Let's Get Divorced, and the Marriage Everyone Else Needed

At home, the only conversations they still have are performances. The synopsis Netflix published before Let’s Get Divorced came out puts it plainly: Shoji Taishi and Kurosawa Yui, five years married, play the model couple for the sake of their work and of appearances, and at home they barely speak, or even see each other’s faces, except when they are live on social media together. On the stream they are the couple the country admires. Then the stream ends.

He is a first-term member of the Diet, the third of his family to sit there, holding the seat in Ehime that was his late father’s. She is an actress, known, in the words Netflix used when it announced the series, as “the number one actress everyone wants to marry”. A year before the story begins, his affair with a television announcer came out. She forgave him in public. Her popularity soared, and his sank.

Then, at a Setsubun festival in Ehime, he tells her they should get divorced, and she answers that she had been thinking the same thing. It may be the first thing they have agreed on in years, and it settles nothing. His mother needs the marriage for his career. Her mother lives on money from his family. Her sponsors are paying for the image. When Netflix announced the cast, it called the Shojis “a mediatised married couple”, and the word is exact. Their marriage exists chiefly as something to be watched, and a great many people have an interest in the watching.

This essay argues that the series is, under its jokes, a comedy about ownership. A marriage kept for show has shareholders, and the two people inside it are the only ones it pays nothing. It asks something particular of the woman whose work is being looked at, because her share of the product is her forgiveness. And the series’ best discovery concerns what these two do together. It may be that in five years of marriage, the first thing they have done together for themselves is to set about getting divorced.

How the series ends, and why this essay thinks the ending is the bravest thing in it, can wait until after the note below.

This essay discusses the whole series, including how it ends; the section where the ending begins says so again. It also discusses affairs, a pregnancy and a public apology, plainly. If you would rather watch first, do. This will keep.

Let’s Get Divorced is a Japanese series of nine episodes, released worldwide on Netflix on 22 June 2023. It was written by Kudo Kankuro and Oishi Shizuka, directed by Kaneko Fuminori, Fukuda Ryosuke and Sakaue Takuya, and produced by Isoyama Aki and Katsuno Itsumi; TBS Television made it, with TBS Sparkle as the production company. Matsuzaka Tori plays Taishi and Naka Riisa plays Yui. Nishikido Ryo plays Kano Kyoji, a self-styled artist. Itaya Yuka plays Taishi’s lawyer, Inden Kaoru, and Furuta Arata plays Yui’s, Ishihara Henry K. Yamamoto Koji plays Soda Go, the opposition politician who stands against Taishi. Takeshita Keiko plays Taishi’s mother, Mineko, and Takashima Reiko plays Yui’s mother.

The title is a one-word joke on a famous song. Yoshida Takuro’s Kekkon Shiyou yo, Let’s Get Married, was a hit in 1972, a proposal set to music; the series changes marriage to divorce and keeps everything else, including the soft, inviting let’s. The writing had a shape worth knowing, too. By one film site’s account, Kudo and Oishi wrote the series like an exchange diary, taking turns, each carrying the script on from where the other had stopped. A story about two people who can only finish something by doing it together was itself finished that way.

The story in outline. Taishi is, in Netflix’s description, a philandering and not always sharp third-generation politician with a sheltered upbringing. Yui made her own name, with a drama inside the drama called Miko-chan, set in Ehime, in which she played a shrine maiden. At the festival they agree to divorce, and each hires a lawyer; the lawyers turn out to be old lovers. Yui falls for Kyoji, a man she bumped into by chance. Then a snap election is called, and Soda, a star of the opposition, comes to Ehime to break the hereditary seat, so that the husband and wife who are divorcing have to campaign side by side. The rest belongs to the second half of this essay.

The series was not screened for this essay. Its story is taken from Netflix’s own announcements, from the makers’ published remarks, and from Japanese reference pages and episode recaps. What the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

Start with the shareholders, because the comedy depends on every one of them being real.

On Taishi’s side they are his family and his constituency. Japanese has a colloquial phrase for the three things a candidate is said to need in order to win: jiban, kanban, kaban, the ground, the signboard and the bag, which dictionaries gloss as an organisation of supporters, a name and reputation, and money. Taishi inherited the first from his father, and his family supplies the other two. The marriage belongs to the second. A photogenic wife is part of the signboard, and his mother, Mineko, needs the marriage for his career.

On Yui’s side they are her industry and her family. Her sponsors are paying for the image. Her mother, who runs a small bar on her own, lives on money from Taishi’s family. The character notes add one more fact about this mother, which the essay will come back to near its end. She has never married, and she has had seven children, not all by the same father.

None of these interests is frivolous. A seat is a career. An advertising contract is income. For a mother who lives on her daughter’s in-laws, the marriage is not a matter of snobbery; she has a living to keep. The comedy works because not one of these needs is fake. What makes them ridiculous is only that all of them are being met out of one marriage.

And none of them belongs to the two people who are married. That is the arrangement’s strangest property. Everyone around the marriage draws something from it: a seat, a contract, an allowance, a family name. The only two people it pays nothing are the husband and the wife, who at home do not look at each other.

It would be easy to read Yui as a star protecting her brand, and she is one. The more exact description is that her brand is a marriage.

Her fame began with Miko-chan, which one Japanese review read as a send-up of Kudo’s own morning serial, Amachan; the chief director, Kaneko Fuminori, told the film site Cinema Today that he had been a little careful not to upset the original. The producer, Isoyama Aki, told the same site that the team settled on a shrine maiden because one seemed right for the image of a pure heroine. Out of that role came the public Yui: the woman everyone wants to marry, and a career that sells her, in effect, as everyone’s idea of a wife. That is not vanity, and this essay will not call it vanity. It is her work, and she is very good at it.

Kaneko said, too, that what mattered was the gap between the Yui on television, sunny and guileless, and the Yui who comes home. Kudo, announcing the series, described the pair in two lines that say more than they seem to: the husband a handsome Diet member, well brought up but careless; the wife a rather proud actress who had worked her own way up. He inherited his standing. She built hers. And what she built needs a husband.

This is where the arrangement asks more of her than of him. His part of the image is to be a husband, which he does badly and which has cost him votes. Her part is to be a wife, which is the thing her sponsors pay for. When the image cracks, he loses popularity. She loses the product.

The scandal a year before the story begins holds the key to the whole arrangement, and its arithmetic is worth doing slowly, because it had three parties, not two.

The third was Sakurako. The character notes say that she had been an announcer at one of the main networks and went freelance after the affair came to light. One affair, then, and three prices. Up for the wife who forgave. Down for the husband who strayed. And, for the woman on the other side of it, a network post exchanged for freelance work. Two of the three are women whose work is being on screen, and the same story moved them in opposite directions: one was rewarded for absorbing an injury, and the other left the network.

What was Yui paid for? Not for being wronged; nobody’s popularity rises for that alone. She was paid for forgiving, which is to say for performing, in public, the part of the wife who absorbs an injury and keeps the household together. This Library argued in “An Apology Matters Less Than What Becomes Different After It” that an apology is a public, legible event with an audience, while a change is visible only to the person living beside it, and that once a wrong has been made public and apologised for, the open question moves from his conduct to her character: has she forgiven him? The series runs that mechanism to its end. The audience asks the question. Yui answers it. And the audience pays her for the answer.

That is the trap, and it is the part of the story that deserves a little anger. A forgiveness that has become part of your market value cannot be withdrawn without breaking the product. Whether Yui’s was sincere is almost beside the point. From the day it paid, it stopped being hers to take back. Every morning she stays married, she is keeping a promise she made to an audience, not to him.

The divorce is proposed the way the old song proposes marriage: as an invitation to do something together. At the festival he says it. She says she had been thinking the same. Whatever else is true of this marriage, it is capable of one instant agreement, and this is it.

Netflix, announcing the cast, wrote that outside circumstances would leave the couple “no other choice but to work hand in hand to reach their ultimate goal: getting a divorce”, and Cinema Today called the series a comedy in which the two fight side by side, as allies do, towards the goal of divorce. That is the series’ quiet reversal. The marriage made them rivals: in the market for their images, what raised her had lowered him. The divorce makes them partners.

Each of them hires a lawyer. Taishi’s, Inden Kaoru, is in Netflix’s words “a gifted attorney who relentlessly trains the spineless Taishi”. Yui’s, Ishihara, is “the shady yet skilled attorney of Taishi’s wife”. And the two lawyers turn out to be old lovers: a couple who parted once themselves, now working opposite sides of someone else’s parting.

This Library read Marriage Story, in “Marriage Story, and the Machinery That Takes Over”, as a film about the machinery of divorce: two people who meant to separate decently discover that once lawyers are engaged the process has a logic of its own, converts a shared life into allegations and rewards behaviour neither of them wanted. Let’s Get Divorced turns the machine round. What has taken over this couple is the marriage. Mother, agency, sponsors and constituency are the process with a logic of its own, and it is the image that converts a shared life into content. The divorce, with its two lawyers who were once a couple themselves, is the one project in the story that belongs to the two of them alone.

Yui meets Kyoji by accident. He bumps into her, has no idea who she is, and walks the city with her. For a woman whose face is her living, that may be the most intimate thing a stranger can offer: to meet her before the image arrives.

What follows has a strange, careful shape. In a scene publicised before the series came out, Yui goes out to see him in glasses, a mask and a cap, so as not to be recognised, and brings him breakfast. In his studio he shows her a piece that he says stands for his feelings about her, and names its price: all her free time. One rainy day he sends her away coldly, and then, a man without a phone in a story run on live streams and leaks, he buys one just to ring her and apologise. He kisses her. And he tells her something about his own body: that he is impotent.

This essay takes that last sentence as he gives it: something he chose to tell her about himself. It is not a diagnosis, and it will not be treated as one here, and it is not a request. A disclosure asks nothing of the person who hears it, and hearing it commits her to nothing. What it does in the story is move the affair away from what a weekly magazine would assume. What draws Yui to Kyoji, as this essay reads it, is time and attention before anything else: a walk with a man who did not know her face, and a price that was her free time.

He follows her to Ehime and makes a studio of an old farmhouse to be near her. It would be easy to make him the story’s romantic answer, the man who sees the woman behind the image. The story goes somewhere less expected. Before it is over, he and the husband have taken to each other.

Then a snap election is called. Soda Go, a star of the opposition and, in Netflix’s words, “a skilled speaker who is also very good at singing”, comes to Ehime to stand against Taishi and to break the hereditary seat. The parties are the series’ own inventions. What matters here is what the campaign does to the marriage.

It turns the divorce into a performance of the marriage at full volume. Yui is filming a special of Miko-chan, the Ehime drama that made her, and Taishi, as Cinema Today put it, cannot campaign in Ehime without her help. So the woman who is divorcing her husband campaigns for him. Taishi is routed by Soda in a public debate. Kyoji, in the audience at a debate, needles Soda from the floor. And Yui finds she is pregnant, by Taishi, from their night at the festival.

Something happens inside the performance that the performance did not plan for. Taishi, who inherited a seat, starts listening to the people who vote for it, and begins to argue properly for a virus research institute. It is a small change. But it is the first time in the story that the heir does the work the seat stands for, and it happens in the most performed thing a politician does. A campaign is where this one starts to mean what he says.

The series’ other target is the hereditary seat itself, which Soda has promised to end. What it shows is a seat handed down with a family’s name, a marriage kept polished because it is part of that name, and a challenger who makes the inheritance the issue.

The image breaks from outside. Sakurako leaks proof that Taishi visited her the night before the festival, which is to say the night before the night their child was conceived. Yui’s answer is not the one her public knows. She does not forgive him again. In fury, she tells a weekly magazine about her own affair.

Then the two of them hold a press conference and kneel side by side. The gesture is dogeza: kneeling on the ground or the floor to apologise, bowed low. Japanese dictionaries also record its older sense, which was what ordinary people did when a lord went by, kneeling with their foreheads low to the ground. Nothing about it needs translating. Two adults are on their knees, as low as the body goes, in front of the people whose regard they live on.

Set it beside the scandal a year earlier, and the change is the whole point. Then, he had strayed and she had forgiven: the errant husband and the wife who stands by him, the most saleable picture in the story. This time she refuses the part. By confessing, she makes herself a co-defendant instead of a character witness, and spends at a stroke the capital her forgiveness had earned. For the first time in public, the two of them are equals. They got there on their knees.

And something breaks through the ritual that it was not built to hold. Taishi, on his knees, weeps that he no longer knows why they are divorcing. It may be the most honest thing either of them has said in the marriage, and he says it in front of the cameras. The apology essay’s distinction is useful again here. The kneeling is for the audience, and as far as the audience is concerned it closes the matter. What becomes different after it happens away from the cameras, between the two of them, and only they are there to see it.

The campaign changes them. They start to laugh together, and to wonder aloud why, exactly, they are splitting up. Kyoji invites Taishi to his studio, and the man she has fallen for and the man she is leaving, of all people, take to each other. When Yui tells Kyoji she is pregnant, he says that any child of hers is his too.

The easy reading is that they are falling back in love, and the series gives that reading plenty to work with: the laughter, the baby, the husband’s tears. This essay reads it differently. What changes is less the depth of their feeling than its conditions. The image has been spent. Nobody is buying the forgiving wife now, and the husband has lost his debate. The marriage stops being a product, and with no product left to protect they have, for the first time, a project: to get through the campaign, and to get divorced. People who share a project can become friends.

That is what the series finds under its jokes, and it is not a sentimental finding. Two people who were rivals inside a marriage become colleagues inside a divorce. They come to like each other only when they stop performing the marriage. Netflix’s Japanese announcement promised a comedy about the discontents, conflicts and collisions of married life, and about the wish to live freely, as oneself. The freedom arrives, oddly, as friendship with the person one is leaving.

From here the essay discusses how the series ends.

On election night Soda’s party takes power, and Taishi loses his seat by about a hundred votes. Before dawn, unsettled, the two of them hand in the divorce papers anyway.

It is worth knowing how plain that act is. For a divorce by agreement, the Ministry of Justice’s own page explains, the notification is filed by the couple themselves, needs the signatures of two adult witnesses, goes to a city, ward, town or village office, and may be handed in at any time. A marriage conducted for five years in front of cameras, and apologised for on its knees in front of more of them, ends with a form handed in by the two people named on it, before it is light.

Liking each other again does not undo the decision. That sentence is the spine of the series, and it is the hardest thing in it to accept. They have every reason to stop. They are getting on. There is a baby coming. He has just lost the seat the marriage was being kept for, which means that the reason for the marriage and the reason for the divorce have gone at the same moment. Nothing is forcing them to the office. They go.

This Library argued in “Chosen Again, Not Chosen Once” that the paperwork of a marriage documents a decision that has to be made again, in small ways, for as long as the marriage lasts, and that a marriage can instead be slid through, kept going by inertia and by the practical difficulty of ending it. The Shojis’ marriage was exactly that: slid through for five years, held in place by everyone who found it inconvenient to end. What the series adds is that a divorce can be chosen twice as well. The first time, at the festival, it was an escape from a marriage nobody would let them end. The second time, before dawn, there was nothing left to escape, and the easy slide ran the other way, back into the marriage, with the laughter, the baby and the lost seat all pushing. They decided instead.

It could be said that the second decision was only momentum: they had a plan, and plans have weight. They are unsettled when they go, and this essay does not want to make a triumph of it. But the test of a slide is whether anything was pushing the other way, and here almost everything was.

Four months later Yui gives birth to a son, Yoji. The series then moves three years on. Yui has won an acting prize in Berlin. Kyoji has become a blogger chasing elections round the country. Soda, caught taking money over the sale of the virus institute, has resigned, and sells bread from a van with his wife. Taishi has won the by-election, looks after Yoji four days a week, and speaks up in the Diet for support for parents. He hints at remarriage. Yui tells him they work better unmarried.

Start with the prize, because it is the quietest line in the ending and the one this essay cares about most. The woman whose career was built on being the bride the country imagined is honoured, in a city far from Ehime and further still from the weekly magazines, for acting. Whatever the prize was for, it was not for being anyone’s wife.

Then the refusal. It would be easy to hear her line as a punchline, and it is funny. It is also the most exact sentence in the series, and what it claims is remarkably small. It passes no verdict on marriage, and none on him. It says that the two of them work better unmarried. That is a finding about these two people, reached by trying both: five years of a marriage kept for others, a campaign, a divorce, and three years of raising a child between them. She is reporting the result.

It would be a mistake to read the ending as a verdict on marriage as such. The last we see of Soda, the reformer brought down, he is selling bread from a van with his wife; whatever else he lost, that marriage came with him. What the series refuses is narrower and harder. It will not let liking each other become a reason to put their names back under a brand. The family outlasts the marriage, and staying divorced is a choice, made again three years on, in one sentence.

Here the character note about Yui’s mother comes back. The woman whose living depended on Yui’s marriage had never married herself, and had seven children without it. Her daughter ends the series raising a child outside marriage too, and the story makes one thing about it plain: the father is there, four days a week. Whether the rhyme was intended, this essay cannot say. It is there to be read.

This Library has read a marriage kept as an arrangement before. “Because This Is My First Life, and the Contract That Had to End Before It Could Be True” followed a Korean couple who married on a two-year contract, she for somewhere to live and he for an undemanding tenant and a wife on paper, and found that the contract kept what passed between the two of them in good order and had no hold at all on everyone else’s terms: a mortgage, two sets of parents, an ancestral rite. When love made the contract’s first premise untrue, the honest thing was to end it. And the new contract they signed, renewed every year, was worth something because not renewing had become real.

Let’s Get Divorced starts where that essay’s problem stops, and ends where that series would not. Here there was never a private arrangement for outsiders to invade. The outsiders’ terms were the marriage: a seat, a signboard, a contract, an allowance. Nothing had to walk in, because nothing had ever been kept out. And when these two find, as those two did, that they like each other after all, they do not write a better contract. They keep the divorce.

The two stories do not quarrel about marriage. Both refuse to go on honouring one after it has stopped describing the people inside it. The difference is in what each finds on the far side. That series found a truer contract. This one finds that a family can be described without one: a son, a father four days a week, a mother with a prize, a friend who blogs about elections, and two people who get on better now than they ever did as a product. That essay concluded that a renewal means something only where not renewing is possible. The same holds the other way round. Not remarrying means something because remarrying was on offer, and she turned it down.

Japanese has an everyday word for a marriage like the Shojis’: kamen fufu, a masked couple, which a standard dictionary defines as a couple who perform closeness in front of others while the relationship between them has gone cold. It has another for what such a couple keeps up: sekentei, the face one shows the world. Neither needs a television camera.

Off screen, a marriage kept for show has an audience of a few, not of millions. A mother-in-law who would take a separation as a verdict on her son. A neighbourhood, a school gate or a small town where a family is known by its couple. A family business in which the marriage is part of the name above the door. And the reasons such marriages continue may be the very reasons the series turns into comedy: a parent whose living depends on the arrangement, an income, a name, a child. None of them is frivolous. A woman keeping a marriage going for one of them is carrying other people’s needs, which is exactly what Yui was doing, and there is nothing cowardly in it.

The series also knows that Tokyo is not the whole country. The audience that matters on election day is not the nation that watches Yui’s live streams but a constituency in Ehime, where she is the shrine maiden from the drama and he is his father’s son. A reader who lives outside a big city may recognise the geometry. In a smaller place, a marriage can be part of how a family is known.

The ending also touches on something that has changed in Japanese law since the series was made. What the series shows is a child whose week is shared, four days of it with his father. How any real family’s arrangement stands in law is a question for a lawyer or the family court, not for an essay. But the Ministry of Justice’s own pages explain that revised rules came into force on 1 April 2026, and that when parents divorce, one of them or both are named as holding parental authority, decided first by agreement between the parents, with neither arrangement the default. That is a fact about where the question now stands. It is not advice about any family.

This reading could be wrong in at least five ways.

First, it is a farce, and its makers said as much. Announcing the series, Kudo said they had drawn the joys and sorrows of a couple in a slump at a weight that was not too heavy, and Oishi said the two of them had ended up with a pushy, outlandish script. Reviewing it for But Why Tho, Charles Hartford found the characters’ over-the-top reactions ranging from genuinely funny to cringe-inducing. An essay that finds an argument about ownership and forgiveness in all this may be taking a comedy at its most solemn moments and ignoring the rest. What survives is narrower. The premise, as Netflix and the makers described it, is a couple performing a model marriage for their work and for appearances, and every joke depends on that premise being true.

Second, the ending is affordable only for people like these. A seat in the Diet, an acting career that reaches a prize in Berlin, a family with money behind it: an amicable divorce with a shared child and no one ruined is a luxury, and a comedy that makes it look easy may be only a fantasy for anyone who could not leave a marriage without losing a home. That is true, and this essay concedes it. What remains is only the smaller point that these two, at least, could have stayed, and chose not to.

Third, the satire of inherited power is gentle. The heir loses his father’s seat and wins it back at a by-election; the reformer who promised to end the hereditary seat is caught taking money and ends up selling bread. A critic could say that the series mocks the dynasty for nine episodes and then reassures its audience that the dynasty will be fine. The reply is only partial. Taishi comes back changed, raising his son and speaking for parents. But the seat stays in the family, and the objection stands.

Fourth, Yui’s anger. The series plays the gap between the sunny Yui on television and the harder one at home partly for laughs, and the turn this essay admires most, the confession, is an act of fury. A comedy that gets its laughs from a woman’s temper is always at risk of making the temper the joke rather than what provoked it. This essay has read her fury as a woman spending the capital of her own image. A viewer who finds it played mainly for laughs will read the same scenes differently, and will not be wrong to.

Fifth, this essay’s own leanings. This Library has a weakness for endings in which a woman declines something, and it may have found in Yui’s last line what it went looking for. A viewer who wanted the two of them to remarry has the laughter, the baby and the husband’s tears on her side, and can fairly say that the series built a love story and then refused to finish it for the sake of a twist. The refusal can be read as a principle or as a punchline. This essay has chosen the first. The second is there.

Three things stay after the jokes, and they are observations, not rules.

A marriage can have shareholders, and it helps to know who they are. A parent who depends on it, an employer who profits from it, a town that reads a family by its couple: each holds a share, and each will have a view about what you do with yours. Knowing who they are settles nothing. It tells you whose voices are in the room.

Forgiveness given in public can stop being yours. Once other people have a stake in it, taking it back breaks something they are counting on. Forgiveness is a real good, and nothing here argues against it. The caution is about the audience. A forgiveness offered for other people’s approval is hard to take back, even when you need to.

And a decision can be made twice. The first time, a divorce, or a marriage, may be a reaction. The second time, with nothing left to react to, it is a choice. Liking someone again does not oblige you to undo what you decided, and it does not oblige you to keep it either. The two people in this series decided twice, and the second time was the one that belonged to them.

So, once, to you. If you are keeping a marriage going for an audience, large or small, you are not a fraud, and you are not a coward. You may be carrying a mother’s rent, a family’s name, a child’s ordinary days, and those are heavy things to carry. This essay will not tell you whether to go on carrying them. Nobody outside your life can know what they weigh. What the series asks is smaller: that you know which parts of the marriage are for you and which are for them, and that whatever you decide, the decision is yours, and not one made for you by everyone who holds a share.

This is a reading of a television comedy. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about anyone’s marriage, divorce or legal position. The Ministry of Justice’s pages are cited for what they say, not for what they would say about any family.

Who holds a share in the marriage you live in, or in the one you grew up beside, and what does each of them draw from it?

Which of the marriages you have watched up close was kept for an audience, and what did that ask of the woman in it?

Have you ever made the same decision twice, once in a hurry and once with time to think? Which of the two was yours?

When you forgave someone in front of other people, who was the forgiveness for?