My Husband Won't Fit (2019)

Click here for a video version of this review: https://youtu.be/Ry1AKGVWSZg

Netflix has some really great Asian content on it, and a recent addition called _My Husband Won’t Fit_ is another excellent addition to the catalogue. Now, you might have an inkling from the title what this is about, but the Japanese title will leave you in no doubt. It’s called _Otto no Chimpo ga Hairanai_ which when translated directly is _My Husband’s Dick Won’t Go In_. So there you go, that’s a series of words I never thought I would utter on this channel.

This is a very unusual series for Japan, as it takes a pretty open look at sex and the day to triumphs and troubles of married life. The couple are adorable, and the acting between the two of them is very natural. 

There’s 10 episodes and apart from three which are around 40mins long, the rest are nearer to the 30min mark. We follow the couple from when they meet while at Teachers College to their marriage through to their lives after. The problem that is included in the series title forms a key part of the story and is the spine from which the ribs of each episode grow. 

The show gives a realistic look at home and work life in Japan, and as someone married to someone who used to work as a teacher in Japan, the school scenes in particular brought back a lot of memories. The interactions with the parents and in-laws was also spot on. For anyone wondering what life in Japan is like, this will give you a pretty good insight.

It’s mostly a light drama, with some funny moments, and overall it’s a really sweet series. If you like quirky family stories with heart, you might just get a real kick out of this.

A story about sex. Made by the most prude Japanese standards. Not very inspiring.

She comes from nowhere. A nowhere that is very backward. Yet, taking someone in her room, and accepting sex is not an issue. Weird.

He comes from an even less evident nowhere. Going nowhere that might be the same nowhere where he came from, or not.

And not only the characters are badly drawn, but the casting is a bad idea, as the two actors are at least 10 years older than their characters.

What's more unpleasant it's the rotten take on life the producers have. Love means the dumb altruism, of course, the Asian version that implies some more pointless sacrifice than the Western dumb altruism. The writer / producers believe they are so evolved compared with the peasant's take on sex, yet it's the same penis-in-vagina thing. And there is the usual macho take on life: they are doing some mild effort to have some evolution of the male character, but the woman is mostly a pillow that can talk, how else, in a polite manner, once the male has finished his speech.

The end is somewhat redeeming. And it is flat. The characters are the same from where they have started the story. And although I choose to think it's about the woman having a choice, it might as well be the story of another nut who thinks there are too many people on the planet and his clan runs a risk of starving, which is not at all in sync with his personal image of chosen one.

For me it was instructive to see the corruption of the system. How the only choice is to become a bureaucrat shaping the lives of others in accordance with the wishes of those in power. I had no idea of how rotten and fake the school system can be, and how those OECD tests are rather meaningless: after the well to do parents spend a fortune showering the bureaucrats, they are taking it on the children who have to perform at any tests.

Or to see the ideals of the absolutist monarchies of the past centuries working in practice: the mother a meek house servant, the father a rather parasite, and both blending to mindlessly enforce the Big Brother edits with no consideration to the consequences in the life of the next generation. It for their own good, right?

It was fascinating to see the S&M practiced as normal in a relationship, of course with the Japanese twist: he is sempai and she is chan. And the reinforcing of the woman as simply an object, when she goes for a vaginal exam and she is hidden behind a curtain, although she had interacted with the doctor before and on camera after.