One day, Sakurada Kazuhiko, a host at a club who was run over by a garbage truck, notices himself at the scene of an accident and staring at his own body. Sakurada realizes that the people around can’t see or hear him, but encounters another ghost (Momo) who takes him a ghost “sharehouse”, which is actually a rundown soba store. Besides Momo, there’s Saki (former nurse), Rin (high school girl), Sen no Rikyu (that one), and the living owner of the soba store who, despite being human, seems to notice their existence.
Before watching, there’s a few conditions you should accept first:
- Ghosts in this universe exist in an in-between state until they can come to terms with their past life and move on to Nirvana. Makes sense.
- Ghosts can communicate with the dead and the living. Believe it or not, ghosts have cellular service providers lol
- There are some limits, but ghosts can also interact with the living and vice versa.1
If you can live with all that, this is the drama for you!
If you’ve ever watched anything directed by Nagahisa Makoto, you’ll recognize a lot of his trademarks: bright and saturated, lo-fi, distorted… it’s pretty unique, but it could’ve been more restrained. Less visuals and more story, especially with just 7 episodes at less than 30 minutes apiece. That’s not to say I didn’t like the visuals. They were AWESOME:
I could go on. And then there were scenes like this:
Like I said, restraint. LOL
Anyway, as it turns out, moving on is not an easy concept. Saki was sure that after finding out what love meant, she would be able to move on — but she couldn’t! I think I found that surprising because the episode count was short, so I was expecting rotating departures. On the other hand, Momo finally stopped telling lies and was able to move on within an episode, and the payoff was actually quite sweet.2 And others simply don’t want to. I wonder how much of that was because Rikyu seemed to enjoy his time in the middle (幽Tube lol) or because we had a limited amount of time with our ghost family.
While I really liked the drama, I felt like things happened a little too conveniently. I could be convinced by Rin “watching over” a living Kazuhiko as its own standalone piece of the story, but the introduction of Matsuda Yuki just felt like a way to make things move faster… not organically. 10 episodes would’ve been really nice. But I did enjoy OreShin overall, Yuya Yagira was fantastic PER USUAL, and I enjoyed the feels it made me feel.
Rating: 4/5
- Matsuda Yuki’s character dated ghosts, ghosts could eat soba, etc. Being dead doesn’t seem like the end of the world, minus the whole dying/unfeeling thing. Pretty lighthearted if you ask me! ↩︎
- The cynical part of me thought his best friend was just being nice, but the taped together picture in the end credits made me think differently. ↩︎