Yui Katakura has spent her adult life treating saving money as a hobby, and by her fortieth birthday she has the bank balance to show for it. Then a free cancer screening gives her about a year to live, and the first thing she feels, in Netflix‘s synopsis, is relief: if she is going to die, there is no reason to keep saving. One Year to Live, Buy a Man, a Japanese romantic drama film made for Netflix, starts from that piece of arithmetic. Ko Shibasaki plays Yui, and Eiji Akaso plays Sena, a pink-haired nightclub host in debt who asks her for a loan and ends up being bought instead, for a fixed price.

The film is directed by Hiroki Kazama, who made the Fuji TV romance Silent, and written by Yoshikazu Okada, whose screenplays include one of the best-known Japanese films about a young woman with a terminal illness. It adapts Toriko Yoshikawa’s novel of the same name, published by Kodansha, which won the Shimase Romance Literature Prize. Netflix pitches it as a Cinderella story for grown-ups. The label fits as far as it goes, with the roles swapped: the woman pays, the prince is a host with debts, and the clock that runs out is a diagnosis, not midnight.

A price tag on a person

Remaining-life romance is a crowded Japanese genre, and its usual shape is familiar. In The Last 10 Years, Let Me Eat Your Pancreas or Crying Out Love in the Center of the World, the person who is dying is young, the love story is a race against time, and money never enters the room. One Year to Live, Buy a Man starts somewhere else. Its heroine is 40 and single, her doctor wants to operate, and her relationship to the future has always run through a savings account. Netflix’s synopsis gives her a motto that works as a thesis for the whole premise: saving money is the best entertainment and the perfect way to kill time.

That is what makes the price Yui settles on, 720,000 yen, the center of the story rather than a gimmick. A woman who has priced every pleasure in advance finally has a reason to spend, and the thing she spends on is a person. The premise sets up a transaction first and a romance second, and the order matters. Whatever grows between Yui and Sena grows on top of a contract, and the synopsis says plainly that the lopsided arrangement becomes harder to bear as the feelings deepen.

Mizuho Maruyama, Yui’s coworker, played by Naomi Nishida, carries the opposite motto: spending is love. Between the two women’s slogans sits the question the film is built to test, which is whether money spent on someone can ever be separated from what is felt for them.

What the trailer shows

The trailer released by Netflix Japan lays out the deal and then what Yui does with her purchase. She takes Sena to premium cinema seats, to game arcades and to department-store food halls, the everyday luxuries she had denied herself for years, and the trailer shows her growing visibly more carefree as they share these firsts. It then shows the bond between them turning warped, and in its key line Yui asks whether it would suit him better if she died sooner.

That question names the trap the premise sets for both characters. Once a dying woman is paying a man, every kindness he shows her can be read as service, and every hour he spends with her can be read as an investment that pays out when she is gone. The key art places the two of them facing each other in a red bathtub, and Netflix describes their eye contact as hinting at something beyond a contract. The film’s job, judging by its setup, is to make the audience doubt that reading as often as Yui does.

The people around the contract

The supporting cast sketches two very different worlds. On Yui’s side are Michitaka Tsutsui as Masami Ikuyama, her former boss and former affair partner; Yoko Moriguchi as her stepmother; and Koen Kondo as a doctor. On Sena’s side the list reads like a household under financial strain: Mari Hamada plays his mother, who is paying off debt while caring for a grandchild, and Yui Narumi plays his younger sister Nachi, back home after leaving an abusive husband. Ryubi Miyase plays Kiriya, a junior host at Sena’s club, and Ichika Osaki plays one of Sena’s top clients.

The arrangement of those roles suggests that Sena’s request for money is not written as a simple hustle. A host whose mother is in debt and whose sister has fled her marriage is asking for cash from inside a family that needs it, and the film appears to set his situation against Yui’s careful solitude rather than against a villain.

Kazama, Okada and a pairing that has worked before

Hiroki Kazama is not new to directing Eiji Akaso. He directed him in Cherry Magic, the TV Tokyo romance about a man who gains the power to read the thoughts of anyone he touches, and in its film sequel, Cherry Magic! THE MOVIE. Kazama’s later television work, Silent and The Beginning of the Sea, built his reputation for romances driven by restraint and by what characters do not say. Yoshikazu Okada brings the other half of the lineage: beyond The Last 10 Years, he wrote the Netflix series Beyond Goodbye.

At Netflix’s lineup event in Tokyo, Okada said he had wanted to write the screenplay ever since he read the novel and that he wrote it with Shibasaki and Akaso in mind from the planning stage. Kazama said he felt a distinctive energy in the way Yui lives, and that he was looking forward to working with Shibasaki, whose work he has watched since his teenage years, and to reuniting with Akaso. Shibasaki said she was strongly drawn to the role when she read the novel, that she related to Yui’s way of living alone, and that meeting Sena made her feel the importance of an oshi, the person a fan devotes time and money to. Akaso described Sena as someone who carries a heavy reality but lives lightly, and said he hoped the film could be a light for people who feel anxious about their future.

For Shibasaki, whose career runs from Battle Royale to Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s Serpent’s Path, this is her first Netflix project. Akaso already has two Netflix leads behind him, in Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead and Inheritance Detective.

Money, old age and the host club

Yoshikawa has said the novel grew out of a question many Japanese readers will recognize: how much money a person needs in old age to feel safe. The question has had a national edge in Japan since the Financial Services Agency published a report estimating that a retired couple might need around 20 million yen on top of their pension, a figure that became a household reference point for retirement anxiety. Yui is a character built from that fear, someone who saved for an old age she now will not have.

The host club is the other half of the anchor. Japan’s host clubs have drawn sustained scrutiny over customers who run up large debts to the men they pay to spend time with, and the government recently tightened the law to stop clubs from exploiting customers’ romantic feelings to drive spending. The film’s premise flips that familiar story. Here the customer sets the terms and names the price, and the host is the one with debts at home.

One Year to Live, Buy a Man, Japanese Netflix film — One Year to Live, Buy a Man. Photo: Makanai Hitoshi / Netflix

That inversion is where the film leaves its central question open. If affection begins as a paid contract, nothing either of them says later can fully prove it became something else, not to Yui, not to Sena, and not to the people watching them from either side of the money.

One Year to Live, Buy a Man: release date, cast and where to watch

One Year to Live, Buy a Man premieres worldwide on Netflix on November 5, 2026, as a Netflix Japan original feature film. Ko Shibasaki and Eiji Akaso share the lead as Yui Katakura and Sena, with Michitaka Tsutsui, Naomi Nishida, Mari Hamada, Yui Narumi, Yoko Moriguchi, Ryubi Miyase, Ichika Osaki and Koen Kondo in supporting roles. Hiroki Kazama directs from a screenplay by Yoshikazu Okada, based on the novel by Toriko Yoshikawa. The music is by Haruka Nakamura, and the film was produced by Netflix in association with AOI Pro. The story is fiction, not based on real events. The original Japanese title is 余命一年、男をかう.