I must confess I started watching this "Iyashi no Otonari-san ni wa Himitsu ga aru" only out of my love for Tanabe Momoko, who's my #1 fave of the current generation of Japanese actresses (and considering that she has some fierce competition there, that's saying quite a lot, isn't it?). And indeed she was once again perfect to a "T", gorgeous and tremendously talented as always.
On the other hand, I didn't have any expectation at all about the drama itself: I was actually expecting the Nth crappy hollywoodian story of "the good guy next door seems nice but actually is a psycho, so beware of other people, stay alone and unhappy 'cause that's how we want you to be"...but it ended up being, much to my surprise, quite the other way around!
The writers aren't keeping from us that the ML is a "psycho"; I mean, seriously, they portray him right from the beginning with a demented grin on his face, and on top of that, humming the European Union anthem! Hard to be crazier than that, right? >___<
(...yeah, I know it's Beethoven's "Ode to the Joy", but the EU using it has ruined that completely for me, sorry...)
Back to what I was saying (and more seriously!), what the writers did here was to actually orchestrate an intricate "double play": on the surface, we have the FL finding out, slowly but surely, that the ML ain't what he seems...but on a deeper level, we viewers take just the opposite path, finding out precisely that he's not as crazy (nor as "stalkerish") as we initially thought him to be! So in the end the message is a completely non-hollywoodian "the next person might be a lot better than you think, so open up and be happy", which is pretty damn nice, coming to think about it!
The music is good, the "packaging" too, the scenography great (I want an apartment like that! Of course as long as I could share the balcony with Momoko-chan, LOL).
But the absolute best part is the acting. ALL the cast did marvelously, with virtual standing ovations for both leads!
The only reason I'm not grading this as a "Perfect 10" (SPOILER ahead) is that I've found the stabbing scene with the subsequent endless monologue really forced and overall annoyingly clichéd; had they done that more nicely, it would've been perfect. But it got close.