The orphaned son of a yakuza boss and his master’s son navigate a lifelong rivalry and brotherly bond, sacrificing their personal lives in pursuit of the prestigious title of “Living National Treasure.”
by Vivien Leung
I find it hard to deal with a film as grand as its title, especially when some of my Japanese friends were raving about it. I see this review as a way to openly acknowledge my cultural blind spots and my discomfort with confrontation in Japanese social situations.
Kokuho opens in mid‑1960s Japan, with a boy on the threshold of kabuki’s sacred world. Yet from the very beginning, the film was evidently designed to be monumental (perhaps too monumental for my 9 a.m. screening). Lee Sang‑il’s decades‑spanning epic follows Kikuo, the orphaned son of a slain yakuza boss taken into the household of kabuki legend Hanai Hanjiro II. It is meant to be a story of identity, lineage, and the slow burn of artistic becoming, but the film’s beauty is loud and persistent, so polished that it smothers the potential nuances.
The Hollywood Reporter describes the film’s “operatic intensity and visual poetry”, but for me, the poetry felt over‑articulated and excessively chromatic, as if every frame were a painting rather than a moment of being. The fifty‑year span — from the 1960s to the 2010s — becomes an eventful timeline without the emotional progression that would allow the characters (and us) to settle and reflect.
Kikuo’s relationship with Shunsuke, the heir to the kabuki lineage, should have been the film’s emotional anchor: part brotherhood, part rivalry, part unspoken longing (for the love of a father figure). Instead, their dynamic feels flattened by theatrical‑grade facial and bodily gestures. The backstage melodrama, the succession anxieties, the jealousies — all are rendered with such self‑conscious grandeur that the human texture gets blurred. There are hardly any off‑stage moments. Not having read it, I’m certain the original book by Shuichi Yoshida gives readers some breathing space across its 800 pages. Come to think of it, it may be ambitious to compress 800 pages into three hours.
What was also disappointing was how Kokuho treats kabuki not as a living art but as an aesthetic object. The onnagata tradition, highly stylised but rich with contradictions and emotional nuance, is saturated to flatness. Some films lack trust in the audience to feel and read beyond what is shown; this one explains through beauty, and beauty alone. The performances by Ryo Yoshizawa and Ryusei Yokohama are devoted, but the film’s visual excess keeps them at a distance, and strangely unrelatable.
In the end, Kokuho feels like a national treasure sealed behind glass: technically immaculate, emotionally unreachable. It is a film with a mission to satisfy by being a monument, which also distances itself from the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi‑sabi — beauty in imperfection.
Kokuho (2025)
Japanese
Director: Lee Sang-il
Writers: Satoko Okudera, Shuichi Yoshida (novel)
CAST
Ryo Yoshizawa – Kikuo Tachibana
Ryusei Yokohama – Shunsuke Ogaki
Mitsuki Takahata – Harue Fukuda
Shinobu Terajima – Sachiko Ogaki
Nana Mori – Akiko
Ai Mikami – Fujikoma
Kumi Takiuchi – Ayano
Masatoshi Nagase – Gongoro
Emma Miyazawa – Matsu
Takahiro Miura – Takeno
Kyusaku Shimada – Umeki
Tateto Serizawa – Genkichi
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