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“Drawing Closer“ is a beautiful melodrama about life, death, kindness, love, and time. It follows the heartbreaking story of Haruna and Akito, two 17 year olds who are diagnosed with terminal illnesses, her with six months left to live and him with one year. In their shared despair, they meet, fall in love, and save each other. Though the two leads truly love one another, and there are awkward stares, small gestures, gifts and daily visits, Takahiro Miki doesn’t fully focus on their romance.

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Instead, “Drawing Closer” aims to capture how a relationship can save someone from an abyss of despair. How being there for each other is helping Haruna and Akito to value their time again, to smile again, to live again, to learn what love truly is, and to enjoy their final moments together. When they meet, these characters are ready to die,...

Yahoo! Japan today revealed the results of their annual Search Awards, which spotlight various topics that have seen a sharp increase in search volume compared to the previous year, for 2024. The anime adaptation of Mashle: Magic And Muscles and its viral Season 2 opening song, "Bling-Bang-Bang-Born", topped their respective categories, while Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle took first spot among live-action alternatives. Full top-five results for the People and Pop Culture sections are as follows, using data recorded from January 1 to October 1: People Category Performers Yumi Kawai Chae Jong Hyeop Natsuki Deguchi Ryuya Wakaba Wakana Matsumoto Musicians Number_i Mrs. Green Apple NewJeans West. Me:i Athletes Shohei Ohtani Ran Takahashi Takerufuji Mikiya Hifumi Abe Natsumi Tsunoda Comedians Yasuko Hyoroku Macho Aoki Gakutensoku Risa Hariu Voice Actors Kokoro Kikuchi Kenjiro Tsuda Mayumi Tanaka Sayuri Date Yuka Iguchi Special Kasumi Mori Mitsuho Fukutome Anna Murashige Danpu Matsumoto Emi Suzuki Pop Culture Category Anime...

The 2020 Japanese drama Drawing Closer offers a heartfelt look at the connection between two teens facing mortality. Directed by Takahiro Miki, the film is based on Aoi Morita’s novel about 17-year-olds Akihito and Haruna, whose chance meeting at a hospital takes an emotional turn. They form a bond despite each having a terminal illness—Akihito has a year to live with a heart condition, while Haruna was born with a disease, giving her just six months.

Led by the performances of Ren Nagase as the brooding Akihito and lively Natsuki Deguchi as the smiling Haruna, the movie focuses on how their friendship develops. Haruna finds purpose in art and faces death openly, helping Akihito rediscover his passion for painting after losing hope. They spend afternoons sharing sketches at Haruna’s bedside, growing close yet guarded about their conditions.

As more time passes, Akihito works to reunite Haruna with an...

“Drawing Closer” is a Japanese movie directed by Takahiro Miki starring Ren Nagase and Natsuki Deguchi.

A beautiful and beguiling romantic movie starting from an utterly tragic and paradoxical premise: a boy and a girl fall in love, they share nearly everything in common, but both are suffering from an illness that leaves them with only a few months to live. “Drawing Closer” is one of those films that strikes straight to the heart, stirring the deepest human emotions as it explores the great themes of life: love, living, and death, and in between, the beauty that pervades all around us.

Even though a flower is doomed to disappear, it leaves behind a fleeting moment of intense, profound and genuine beauty. A film that is profoundly alive and profoundly beautiful. If you’re looking for a movie that connects you with profound and inner truths, “Drawing Closer” will indeed cater to your taste.

The official website for the upcoming live-action film adaptation of Masamitsu Nigatsu's romantic comedy action manga Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards released a main trailer and a main visual today. The trailer features the film's theme song "Breakout" performed by the Japanese male idol group Snow Man . The group's 20-year-old member Raul is also cast as the film's protagonist, Arakuni Ibuki. "I am very happy that the group's song will be added to the film I am participating in," said Raul. "It is a great honor for me and for the group, so I thought carefully about the meaning of singing this song as a group. I was able to share the screenplay and the atmosphere of the work site with the members while working on it, so the team and I were satisfied with the finished song. I hope you enjoy the chemical reaction with the movie." Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards...

Netflix has revealed that its Japanese slate for the year ahead includes three films and a seven new and returning series.

The features include Drawing Closer by Takahiro Miki, a director well-known for romantic dramas such as Love Me, Love Me Not and Your Eyes Tell. It follows a young man with a terminal illness who falls for a woman who is also living on borrowed time. The cast is led by Ren Nagase and Natsuki Deguchi.

It is based on a best-selling novel by Ao Morita and is scripted by Tomoko Yoshida, whose collaborations with Miki go back to...

It's not the first time that internationally acclaimed maestro Hirokazu Koreeda put his effort on a serial drama. In 2019 he directed the first episode and coordinated the collective show “A Day-Off of Kasumi Arimura” and before that, in 2012, he directed the lovely (a personal favourite) “Going My Home”, starring Hiroshi Abe as a clumsy father struggling with his roles as son and as father too. However, his recent “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House” has been propelled to global audience by the intervention of giant platform Netflix. The show is co-written, co-produced and co-directed by Koreeda, alongside a handful of Japanese filmmakers and is based on a famous manga of the same title that has sold more than 1.8 million copies in Japan.

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After seeing maiko (apprentice geishas) walking the street of Kyoto on a school trip, 16-year-old inseparable best...

It’s hard to make food look unappetizing on screen. Fill up the screen with the greasiest monstrosity you can muster and the very fact it’s on a TV gives it a certain kind of baseline appeal. Fiction has a way of priming our stomachs in a way that even real life sometimes can’t.

In a weird way, that makes the cooking in “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House” feel like even more of a challenge. Kore-eda Hirokazu’s new Netflix series can’t just rest on looking at some rice dishes or stews. It needs to convey the idea that Kiyo (Nana Mori), a bright-eyed teenager looking for a new life in the Gion district of Kyoto, is so entranced by the possibilities of her own food that it changes her life.

“The Makanai” finds the same magic in the everyday that’s dotted Kore-eda’s film resume.

“You must show what’s unseen, but you cannot show too much either,” Mother Chiyo (Keiko Matsuzaka) explains to apprentice maiko Sumire (Natsuki Deguchi) about the delicate balance of expressing the story of a traditional mai dance. This same ethos permeates throughout the soft tone of the new Netflix series “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House,” from acclaimed filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Continue reading ‘The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House’ Season One Review: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Netflix Show Is A Rich and Rewarding Experience at The Playlist.

Hirokazu Kore-eda infuses the world of the Japanese geisha with his signature gentle humanism in The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, his first drama series for Netflix, launching worldwide this week.

Based on a best-selling manga by Aiko Koyama, the nine-episode series is set in the traditional Geiko district of Kyoto, depicting the inner sanctum of aspiring maiko courtesans. The story follows two 16-year-old girls, Kiyo (Mori Nana) and Sumire (Natsuki Deguchi), who move from rural Aomori with dreams of becoming geisha. But while Sumire is instantly identified as a natural talent in the traditional arts — dance, elaborate costume and delicate music-making — Kiyo proves an awkward fit. Instead, she finds her place as a makanai, the traditional cook who prepares the meals within the yakata house where all of the geiko live together.

Kore-eda, who won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 2018 with his family drama Shoplifters, acts as the show’s producer,...

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (Maiko-san Chino makanai-san) is a Japanese series created by Hirokazu Koreeda starring Mayu Matsuoka, Ai Hashimoto, Nana Mori and Keiko Matsuzaka. Based on the manga by Aiko Koyama.

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, is a tender Japanese story about art, friendship, youth, time… and, what can merge all these concepts in a single one? Food as an art form and an expression of ephemerality and at the same time, eternity, serves this series to achieve a portrayal of youth that is charming, consoling and above all, very, very tender.

About the Series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House

A small delicacy for those that love the most traditional aspects of Japanese culture. The lives of these two kitchen apprentices will lead us, almost apologetically, to view a kind of Kyoto in which time goes by almost unnoticed, like those first...

At the close of its opening credits sequence, Netflix’s The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House splashes its title over a close-up shot of a meal. What meal specifically varies from episode to episode, depending on what the characters eat in any given one. Invariably, however, it’s some form of home-cooked comfort food: oyakodon or tomato curry or stewed eggplant, often still bubbling in the pot.

The dishes aren’t necessarily pretty, by the standards of your typical foodie show, nor do they look particularly fancy or original. But that’s precisely their appeal. They’re simple, straightforward, deceptively humble and irresistibly cozy — much like the series itself.

Adapted from the manga by Aiko Koyama, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House centers on a rare adventure. At the start of the series, 16-year-old best friends Kiyo (an irrepressibly sunny Nana Mori) and Sumire (Natsuki Deguchi) strike out...

Cannes Palme d’Or-winning director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first series for Netflix, The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House, is based on a best-selling manga about two young girls who move to Kyoto to start their training as ‘maiko’ or apprentice geisha.

One of them turns out to be a star maiko, but the other is not so talented in the geisha arts, which mostly comprise traditional song and dance, and ends up cooking for the household where the girls are being trained, an activity in which she excels. Neither the manga, created by Aiko Koyama, or the series are set in the Edo period, the golden era of geisha culture, but in contemporary Japan, where the profession still exists and is respected, but is also regarded as a dying art.

Scheduled to start streaming tomorrow (January 12), the series is produced by Kore-eda and Genki Kawamura, a leading producer behind hits such as Confessions,...

Emerging stars from Netflix Japan’s biggest original shows have revealed their experiences working with the streamer today at the final Tudum event of the past 24 hours.

Netflix is involved in a fierce battle for streaming supremacy in Japan with Amazon, Disney+ and others, and today’s event was a chance to show off its firepower.

As such, it held interviews with five up-and-coming stars from the Asian country at their Netflix Tudum event: Kento Yamazaki and Tao Tsuchiya, who play Arisu and Usagi from Alice in Borderland, appeared at the event alongside Nana Mori and Natsuki Deguchi, who play Kiyo and Sumire from The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, and voice actress Fairouz Ai, who plays Jolyne Cujoh in the upcoming JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean.

Season one of Alice in Borderland is, based on the manga of the same name, launched in 2020, following Yamazaki and Tsuchiya...

Shoplifters director Hirokazu Kore-eda is to adapt popular comic Maiko in Kyoto: From the Maiko House into an eight-part Netflix TV series, his first for the streamer. The prolific Kore-eda teased a TV and film project for Netflix late last year and these are the first details to emerge.

Airing later this year, The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House from Story Inc and Bun-Buku Inc is set in the geisha district of Kyoto, as protagonist Kiyo becomes a Makanai (person who cooks meals) at a house where Maiko (apprentice geishas) live together. The story depicts the everyday life of Kiyo maiko Sumire, her childhood friend who came with her from Aomori to Kyoto, amid a vibrant world of geisha and maiko courtesans.

Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters, his story about a family that relies on shoplifting to cope with poverty, is also in the...