Let me start by saying that the ending surprised me and yes it did suck in terms of wrapping up the story line.

It was well paced overall I would say but it does help that you can watch episodes back-to-back to keep the viewer in. Because it can bore you. But the idea that the affair and after result with the compensaiton seemed almsot like a buiness transaciton to me. Like there were no feelings on either side. He was just drifting and as a young men who to me seems like he was still a virgin, was given the chance to have sex with a beautiful women, he naviely took it wihtout thinking of the love he felt for his girflriend and it blew up in his face. While she is in an unhappy marriage, was craving as she said, affection and comfort from another and since her husband wasn't giving it to her and as any human would do in my opinion, looked towards someone else to fill that need.

I feel like it is what the Tokyo Tower storyline could've been if the FL was still with her husband as an endgame scenario. But while in this storyy the FL or second FL dependning how one sees it, is just expressing a basic human need which is what we as human beings crave, the attention and affection of another human. It's what made the story good for me is that, the affair itself refelcts both an embodiment of and what the reality of an ACTUAL affair is. Except perhaps the part of the ML compensating the wife's husband. That is a bit alien to me which is probably due to the fact that I am from the West and unlike in Japan where cheating is part of their culture alot more than in Canada, it seemed strange to me that the husband could measure his wife's infedelity in numbers.

Anyways....the ML was a barely out of high school graduate who just enetred the real world and thought he could handle it. But as we saw, he overestimated himself in his understanding of the world and he was consumed by it. He gave this sort of feeling, to quote a character form a video game "my soul was asleep but my body was moving". WHihc can sort reflect alot of men, like myself when I graduated high school nearly a decade ago and enter the big bad world, where you almost just let yourself float and go along with the current of life unitl you hit a wall of reality, causing to wake up and face the consequences of our actions. Which he faced and by the end, is still paying the price for it.

As for the FL(the wife, not the girlfriend) she was sad and she craved affection but did not get it from her husband so she went to an innocent young man (at the start of the drama) to get it. But it was just a means to an end and how she bascially made the whole affair, which seems more like a s*xual realtionship than anything else, since they didn't really do ANYTHING else besides sleep together look like a buiness deal with no reall atttachment except primal human desires.

And here is where I think the story is unique but also falls apart. the affair as mentioned before, was made to look like a transaction. The complete lack of emotions both during and after the affair was exposed gave this sort of fresh feeling that I have never really seen before, in the sense where you, as a viewer see the TRUE reality of what an affair is, but without the emotions attached to it and how yes its a bad horrible thing that damaged a marriage and ended a relationship. But people still have lives, they move on from it. But maybe it's becasue of this sort of cold resolution that made the ending lack a bit substance given the fact that after he payed back the husband, he moves on from the affair but is still stuck in the past where he writes to his ex hence he does not truly move on from the break-up which make the charatcer seem a bit pathethic and lacking "meat" so to speak and therefore lacks storytelling.