Back in Europe in the 1960s, if a key agent resigned, you abduct them and imprison them in a picturesque village while trying to tease out their inner motives. In Japan in the 2010s, you let them settle down as a dutiful wife in an upmarket suburb... or do you?
Ex-secret agent Nami Isayama, a fragment of whose past life as a top operative we glimpse in the action opening scenes of the first episode, is a devoted housewife living a dull life in a select residential area where her days consist of cleaning, cooking (running gag: not very well) and spending time with her nextdoor neighbours, Yuri and Kyoko. Afternoons are often spent attending local classes in anything from flower arranging and cooking to yoga and how-to-wear-a-kimono lessons.
The women-who-lunch classes are a useful dramatic device for the hyper-perceptive Nami to uncover crimes and injustices, e.g. wife-beating, kidnapping, blackmail, extortion etc, which would otherwise remain undetected and onto which she can bring to bear her formidable retributive skills. As Nami has no wish for her past life to be revealed, she has to go about her activities in the utmost secrecy and this adds to the challenge of some of the cases that she takes on.
Nami even has to keep her clandestine past hidden from Yuri and Kyoko with whom she evolves an ever closer relationship during the course of the series. This results in Nami having to develop an ever more complex edifice of cover stories to explain certain skills that come to light, e.g. she once worked as a boxing instructor, as a travel agent, in a tax office etc.
As the series progresses we are fed snippets from Nami's backstory at the beginning of each episode and so learn more about how she became an agent. Ultimately Nami's past catches up with her and the series reaches an open-ended conclusion, the implications of which are explored in a spin-off feature length special released three years after this series.
Caution, Hazardous Wife is a well-made and upbeat thriller with both comic and serious threads running through it. The sexual politics aren't always easy to judge from a European point of view but, by setting the drama in a conventional middle-class milieu, the writer is able to satirise a relatively universal form of gender stereotyping as well as highlight some typical deficiencies in Japanese men's expectations around marriage.
Nami Isayama is played by Haruka Ayase who made her breakthrough back in 2008 with a starring role as the eponymous lead in Cyborg She (2008) for which she learned Karate, a skill which she regularly demonstrates throughout this entertaining series.
As can be deduced from a couple of previous reviews, this series is not recommended for Incels.
