Mayu Matsuoka and the long road from the edge of the frame to its centre

Mayu Matsuoka

Photo: Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 16, 1995 Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Actress
Known for	A Silent Voice: The Movie, Shoplifters, Love Exposure
Awards	Blue Ribbon · 2 Nikkan Sports Film · Yokohama Film Festival · Elan d'Or · Tokyo International Film Festival

For most of her career, Mayu Matsuoka has been the person audiences remember from a film sold on somebody else’s face. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters she was Aki, the one member of a makeshift family who steals nothing, working nights behind a one-way mirror and bonding in silence with a customer who cannot speak. In the Chihayafuru films she was the rival, not the heroine. Now a Netflix series, a stage musical and a festival competition title all rest on her, and the question her career keeps asking has shifted. Directors have long trusted her to steady a scene. Can she carry the whole film?

Her way in was close to an accident. When a talent agency scouted her three-year-old sister, Hina, the family went along to the interview, and the agency asked whether the eight-year-old elder sister wanted to try as well. “I got into the agency as an add-on to my sister,” she later joked. She then spent years being turned down. By her own count she failed around two hundred auditions as a child and three or four hundred by the end of high school. One examiner, she has recalled, kept telling her that he could see she was good and that what he wanted was for her to actually move him.

By her early teens, the Tokyo girl born on 16 February 1995 had found visibility through morning television: from 2008 to 2010 she was an “Oha Girl” on TV Tokyo’s children’s programme Oha Suta, a show she had watched since primary school and longed to join The variety work that followed taught her timing. Film parts ran in parallel, among them a high-school girl in Daihachi Yoshida’s ensemble drama The Kirishima Thing.

A national audience found her in Amachan, NHK’s 2013 morning serial, as Shiori Iruma, the leader of a fictional idol group, a part that put her, in character, on the stage of the network’s New Year’s Eve song contest. The more consequential door opened in a variety studio. Screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto saw her hosting Fuji TV’s Utsukemon and offered her Chika Ameki in A Restaurant with Many Problems. Matsuoka still calls Chika a character she talks to in her head, and she has said that letters from viewers who had stopped attending school, telling her the show had made them want to go back, changed how she thought about the job.

In cinema, the turn came through rivals and outsiders. As Shinobu Wakamiya, the aloof karuta queen of the Chihayafuru trilogy, she played opposite Suzu Hirose’s heroine and collected Japan’s TAMA Film Award for best new actress. Akiko Ohku then gave her a first film lead in Tremble All You Want, an adaptation of Risa Wataya’s novel about a 26-year-old office worker with no romantic experience, caught between a real suitor and the classmate she has fixated on since junior high. The film won the Audience Award in competition at the 2017 Tokyo International Film Festival, and Matsuoka received the festival’s Tokyo Gemstone Award.

Months later she stood with Kore-eda’s cast in Cannes, where Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or. Her Aki, a daughter of a respectable family hiding inside a fake one, gave the film its most private register and earned her the Blue Ribbon Award for best supporting actress. She followed it with a lead as a former piano prodigy returning to competition in Kei Ishikawa’s Listen to the Universe, adapted from Riku Onda’s novel, which brought her the Nikkan Sports Film Award for best actress, and with Yoshida’s publishing satire Kiba: The Fangs of Fiction, opposite Yo Oizumi.

The record has a gap that says something about how Japanese film institutions read her. Critics’ juries have rewarded her repeatedly, yet the Japan Academy Film Prize has nominated her four times, twice in a single year for Tremble All You Want and Shoplifters, without handing her the top award. The persona she built off screen cuts both ways. She is the variety host, the declared Morning Musume obsessive who has produced graduation photobooks for members of the group, the friend who trades jokes with actress Sairi Ito on their podcast. That image sells the deadpan, low-energy oddballs she is often cast as, in Sakamoto’s Love with a Case or the police-station comedy GEEKS, and it makes her easy to file as a character actress. Takahisa Zeze, who directed her in Strayer’s Chronicle, reached for a weightier comparison: Haruko Sugimura in an Ozu film, the one performer already in full command among a young cast.

Her most exposed lead so far came in Yuya Ishii’s Masked Hearts in 2023, as Hanako Orimura, a young director who loses her debut, a film about her own vanished mother, to the assistant director who has been harassing her, and then turns the camera on her family instead. It won her the Nikkan Sports best actress prize a second time. In June 2024 she announced her marriage to Daiki Arioka of the idol group Hey! Say! JUMP, adding that the couple would not be sharing further details. In spring 2025 she left the Hirata agency group, her professional home since childhood, and began working independently through an agent contract with Don-crew.

What followed is the busiest stretch of her career. Across the summer of 2026 she played Zoe Murphy, alternating with Haruka Kinoshita, in the Japanese staging of Dear Evan Hansen, on a run from Tokyo to Nagoya and Osaka. On 17 September Netflix released Plastic Beauty, in which she plays Fumi Numata, a gifted reconstructive surgeon pushed out of her hospital and into the cosmetic surgery business, where she collides with Riisa Naka’s celebrity practitioner. Matsuoka described Fumi as “not a hero who saves everyone” but someone “full of prejudice, foul-mouthed and selfish”, the register she has spent a decade sharpening.

Next comes Two Cigarettes, Three Nights, Yukiko Mishima’s adaptation of Akane Chihaya’s novel, which will have its world premiere in the main competition of the Tokyo International Film Festival, running from 26 October to 4 November, before opening in Japanese cinemas on 6 November. She plays a 29-year-old illustrator in Kyoto who has lost sight of what she wants to draw and spends three nights with a friend from university, played by Ryo Narita. Actress and director first met some fifteen years ago, when Matsuoka, then a high-school student hosting an interview programme, asked the director what the difference was between falling in love and loving. Mishima has said that Matsuoka’s work in the Hiroshima scenes alone is reason enough to watch. The festival that once gave an audience prize to her first lead will now judge a film built around her from the first frame.