Erika Karata, the actress who shaved her head to start over

Erika Karata

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	September 19, 1997 Kimitsu, Chiba Prefecture, Japan
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Asako I & II
Awards	Yokohama Film Festival Best Newcomer · Yamaji Fumiko Film

On the set of The Queen of Villains, the production offered Erika Karata a wig. The scene was a hair-versus-hair death match, the kind of bout in which the loser is shorn in the ring, and her character, the wrestler Chigusa Nagayo, was the one who lost. Karata turned the wig down and let them cut her hair. Her explanation had no heroics in it: the audition reached her when she was wondering whether to keep acting at all, and who would want to see her.

The question was not rhetorical. A weekly magazine story about her relationship with a married co-star had taken her off television, out of the fashion magazine that employed her and, for a long stretch, out of public view. The comeback is usually told as redemption. The roles that brought Karata back keep asking her to play women who are judged in public, and she has turned that into the most interesting work of her career. This week she is in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival with Katai, a Japanese-Korean film she leads with the Korean actress and former KARA singer Kang Ji-young.

Kimitsu, the stretch of Chiba Prefecture where Karata was born on September 19, 1997, is rice-paddy country. She grew up there as the youngest of three daughters of a single mother who was often out at work, reading her sisters’ fashion magazines. In 2014, still at a girls’ high school, she was scouted by a talent manager during a part-time shift at Mother Farm, a Chiba theme park, and signed with the agency FLaMme. Her first job was a Girls’ Generation music video, the start of a Korean thread that runs through everything since.

By her own account she kept failing auditions and had told her agency she wanted to quit when she tried out for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II. She got the title role, a young woman who falls for two men with the same face, both played by Masahiro Higashide. The film was selected for the main competition at Cannes in 2018 and she walked the steps with it. It won her the best newcomer prize at the Yokohama Film Festival and the newcomer actress award at the Yamaji Fumiko Film Awards. She has said it moved her from “I can’t, so I want to quit” to “I can’t, so I want to know.”

Korea was already part of the plan. In 2017 she had signed with Seoul’s BH Entertainment and began learning Korean with a private tutor; in 2019 she joined tvN’s fantasy epic Arthdal Chronicles as Karika and returned for its second season in 2023.

In January 2020 the weekly Shukan Bunshun reported that she had been in a relationship since 2017 with Higashide, who was married. The fallout was immediate. She left a TBS hospital drama after its first episode, TV Tokyo pulled two episodes she starred in, and MORE, the magazine that had signed her as an exclusive model, ran her last appearance that month. Her agency said she deeply regretted her thoughtless actions. Higashide announced his divorce that August.

She describes the hiatus carefully. No phone, no television, no films. Her agency’s president had her read novels and hand in a weekly report on each one, with synopses and character charts; Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood was her favourite. She says it taught her to think about characters from the inside, and about how a page becomes an image.

The return was small and deliberate: a short film for Tokyo’s fashion week in 2021, then her first film lead in three years in Yasutomo Chikuma’s As It Flows, whose premiere in November 2022 was her first public appearance since the scandal. A supporting turn in Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia followed in 2024.

Then came Netflix. The Queen of Villains, directed by Kazuya Shiraishi from a project developed by the writer Osamu Suzuki, retold the 1980s women’s wrestling boom through Dump Matsumoto, played by the comedian Yuriyan Retriever. Karata played Nagayo, half of the Crush Gals, opposite Ayame Goriki’s Lioness Asuka. She put on about ten kilos and trained twice a week in the ring. “If I had truly been alone then, I could never have started moving again,” she told Cinema Today,. Finishing the series, she said, felt like finally reaching the starting line.

There is an uncomfortable side to this, and the discomfort is not all hers. The hostility outlasted the hiatus: in 2023 a Josei Jishin reader poll still ranked her second among female celebrities readers did not want to support after an affair report. The industry has chosen to cast that history rather than look past it. Her comeback parts include a wrestler humiliated in front of a crowd, a convicted serial killer insisting on her innocence in the drama Before the Day, and a role in Koji Fukada’s Love on Trial, a film about a pop idol sued by her agency for breaking the no-relationship clause in her contract. When Fuji TV made her the lead of 102nd Proposal, the columnist Takashi Kimura wrote in Gendai Business about why the network had chosen two leads with scandals behind them, Karata and Kentaro Ito. Each part can be read as a second chance or as notoriety turned into ratings. What the performances show is an actress who has learned to use the public gaze instead of hiding from it.

After a 2025 spent partly in Netflix’s band drama Glass Heart, led by Takeru Satoh, this has been her busiest year. 102nd Proposal, a sequel to Fuji TV’s 1991 romance hit, ran for twelve episodes from April to June, with Karata as Hikari Hoshino, a 30-year-old cellist whose father, the hero of the original, is again played by Tetsuya Takeda. Love on Trial, a Cannes premiere in 2025, opened in Japan in January, and she appeared in Mag Mag, directed by her old ring rival Yuriyan Retriever.

Katai, directed by Akira Yamamoto, is the next test. Its casting crosses the border both ways: Kang plays a Japanese woman and Karata a Korean one, Ji-hyeon, two women whose lives are knotted together by a single medical error. Yamamoto calls it the story of two women “whose fates are swapped” between the two countries. It opens in Japan on February 5, 2027. After that comes The Blue We Touch, Hiroshi Ishikawa’s first feature in thirteen years, released by Bitters End, the company that distributed Asako I & II. She plays Ayane, who works nights while preparing to become a public prosecutor. Six years after the story that nearly ended her career, Karata’s next premiere is where her first big one was: in competition.

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