I’m around midway through the series now, and I continue to be entertained by the amount of over the top drama in Glass Mask.
There’s Soul Shattering Death! Tsukikage turns Maya over to the Daito Corporation and Hayami begins the work of turning her into a star. She’s acting in a supporting role on a TV drama and has a role in a movie. Unfortunately she’s surrounded by saboteurs who delight in spiking her food and booby trapping her sets. Maya’s mother is now blind and tubercular, trapped in a hospital with no contact with the outside world. Hayami is paying off the hospital because he wants to engineer a touching mother daughter reunion for the media at the premiere of Maya’s new play. Maya’s mom figures out what’s going on, escapes the hospital, and hitchhikes to Tokyo in the rain in an attempt to find Maya. She ends up dying alone in a movie theater, listening to her daughter act in her first movie.
There’s All About Eve Shenanigans! A mysterious girl named Norie shows up and starts acting like Maya’s personal assistant. Unfortunately she is studying Maya’s every move so she can take over her roles. Norie tells Maya that Hayami was preventing her from seeing her mother. Then Norie pays off a motorcycle gang to take Maya to a beach and ply her with drugs. Maya goes along with it, as the recent events have left her a total zombie. Maya passes out on the beach and misses her first performance. Norie steps in for the role. Maya’s fledgling career is shattered.
There’s Revenge in the form of Acting! Ayumi is disturbed by her rival’s abrupt fall from grace and does some investigating. She discovers that Norie is responsible and maneuvers her director father to cast her in a supporting role as a vampire in Norie’s new play. Ayumi destroys Norie with the power of acting, turning her vampire supporting character into the lead role and blowing her off the stage. Maya is left on her own to rehabilitate her career, and she does so by putting on amazing one woman shows at her high school.
There’s Romance! Maya’s first love ends up being not the patient and long-suffering Sakurakouji but her teen idol television co-star Satomi. They go out on a couple dates, but Satomi’s manager decides that they can’t date anymore after Maya’s fall from grace. Hayami gradually realizes that he’s in love with Maya and he’s appropriately creeped out at himself for entertaining feelings for a girl 11 years younger than him. Even though he keeps paying for Tsukikage’s hospital bills, he still exhibits plenty of his old traits as a heartless bastard. He forces Maya to go on stage after the death of her mother, and even kidnaps her from time to time when she has pneumonia and needs medical treatment.