Lost Paradise (Shitsurakuen)

Kuki Shoichiro, a vet newsman, has recently been promoted sideways out of the fast track. All his years of unstinting effort were in vain. The raison d’être that has sustained him all these years taken away, he falls in love with Matsubara Rinko, a part-time calligraphy teacher nicknamed “Mrs Print” as much for her conventional, straight-arrow character as for the squared-off “printed” style of character calligraphy she favours. Kuki and Rinko find in their affair a connection that Rinko, in her arranged marriage to a prominent doctor, and Kuki, sidelined in his career and distant from his family, have been without. Mingled with their excitement in each other, however, is terror at the yawning gulf of isolation from their respective worlds.