Name: You, Like a Star
Director: Michihito Fujii
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 2026-10-09T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 135 min
Cast: Ryusei Yokohama, Suzu Hirose, Hokuto Matsumura, Anne Nakamura, Gaku Hamada

Two teenagers on an island in the Seto Inland Sea, each carrying a family that asks more of them than it gives, find in each other the only steady ground they have. Then the story does what Nagira Yuu’s novel is famous for: it refuses to stop at first love. Kai leaves for Tokyo to write manga; Akimi stays on the island to keep her household afloat. The book follows them from seventeen to thirty-two, and You, Like a Star, Michihito Fujii’s film of it, promises the same fifteen-year span.

That span is the whole wager. Nagira’s novel won Japan’s Booksellers’ Award, sold past a million copies and built its reputation on chapters that let each lover narrate the distance from the inside. Fujii has the two actors a Japanese audience would most want for the parts, Ryusei Yokohama and Suzu Hirose, and he has Busan, where the film has its international premiere before it opens at home. What he has to prove is that a book about two voices can survive becoming a film seen from the outside.

The casting reads like a second draft. Yokohama and Hirose have met inside Nagira’s fiction before: in The Wandering Moon, Lee Sang-il’s adaptation of her earlier prize-winner, Hirose played the woman at its centre and Yokohama the possessive boyfriend standing between her and the man she trusted. Here he is no longer the obstacle but the other half of the love story. Fujii has said the project exists because of his lead, calling it a film “realised from Ryusei Yokohama’s burning conviction” and adding that he wants to answer it. Both stills Toho has released so far show the two of them together, and the marketing is built on the pairing.

Fujii’s reputation abroad was not built on romance, although he has made one, the tearjerker The Last 10 Years. His name rests on The Journalist, a newsroom thriller about state pressure on the press, and on Faceless, the fugitive drama that brought him Best Director and Yokohama Best Actor at the Japan Academy Film Prize. He also shot the yakuza chronicle A Family, the village thriller Village with Yokohama in the lead, and a Netflix series version of The Journalist whose cast included him. Across that work the recurring subject is an institution, a gang, a ministry or a court, deciding what a person is allowed to become. Nagira’s island is a smaller institution of the same kind: a place where a daughter’s duty is decided for her.

The screenplay belongs to Naoko Adachi, and that credit matters more than it usually would. Adachi wrote What Did You Eat Yesterday? and the NHK morning drama Welcome Home, Monet, television built on long stretches of ordinary time rather than on plot turns. Nagira, for her part, has said she constructed the book “very precisely”, that its branches could grow thick only if the trunk, Akimi’s and Kai’s feelings, stayed strong. An adaptation has to decide which branches to cut. The novel’s alternating first-person sections are its architecture; in a film, unless the script finds its own device, the inner voice becomes glances and silences the audience must read unaided.

There is also a question the marketing does not settle. The tagline Toho has chosen, “I want to get my life wrong for the sake of the person I love”, frames the story as a tearjerker, and the Japanese promotion openly sells it as a film made to make you cry. Nagira’s own stated position is colder: “My basic stance is that people cannot fully understand one another,” she told the book site Hon no Hikidashi. A two-hour-plus weepie and a novel about the limits of understanding are not the same project, and nothing released so far shows which one Fujii has made. Nor has anyone outside Asia committed to it: the confirmed rollout is Japan and Asian territories, with no North American or European distributor announced.

Ryusei Yokohama and Suzu Hirose in a still from You, Like a Star, directed by Michihito Fujii — Ryusei Yokohama and Suzu Hirose in *You, Like a Star* (2026)

Around the leads, the credited ensemble tracks the book’s adult world. Hokuto Matsumura plays Naoto Kuzumi, the artist who draws the manga Kai writes. Anne Nakamura and Gaku Hamada play editors in Tokyo’s publishing machinery. Machiko Ono and Yoshino Kimura play the two mothers, Kai’s and Akimi’s, whose needs shape the island half of the story, with Yuriko Ishida, and Hiroki Hasegawa as Kitahara, the island’s chemistry teacher in the novel. The score is by Takashi Omama and the theme song, “Yuzutsu”, is by RADWIMPS. TOHO Studios and Dragonfly Entertainment produced; Toho distributes.

You, Like a Star screens at the 31st Busan International Film Festival in the A Window on Asian Cinema section on October 7, a screening that sold out as soon as booking opened, with Fujii and Yokohama attending. It opens in Japanese cinemas on October 9, 2026, running 135 minutes. Hong Kong follows on October 29, Korea gets an October release exclusive to Lotte Cinema, and releases are set in at least six Asian territories including Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. No US or UK release has been announced yet.