Followers

Starring

• Miki Nakatanias Limi Nara

  A celebrated Tokyo photographer who decides to have a child and refuses to choose between work and motherhood.

  Limi Nara’s story

  Limi has everything her career can give, and wonders what success as a woman ought to include. She decides to have a child, though she has no partner. Her former lover and teacher, Tamio, returns, but malaria has left him unable to father a child, and when treatment fails he steps back. A friend who runs a flower shop helps her conceive, and she gives birth to a son, Towa, and tries to do everything herself. When Towa's chickenpox makes her cancel a shoot for the second time, the client drops her. She thinks of quitting, until Eriko's son tells her that a mother who works flat out is cool. At the awards she says she will give up neither her work nor a woman's happiness, and the last scene finds her photographing Natsume again.

• Elaiza Ikedaas Natsume Hyakuta

  A struggling actress whose life changes when Limi posts her photograph, and who learns what online fame costs.

  Natsume Hyakuta’s story

  Natsume goes from audition to audition and is cast only as corpses, until Limi posts her photograph. Overnight she has followers, invitations, modelling work, an agency and a boyfriend, the YouTuber Hiraku, and she grows arrogant. Jealous models leak what she wrote in a group chat, and the internet turns on her. Her scenes in a new role are all cut at a sponsor's request; told to deny Hiraku in an apology video, she refuses and parts from the agency. She nearly goes home for good, then makes up with her friends and makes a film of her own with Hiraku. It misses a competition deadline but spreads online, and she puts it into Quentin Tarantino's hands; he calls her to an audition, and she goes to Hollywood. At the end Limi photographs her for an interview.

• Mari Natsukias Eriko Tajima

  Limi's older friend, living with a much younger lover, who faces breast cancer.

  Eriko Tajima’s story

  Eriko falls for Sueo, a young gym trainer who catches her when she stumbles at a party. When he grows jealous of her son, Rui, she brings the three of them under one roof, and Rui warms to Sueo on learning that he is the strongest warrior in Rui's online game. Then she finds a lump: stage-three breast cancer. When Sueo asks what is wrong, she tells him she need not explain herself to a man she means to leave, and sets him free; at a gathering of her friends she tells them the diagnosis. She comes through the illness. She had sworn never to marry again, but when Sueo proposes, with Rui urging her on, she says yes, accepting herself as she now is.

• Yuka Itayaas Akane Gunjo

  Limi's friend at a talent agency, who takes Natsume on and later starts over with her singer.

• Nobuaki Kanekoas Yuruco

  Limi's manager and right hand, who in the end leaves for New York for love.

• Shuhei Uesugias Hiraku Noma

  A YouTuber who becomes Natsume's boyfriend and helps her make her own film.

Why it matters

Followers, Mika Ninagawa's first drama series, is a portrait of women in Tokyo trying to have everything at once, and of the machinery of attention that now decides who gets to. It sets a photographer at the top of her profession beside an actress whose career is made and unmade by likes, a leaked group chat and an online pile-on, and asks whether being seen is the same as being valued. It also takes up a woman choosing to have a child without a partner, a mother who works as hard after the birth as before, and an older woman with a younger lover and cancer. One Japanese review argued that its idea of success was the old one after all: beauty, wealth and momentum. Limi's line in the last episode, that one's biggest follower is oneself, is both the series' argument and the question it leaves.