Review of Fishbowl Wives

As of late I’ve been on a major drama kick. Korean, Japanese, and Chinese dramas have all been fair game for my latest obsession, and I’ve been binge watching entire dramas in three days or less.

The one pro of being in graduate school is having the opportunity to just go ahead and have the summers off if I want, and because of that I’m able to take the time and sit and watch these shows. So I ended up stumbling upon Fishbowl Wives when researching an article for my freelance writing gig at MovieWeb.

I write criticism, interview, and do lists for them, so when I was writing an article about Japanese romance dramas on Netflix, I found out about this show.

I had seen it before in the carousel of shows to watch, but never felt particularly compelled to sit down and watch it. Well, one day I was facing choice paralysis on what to watch next and was flipping through my various subscription services before landing on Netflix.

And there this show was under the Asian romance dramas section; the cookies were hitting hard for this session. And so I pressed play.

Onwards with the review!

Dissatisfied wives grapple with cheating and emotional affairs with other people.

I’d say the main character in this show is Sakura, as we follow her the most throughout the episodes. At the beginning of the series her and her husband own a successful salon business, and in the public eye they look like the perfect couple on the magazine covers.

When Sakura arranges her own birthday party this year, the employees show the first cracks in their relationship: they mention how Sakura had to make her own party, and that it is unfortunate that she seems like she’s completely unaware that her husband is actively cheating on her with someone else.

As it turns out, as the camera follows them into their personal high-rise apartment, her husband also hits her and treats Sakura horribly.

That leaves Sakura to find solace on the streets, and she meets the owner of a goldfish and regular fish shop. He’s the exiled son of a wealthy family, but we don’t learn that fact until around the halfway point of the series.

But he teaches her about goldfish and how to take care of them, and when she returns to her house that night, and her husband ends up seeing her with the fish, he picks up the entire fishbowl and throws it on the ground. Sakura is obviously devastated because of it and flees to the fish shop owner, who helps take care of her fish before it dies.

Thus begins an eight-episode long series where she moves in with the fish shop owner, and her husband starts looking for her. She hides whenever he comes around, and he ends up buying a fish for himself.

The romance between Sakura and the fish shop owner is seriously innocent until the last couple of episodes, which is shocking because of how the other side stories get really steamy throughout.

Each episode has a tendency to focus on a different couple outside of Sakura’s problems, and in each of the stories the wife is unhappy with their husbands.

There’s one who has depression and her husband is unable to understand her, so when he goes out without her she just looks on at the television on the couch and gets even worse.

Then there’s the husband who gets another employee from his work to come in and have sex with his wife, who decides she likes the younger employee much more than her husband at the end of the day.

By the end of the series, Sakura ends up deciding to get a divorce from her husband, and leaves the fish store guy. There’s a note that she needs to be independent from men and paving a path for herself, starting a new salon, at the end of the series, which is a girl power moment.

I know people probably wouldn’t like this fact because they like endgame romance dramas, but Sakura finally escaped from her personal fishbowl and is starting a life of her own.

She couldn’t live her life without being defined by the men in it. The ending is also open, so someone could interpret it as she could end up with the fish store guy.

Overall Thoughts

I think this was a decent drama considering it only consisted of eight episodes. It went through a lot in those eight episodes, but I think if it was longer, it would begin to drag a little.

It would also run out of content it could go through, which would be bad for the viewers in the end. Lots of steamy scenes throughout with the subplots, but we don’t get much from the main couple.

As someone who didn’t care for these kinds of scenes that was fine with me, but I could see how someone purposely wanting more would not be content with this fact. I was perfectly fine without the sex scenes, which were pretty aggressive and out there at times with the scenarios leading up to them.

All in all, I was entertained and finished the series, which was enough for me.

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