Rikiya Imaizumi adapts Hiroyuki Yasuda’s manga with Kasumi Arimura as a woman who leaves the night trade without apologising for it, and lets a small coastal town come to her instead.

Call Me Chihiro (Chihiro-san) is a Japanese drama about a woman who walks away from sex work and takes a job behind the counter of a bento shop in a small seaside town. Kasumi Arimura plays the title role, Rikiya Imaizumi directed, and the story comes from a manga by Hiroyuki Yasuda whose heroine has been around, on and off, for more than two decades. Netflix produced it with the Japanese studio Asmik Ace and released it worldwide as one of its Japanese original films.

The premise is plain on purpose. Chihiro, the name she used at work and the one she keeps, makes no secret of where she has been. She does not apologise for it, and she does not explain it either. The shop’s owners, Bito and his blind wife Tae, take her on; the customers warm to her; and a handful of people who do not quite fit anywhere else begin to gather around the counter. Among them are Okaji, a withdrawn high-school girl who has been secretly photographing Chihiro, and Makoto, a boy whose mother leaves him largely to fend for himself. Chihiro is friendly with everyone and close to almost no one, and that distance is the engine of the story.

The cast around Kasumi Arimura is built from familiar faces of Japanese film and television. Hana Toyoshima plays Okaji, whose real name is Kuniko Seo, and Tetta Shimada plays Makoto, with Yui Sakuma as his mother, Hitomi. Jun Fubuki and Mitsuru Hirata play Tae and Bito, the couple who run the shop; Tae is the one person Chihiro lets in. Lily Franky plays Utsumi, her former boss and the clearest thread back to her old life. Miwako Ichikawa appears as the woman Chihiro met as a child and whose name she later borrowed, and Ryuya Wakaba, who led Imaizumi’s Over the Town, plays Taniguchi.

Call Me Chihiro (Kasumi Arimura) — Call Me Chihiro (2023)

The source material has a longer history than most streaming adaptations. Hiroyuki Yasuda, born in 1967 in Niigata Prefecture, made his debut in 1991 and is best known for Shomuni, an office comedy serialised in Kodansha’s Morning that Fuji TV turned into a drama series in 1998. His first manga about this character, Chihiro, ran between 1999 and 2001 across Morning Magnum, Morning and Evening, and followed a sought-after sex worker through her working days. The sequel, Chihiro-san, moved her out of that life and into the lunch shop.

Chihiro-san was serialised in Akita Shoten’s women’s magazine Elegance Eve from 2013, closing its first part in 2018. The film brought the character back: the magazine ran a new chapter in 2023 to mark the adaptation, and further instalments followed through 2025. The series stands at ten volumes, and by January 2024 the two manga together had passed one million copies in print and digital. That is the audience the film inherited before anyone outside Japan had heard of it.

Rikiya Imaizumi, born in 1981 in Kōriyama, Fukushima, came up through small-scale relationship films, many of them written by himself. His filmography includes Sad Tea (2013), Their Distance (2016), Just Only Love, which played in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2018, Little Nights, Little Love (2019), His (2020) and Over the Town (2021). He has won the Best Director prize at the Yokohama Film Festival. Call Me Chihiro arrived in the same year as his manga adaptation Undercurrent, and he went on to direct the series 1122: For a Happy Marriage and the live-action Teasing Master Takagi-san film in 2024.

Imaizumi and Kasumi Arimura had worked together before. He directed two episodes of A Day-Off of Kasumi Arimura (2020), a television series built entirely around the actress. Born in 1993 in Itami, Hyōgo, Arimura broke through as the young Haruko in NHK’s morning drama Amachan (2013) and later led the morning drama Hiyokko (2017). Flying Colors (2015) won her Newcomer of the Year at the Japan Academy Film Prize, and We Made a Beautiful Bouquet (2021) earned her Best Actress at the 45th edition. In the same year she played Tomoe in the last two Rurouni Kenshin films.

Against that record, Chihiro is a deliberate change of register. Her best-known roles are morning-drama heroines, romantic leads and period figures, and when the project was announced in August 2022 the Japanese press led with exactly that contrast: Arimura, in a starring film role, as a former sex worker. The manga’s Chihiro is amiable, solitary by choice and in no hurry to be rescued, and Netflix’s own logline for the film calls her unapologetic. How much of that an adaptation keeps is the main question the project sets itself.

Behind the camera, the screenplay is credited to Imaizumi and Kaori Sawai, with Hiroshi Iwanaga as director of photography and Akira Yamano producing for Asmik Ace and Digital Frontier. Principal photography took place in Hiroshima Prefecture. The score and the theme song are by Shigeru Kishida, frontman of the Kyoto rock band Quruli, whose involvement was announced with the trailer and key art in December 2022. The film runs 132 minutes and opened in Japanese cinemas on 23 February 2023, the same day it reached Netflix around the world.

Call Me Chihiro also sits in a familiar strain of Japanese cinema: stories set around a small food business, where the counter is the meeting place and the customers carry the plot. Naoko Ogigami’s Kamome Diner (2006) and Naomi Kawase’s Sweet Bean (2015) are the best-known recent examples abroad. What sets Yasuda’s premise apart is the woman behind the counter, whose past is stated up front in the synopsis instead of being held back as a twist.

For Netflix it was a live-action Japanese original, and the simultaneous cinema opening at home gave it a theatrical run that many streaming films never get. For international viewers who know Kasumi Arimura only from We Made a Beautiful Bouquet or the Rurouni Kenshin films, it is an easy entry point into her later work, and into Imaizumi’s.

None of this settles whether a long, quiet character study about a woman who keeps everyone at arm’s length will hold every viewer for over two hours. The ingredients are clear enough: a manga with a loyal readership and a decidedly unsentimental heroine, a director whose career is made of small, unresolved relationships, a lead actress stepping outside her usual roles, and a musician with his own following writing the score. Whether those pieces add up is the kind of question each viewer answers for themselves.

Cast

Tags: Netflix, Japan, Kasumi Arimura

Kasumi Arimura / Chihiro	Hana Toyoshima / Kuniko Seo
Ryuya Wakaba / Taniguchi	Yui Sakuma / Hitomi
Lily Franky / Utsumi	Jun Fubuki / Tae
Mitsuru Hirata / Bito	Toshie Negishi / Nagai
Miwako Ichikawa / Chihiro	Itsuki Nagasawa / Chinatsu Ube

Call Me Chihiro Puts a Former Sex Worker Behind a Seaside Bento Counter on Netflix

Cast

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