Kangoku no Ohimesama Episodes 1-5

Kangoku no Ohimesama is a Kudo Kankuro (Tiger & Dragon/Manhattan Love Story) dorama with a stellar cast of the best actresses in Jdoramas along with Iseya Yusuke (Ashita no Joe). The story is about a group of women who met in prison getting their revenge on Ikemen Shacho Itabashi Goro.

The main attraction of the dorama are the chemistry between the characters especially Koizumi Kyoko's Baba Kayo, Kanno Miho's I didn't hurt anyone tax evader and Mitsushima Hikari's sensei.

Its funny how these group of women still carry over their practices and traditions from the prison to outside life. Or one could say that the practices from prison life is the basis of their friendship and they would not be able to relate to each other without them.

Kangoku no Ohimesama is funny, charming and has lots of flashbacks and it slowly goes through what happened with the obasans in prison and what they are taking revenge for. While the flashbacks are funny, it takes a very long time for them to get to the important questions to answers that I as the viewer want when interrogating Itabashi Goro.

It feels like instead of giving one small revelation in one episode, it would have been better for pacing reasons to have to have two, ie do the first five episodes in 3 episodes instead. I can understand Kudo Kankuro did it that way. Its more about the characters than the mystery and works as a once a week show. However, it doesn't make for a good marathon series.

I want to see what happens next but there's a lot of entertaining stuff that I need to go through to get to that point in the next episode. Its sad I can't give this a must watch but it is certainly fun to watch. Hopefully there will be a lot less detailed flashbacks in the second half of the series and the pacing can go faster.