsuki's sorrow.

Here is Toda Erika, who plays the character Hanae, Asahi's best friend. Hanae likes Asahi a lot, and she also usually expresses her feelings to him, but Asahi does not think much of Hanae's feelings. Hanae has liked Asahi ever since they met in high school, but Asahi never seems to care about whether Hanae likes her, especially when Asahi fell in love with a certain girl who left her three summers ago.

That girl is Kasumi (Nagasawa Masami, she's also the actress in Proposal Daisakusen, whom YamaPi was also chasing/loves). They met three years ago during summer, and also fell in love during those days. However, Kasumi suddenly left town and never came back, without saying anything to Asahi.

Now, back to the present summer. Because of certain circumstances, Asahi ended up asking Natsuki to go to his town and manage his friend's restaurant, since his friend, Setsuko (Itaya Yuka), just gave birth and still couldn't manage the restaurant.

Natsuki went to Asahi's town, thinking that it was only a one time job. However, she immediately found out that it was for the whole summer, and so she outright rejected the job. In the mean time, she stayed the night in Hanae's house, and they bonded together.

Finally, we have Hikaru (Kubota Masataka), another one of Asahi's close friends. He likes Hanae, but of course, Hanae is not aware of that, and no one knows. He is well aware of Hanae's one-sided liking for Asahi, and also knows of her suffering because of it.

In the next episodes, Natsuki will eventually manage Setsuko's restaurant in the mean time. Also, Natsuki will be showing her support for Hanae's pursuit of love, and that makes it all the more complicated since we can already foresee a love web going on within the group. Summer really is the season for adventures and new experiences outside of our daily lives. Let's see how each of these characters' summer goes as we go on with the drama. I'm hoping to finish this soon, because it only has 11 episodes and I'm already on the 5th episode. Looking forward to a refreshing summer drama despite it being (almost) winter already. Nonetheless, there are only two seasons here in the Philippines and it always feels like summer anyways. Might as well enjoy it!