This Is the Year’s First Great New TV Series

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Monster) is one of cinema’s great humanists, and he expresses intense compassion and understanding for the women of 1979 Japan—and, by extension, their modern counterparts—with Asura.

An adaptation of Mukoda Kuniko’s novel that was previously made into both a popular Japanese TV series and film, the director’s latest Netflix venture, premiering Jan. 9, is a sterling return to form following 2023’s underwhelming The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House.

With keen insight, it details the ups and downs of four sisters grappling with complicated romances, fraught familial dynamics, and a society that expects them to suffer sexist indignities in silence and with a pleasant smile on their faces. At once highly particular and poignantly universal, it’s the year’s first grand television surprise, and additional confirmation that few filmmakers are as empathetic, nimble, and masterful as Kore-eda.

In Tokyo, librarian Takiko (Yu Aoi) hires shy private investigator Katsumata (Ryuhei Matsuda) to look into her 70-year-old father Kotaro (Jun Kunimura), whom she suspects is having an affair with a much younger woman behind the back of her beloved mother Fuji (Keiko Matsuzaka)—and, worse, has a 9-year-old child with this mistress. Takiko’s suspicions are by and large confirmed by the sleuth, and thus she endeavors to break the news to her sisters, all of whom are dealing with their own messy circumstances.

Eldest Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa), a widow with a grown son, works as a flower arranger at a local restaurant and is carrying on a clandestine fling with her boss’ husband Sadaharu (Seiyō Uchino). Makiko (Machiko Ono) is managing a household that includes her teenage kids and her workaholic husband Takao (Masahiro Motoki), who’s not very concerned about her troubles and may be seeing another woman. Youngest Sakiko (Suzu Hirose), meanwhile, is a café waitress with an up-and-coming boxer boyfriend named Hire (Kisetsu Fujiwara) whom her family doesn’t know about and whose loyalty and professional fortunes remain, at outset, murky at best.

Like the Buddhist demigods that lend the series its name, these siblings are a feisty bunch, and Kore-eda—who writes and helms all seven episodes—imagines them as colorful, passionate intertwined relatives struggling to define themselves in relationships, households, and communities in which they’re meant to be subservient.

When Takao hears about Kotaro’s infidelity, he agrees that it’s not right but also justifies it as harmless “fun.” Makiko and Takiko, however, have a hard time consenting to this status quo, and that becomes even more difficult when an article about their father’s unfaithfulness appears in the morning newspaper, apparently written by one of the sisters. In it, the author wonders, “Is it really happiness for women like us to live without making waves?”, and that question hovers over the entirety of Asura as its female players grapple with pressures to conform, to defer, and to be grateful for whatever their male counterparts grant them.

Takiko’s discovery of her dad’s bad behavior is the catalyst for Asura’s family drama, and it sets in motion a sequence of events that culminate, early on, with a paradigm-shifting tragedy. In the aftermath of that shock, the sisters’ bonds (with each other as well as their father, spouses, and partners) become reconfigured in alternately subtle and drastic ways.

Similarly, their lives take new turns, as with Sakiko, who discovers that Hide is a two-timing louse and, rather than abandoning him, more forcefully commits to their shared vision of the future—a decision that inspires him to evolve. For Tsunako, finding happiness is a complex process that involves accepting Japan’s double standards and doing what’s necessary for herself. Takiko, on the other hand, is so uptight, and so unmoored by Kotaro’s adultery (and his blasé attitude toward being outed about it) that coming to terms with her budding feelings for Katsumata, with whom she strikes up a tentative romance, proves surprisingly and amusingly arduous.

Cheating is the axis around which Asura revolves, and though Kore-eda is clearly on the side of his female protagonists, he never resorts to one-note scolding. In a culture that grants men the power to do as they please, and commands women to tolerate any slights or injustices, infidelity turns out to be a tricky burden to shoulder, and Kore-eda tackles the subject from a variety of unique positions.

With deftness and kindness, he recognizes the requirements and stresses weighing down upon Tsunako, Makiko, Takiko, and Sakiko—and, consequently, the motivations behind their differing and sometimes chaotic decisions. At the same time, he posits his primary male figures as byproducts of their time, place and upbringing—a state of affairs that doesn’t absolve them of their (minor and grave) sins but also doesn’t result in holier-than-thou condemnations.

Despite its serious concerns, Asura is a consistently warm and amusing portrait of this close-knit clan, creating an engrossing atmosphere through countless scenes of the sisters joking, bantering, gossiping, and fighting around crowded dinner tables and in backyards while hanging laundry. Between funerals and weddings, hugs and fights, and regular bouts of laughter and wailing, Kore-eda delivers the melodramatic goods, and yet there’s nothing manipulative about Asura, which always grounds its action in its well-drawn characters’ believable and uneasily resolved dilemmas. To that end, much of the series’ charm is due to its cast’s excellent performances, all of which lend it vibrant, distinctive personality.

Tragedies and triumphs vie for supremacy in Asura, and Kore-eda balances his lighter and darker moments with the same gracefulness that defines his finest films. Whether spying on his characters from a slight remove (occasionally through blinds, windows, or slightly ajar doorways) or assuming an up-close-and-personal POV in-between them as they gather for a meal, the director helms his material with gentle intimacy, always managing to interject measures of levity into the saddest of scenarios. There’s a specificity to his stewardship, to his characterizations, and to his plotting that grants the show compelling urgency, no matter the lack of overt narrative fireworks.

Asura is ultimately an incisive portrait of the compromises demanded of women, and the means by which they comply with, revolt against, and transcend the limitations placed upon them. At once moving and mirthful, it’s a tale fit for any age, and one that, with any luck, is only just getting started.