Asura

Starring

• Rie Miyazawaas Tsunako Mitamura

  The eldest sister, a widow who teaches flower arranging and has long been the lover of a married restaurant owner.

  Tsunako Mitamura’s story

  Tsunako tells her younger sisters that their father strayed once before, in the days when their mother ground wheat in a stone mill with a frightening face. When Toyoko, the wife of her lover, Sadaharu, pays Katsumata to follow him, Tsunako admits she is the other woman and claims it is over. She goes to a gagaku concert with a match arranged for her, walks out halfway and goes back to Sadaharu, and Makiko scolds her for it. In the last episode a neighbour reports that she and Sadaharu have tried to die together; she insists it was an accident. Toyoko answers by drawing a doodled face on the sign of Tsunako's flower school, and the affair goes on.

• Machiko Onoas Makiko Satomi

  The second sister, a housewife with a son and a daughter at junior high, who suspects her husband of an affair and keeps silent.

  Makiko Satomi’s story

  Makiko asks her mother what to do about Takao, and Fuji tells her that a woman who speaks up loses. Soon after, Makiko finds Fuji outside Tomoko's apartment and sees her collapse, and at the hospital she grabs her father by the collar. Once she believes the other woman is Keiko, a young woman at Takao's office, she starts to crack: she is caught shoplifting, flinches at the telephone and cannot bear her daughter's friendship with Keiko. Then Keiko asks her to be the go-between at her own wedding and tells her to find out the truth for herself. Makiko confronts Takao, who denies everything. At the wedding, applauding beside him, she tells him with a smile that she does not believe him.

• Yu Aoias Takiko Takezawa

  The third sister, a strait-laced librarian who uncovers her father's secret and falls for the detective she hired.

  Takiko Takezawa’s story

  Takiko is the one who calls her sisters together to tell them their father has another woman. Her first night with Katsumata, the shy detective she hired, goes wrong, and he burns his file on her father, but they marry and move in with Kotaro. She has fought with Sakiko since they shared a room as girls, and when Sakiko, now a champion's wife, looks down on her and Jinnai spills drink over the groom, Takiko orders them out of her wedding. After Jinnai collapses following his title defence, she wonders whether her envy caused it. She cannot forgive her father when she sees him still smiling with Tomoko's son. At the end, when a man tries to blackmail Sakiko, Takiko confronts him at Jinnai's bedside and drives him off. She is pregnant.

• Suzu Hiroseas Sakiko Takezawa

  The youngest sister, a waitress who stakes everything on a boxer and becomes a champion's wife.

  Sakiko Takezawa’s story

  Sakiko lives with Jinnai, an unknown boxer, starving herself alongside him as he cuts weight. By the time their mother dies she is carrying his child; she marries him, has the baby and moves in with his mother. When Jinnai becomes champion she arrives in a foreign car and a fur and looks down on plain Takiko. He collapses at Takiko's wedding; she has him discharged at once, and after defending his title he falls into a coma. His mother blames her, the hospital bills mount, and she smiles through her sisters' visits. She sleeps with a stranger who then demands money, and it is Takiko who drives him off. At the end she keeps watch by Jinnai's bed with his mother, and they rejoice when his foot moves.

• Jun Kunimuraas Kotaro Takezawa

  The sisters' father, a retired man who has been keeping a second household with another woman and her son.

• Keiko Matsuzakaas Fuji Takezawa

  The sisters' gentle mother, who seems to know nothing of her husband's other life and has known all along.

Why it matters

Asura is about what the women of a 1979 Japanese family know and do not say. The mother who seems not to notice her husband's second household has known for years; she hurls a toy car at a sliding door and writes to a newspaper rather than speak. Her rule, that a woman who speaks up loses, passes to her daughters, and the series watches them keep it and, one by one, break it: Makiko finally confronts her husband, and Takiko speaks up for the sister she has always resented. Kore-eda kept Kuniko Mukoda's 1979 script, its dialogue and its period almost intact, and the old lines about jealousy and pride sound close to the present. Infidelity here is not a scandal but part of the weather of a household, like the cabbage pickled every winter. The harder question is what it costs to keep a family's surface smooth, and which of its women pays.