According to East Asian folklore, lovers are tied together by an invisible and unbreakable "red thread of destiny". This old-fashioned romanticism about red threads and fated love provides the wistful wrapping for the 2008 youth drama Akai Ito. Based on a mania cellphone novel about a schoolgirl's supposedly real-life experiences, the romantic mini-series about two teens who must overcome many roadblocks to be together squeezes buckets of Lifetime Television trials into its 11 episodes. Yet, it manages to stay fairly down to earth and affecting during its bumpy adolescent journey.

Many serious revelations and responsibilities are thrown the way of Akai Ito's young protagonists, Mei (Minamisawa Nao) and A-kun (Mizobata Junpei). After crossing paths as children, they serendipitously meet and bond again as junior high school students. It turns out they share not only the same leap year birthday, but also a tragically intertwined family history that makes it difficult for them to be together in the drama-ridden present.

Akai Ito runs through serious issues like drugs, abuse, adoption, suicide, divorce, and teen pregnancy, along with the wishy-washy hookups and breakups, relationship woes, and coming-of-age rites that come with the youth drama package. Despite packing in such heavy subject matter, for the most part the story never ventures into the outright teen-fantasy melodrama of say Koizora, and actually handles many of these tough issues with convincing sensitivity and a positive message. There's way too much going on to be wholly believable, but the series does a fairly good job in its depiction of conflicts like abusive relationships and A-kun's mother's drug addiction problem. It helps also that both protagonists are ultimately just regular, decent, unexciting teenagers responding to some extraordinary circumstances, as they provide a calm and rational anchor to the story that saves it from emotional excess. (And thankfully, there's no terminal disease.)

Perhaps Akai Ito's strongest and most realistic point is the way it chronicles how relationships form and fall apart as time passes, be it with friends, lovers, or family. Care is taken to not cast characters as either good or bad, but rather flawed to different degrees, and thus capable of hurting themselves and those they love.

Standing at the epicenter of dramarama land, Mei and A-kun seem far too nice and J-drama chaste to be real, but they make a couple worth rooting for. Both Minamisawa Nao and Mizobata Junpei should have solid careers ahead of them. Reminding of a young Hirosue Ryoko, Minamisawa is particularly refreshing for really coming across as a normal schoolgirl, who is pretty in a plain way and bubbly without being cutesy.

Akai Ito is also notable for its execution as it was produced as both a movie and a mini-series, with the former basically being a much shorter edit of the story. The movie was released theatrically during a lull in the TV broadcast schedule after the first few episodes were aired. The mini-series acted as a teaser to attract audiences to cinemas, and in turn the movie then acted as a teaser to encourage audiences to watch the rest of the series. With TV ratings falling and TV spin-off movies raking in box office, this double-pronged strategy makes for an interesting marketing experiment (the Pocky tie-in campaign was also a nice touch), and it may be a sign of what's to come. For those who don't want to invest 11 episodes' time, the movie version of Akai Ito, Threads of Destiny, offers a decent bite-sized version of the story - but the TV series is by far the better watch to get the full picture.