氷の世界 / Koori no Sekai / Ice World

This came out back in 1999, but who cares!
The picture was flawless, the subtitles were absolutely marvelous throughout, and the storyline kept me hooked for the duration, too.
Takenouchi's character is an insurance fraud investigator who ends up being drawn into a fascinating case where a young woman, a school teacher so maddeningly beautiful that she has guy after guy falling in love with her only to end up dying shortly after he cancels an insurance policy taken out to prove his unequivocal love for the mysterious female with a checkered past and no sense of remorse for any of her dead lovers.
It was also a two-fer deal for me in that Takenouchi AND Nakamura Toru star in this one!



He's a cop with a chip on his shoulder and a boat-load of personal problems that make it impossible for anyone (including his terrified wife) to warm up to the guy, much less get close to him.
She wants a divorce and he won't grant it.
She tried to leave him and he raped her.

Sooooooooo sexy.

Take's character has a steady girlfriend of 8 years, and she's a traffic cop who is suddenly promoted to detective when Nakamura hires her to help him solve the case.
He's desperate to move on so that he can concentrate more on his crumbling marriage than on his job, which is starting to weigh him down even more than his personal problems are.

There were moments when I wondered if Take's character really was falling for the mystery woman, but alas - he does, and the intensity of the following episodes increased until the very end, when a mind-boggling outcome unfolds before you and you're left utterly speechless (as was the case for me anyway).

I couldn't have predicted an outcome that surprising no matter how much I tried to concentrate on what was going on during this show.
There was another character I kept hunching at was the murderer, and boy, was I ever wrong!

Some pictures ~