What a viewJapanese drama Tokyo Girl on Amazon Prime Video offers a female perspective on big city life

Undersold, underappreciated and under the radar, Amazon Prime Video series Tokyo Girl begins with a mission statement: “I’d like to become a person envied by others.” So says Aya Saito, thinking out loud and betraying the philosophical depth of her ambitions.

That this should be her motivation while still at school in a dead-end town points one way only: bright lights, big city, where this Cinderella believes all her dreams – enviable career, lifestyle, husband – will come true.

And after a fashion (literally, because she starts work at a fashion company), Aya (Asami Mizukawa) is proved right. It’s just that in the meantime she must press her nose up against the bulletproof glass of class divide and wade into the swamp of bitchy office politics and inadvisable dating.

Having managed the tricky ascent of a slime-smeared corporate rung or two, Aya, made a brand manager for being cunning enough to spot the money on offer from Japan’s “neo-material … greedy” girls, realises she is finally envied by others. Not that she isn’t still avaricious and acquisitive: a rising-star bond-broker boyfriend from a privileged family and – the ultimate stamp of success – a birthday date at Tokyo’s ostentatious Joël Robuchon restaurant, and she’s all set: wealth, status and power assured.

Naturally, life for her, at least from 23 to 40, doesn’t work out like that in these 11, first-series episodes. Aya’s ideas of perfection shift as it dawns on her that what she knows is more important than whom, making Tokyo Girl a straightforward, sympathetic social observation. Mizukawa nimbly plays both status-hungry career girl and heartbroken dumpee, especially when stepping out of a scene (but remaining in character) to address viewers directly.

So, the morality-tale gods are not averse to teaching Aya the occasional lesson; but, ultimately, will they make her a Roppongi Hills girl, or leave her as just a face in the Harajuku crowd?