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Learning to Love is a Japanese romantic drama series that I probably shouldn't have watched, as I'm not a fan of the Japanese version of lounge lizards. Also, an average-looking teacher who is thirty-five falling for said extremely dramatic-looking lounge lizard when he's twenty-three (even thought he has a learning disability) seems like a stretch. Still, I wanted to see if they could pull it off, and for the most part they did.

Ogawa Manami (Kimura Fumino) a high school teacher who still lives at home and is being pressured to get married by her overbearing father and dishrag of a mother, meets Kaoru (Murakami Raul Maito), a 23-year-old nightclub host who dropped out of school and cannot functionally read or write. This is at first to save one of her students from Kaoru's clutches, but the two gradually become friends and Manami tries to teach him how to read and write so he can improve his life and get out of the host business.

It goes about how you'd expect, but there are a few interesting twists: Manami's mother grows a spine, the guy Manami's being pressured to marry quickly becomes a very strange antagonist, and Kaoru's wretched past comes to light (although throughout the series you get the gist of how much his life has sucked.) The ending was logical and kind, I thought.

Downsides: some that are significant and possibly triggering for abuse victims. I've noticed that the Japanese apparently are entertained by women being verbally and sometimes physically abused, and there was rather a lot of that in every episode. I thought the way Manami's father treated her mother should have gotten him a trip to prison; his flip toward the end made no sense to me. He was a mean, selfish mysoginist. The scene where Manami is verbally abused by all of her former students was silly and stomach-turning; no school would ever allow that (I hope.) The chemistry didn't seem to be there between the leads and I didn't really believe in the romance between these two, either.

Learning to Love was well-acted by the entire cast, and I am relieved that Kaoru was not a minor. That probably saved the series for me, although I won't watch it again. You have been warned. Available on Netlfix.

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