Hatsukoi no Akuma Episode 1

Thanks to Faiz Ikari for alerting me to the existence of this Sakamoto Yuji dorama. I used to go through jadefrost's jdrama weblog every season to look through all the coming shows and sometimes even wrote about shows I was looking forward to. Now I am lazy and just watch whatever shows up on dramahd and drama-otaku. 

If you don't know who Sakamoto Yuji is, he is a jdorama writing god. Please watch Quartet on Netflix if you have not because he can write beautiful dialogue that just sings. If I were the Minister of Common Sense for Japan, I would declare him a national treasure and give him a crazy budget to do whatever WOWOW doramas he wants.

The good news is kaizensubs has subbed the first 5 episodes of Hatsukoi no Akuma. The bad news is I could not get the English subs after requesting and it seems like there has not been new subs for a while. The good news though is the HikariRaiders raws have Japanese subs because dialogue for Sakamoto Yuji shows are fast and I need Japanese subs to keep up.

Hatsukoi no Akuma is a detective crime solving series except the crime solving is not done by a detective. The main characters of Hatsukoi no Akuma are underdogs. Firstly Hayashi Kento plays a detective who is suspended from work because of a screw up and feels like he is channeling a bit of Abe Hiroshi and he thinks that his neighbour Yasuda Ken is a serial killer.

Nakano Taiga seems to be the main character who plays an office worker who works for the police folding posters and delivering tape etc. Ito Hideaki is Nakano Taiga's boss and tells him that someone in the station caused the death of Nakano's brother.

Matsuoka Mayu is from public safety and Emoto Tasuku is from accounting. Hatsukoi no Akuma is a police comedy with a bunch of underdogs solving a crime and the crime of the first episode is a young boy who fell from a window in a hospital. The police think that the death was an accident and of course our main character think that someone pushed the kid out the window.

First impressions are while there is the trademark Sakamoto Yuji snappy dialogue there is nothing about the first episode of Hatsukoi no Akuma that impressed me. There are some breadcrumb story like is Yasuda Ken really a serial killer and we have the traitor who caused the death of Nakano Taigo's brother. Everything seems pretty standard and nothing has stood out yet in episode 1 besides some interesting crime re-enactments as our underdog main characters discuss the various possibilities. 

I am willing to give Hatsukoi no Akuma as many episodes as it needs to get good. I didn't like the last Sakamoto Yuji show Omameda Towako but fingers crossed it gets better and deserves that best script award that Faiz Ikari mentioned so that I can amend my hamsapsukebe awards for 2022!