Suzu Hirose and the long argument against her own ubiquity

Suzu Hirose

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 19, 1998 Shimizu, Shizuoka, Japan
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Boy and the Beast, Our Little Sister, Lupin III: The First
Awards	2 Japan Academy Film Prize · Kinokuniya Drama · Mainichi Film · Blue Ribbon · Art Encouragement Prize

When A Pale View of Hills had its premiere at Cannes, Suzu Hirose walked the festival’s red carpet for the first time since she had arrived there as a teenager in Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Our Little Sister. In between, she had become the face Japanese viewers met most often between programmes, the actress the country’s advertisers have, in more than one year, booked more than anyone else. Familiarity on that scale is a trap for an actor: the audience thinks it already knows you. Hirose’s answer, worked out film by film over a decade, has been to take the parts that make her harder to read.

She grew up in Shimizu, the port district of Shizuoka, the youngest of three children. Her older sister is the actress Alice Hirose, and it was through Alice that the business found her: Suzu had gone with their mother to an event for Seventeen, the girls’ magazine where her sister was already a model, when the head of Alice’s agency approached her; she has said she simply could not find a way to say no. She cared far more about basketball. When her first commercial shoot fell on the day of a big game, she missed the match and cried.

The job came anyway. She won the magazine’s Miss Seventeen grand prix in 2012, two months after turning fourteen (she was born on 19 June 1998), and her first television and film parts followed in 2013. Two years later Kore-eda cast her as Suzu Asano, the half-sister taken in by three older siblings in a weathered house in Kamakura. Our Little Sister competed for the Palme d’Or and brought her the Japan Academy Film Prize for newcomer of the year. That summer she also voiced Kaede in Mamoru Hosoda’s The Boy and the Beast, and by December Video Research ranked her first among all celebrities by number of television advertisers.

The industry had found its next teenage lead and cast her accordingly. The Chihayafuru trilogy made her Chihaya Ayase, a schoolgirl obsessed with competitive karuta, and a box-office draw. Manga romances such as Your Lie in April filled the gaps. What kept her from being filed away was a second track running in parallel. In Lee Sang-il’s Rage she played a teenager on an Okinawan island whose assault the film refuses to look away from, and that season the Japan Academy nominated her twice, as lead for Chihayafuru and in support for Rage. Kore-eda brought her back for The Third Murder, a legal drama that competed at Venice, as the murder victim’s daughter. It won her the academy’s prize for best supporting actress.

Television and theatre widened the range. She voiced the lead in the anime Fireworks and led Yuji Sakamoto’s drama anone. In 2019 NHK gave her Natsuzora, its hundredth morning serial: 156 episodes as a war orphan raised on a Hokkaido dairy farm who becomes an animator in Tokyo. The same year Hideki Noda put her on stage for the first time, in Q: A Night At The Kabuki, his Queen-scored reworking of Romeo and Juliet, in which she and Takako Matsu played the same Juliet at two ages. Matsu is the actress Hirose has named as the one she would most like to become. The role earned her an individual Kinokuniya Drama Award.

Her twenties brought less comfortable work. In Lee’s The Wandering Moon, adapted from Yu Nagira’s novel, she played Sarasa, a woman whose childhood months with a university student were recorded by the police and the press as a kidnapping, and who meets him again fifteen years later. In Shunji Iwai’s Kyrie she was Ikko, a drifter who turns manager for a homeless street singer, and the part brought her the Mainichi Film Award for best supporting actress. In Kore-eda’s Netflix series Asura she returned to his world as the youngest of four sisters, a sly echo of the role that started everything.

Then came the year that changed the conversation. In 2025 four of her films reached cinemas, three of them with Hirose as lead or co-lead. Kichitaro Negishi’s Yasuko, Songs of Days Past cast her as Yasuko Hasegawa, the Taisho-era actress caught between the poet Chuya Nakahara and the critic Hideo Kobayashi. Nobuhiro Doi’s Unreachable, an original Yuji Sakamoto script, made her one of three young women sharing an old house in Tokyo, alongside Hana Sugisaki and Kaya Kiyohara. Kei Ishikawa’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, with Hirose as the young Etsuko in 1950s Nagasaki, took her back to Cannes. Keishi Otomo’s Hero’s Island put her opposite Satoshi Tsumabuki in an Okinawa under American occupation. The prizes followed in 2026: the Blue Ribbon Award for best actress, her first Blue Ribbon of any kind, best actress at the Yokohama Film Festival and the Nikkan Sports Film Awards, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists in film.

The run was not a clean sweep, and the gaps say something. A Pale View of Hills divided critics: Variety wrote that it followed the letter of Ishiguro’s book but missed its haunted spirit, and Little White Lies found that its final revelation landed with a clunk. Nearly every notice exempted the acting, Hirose’s scenes with Fumi Nikaido above all, but a fine performance inside an uneven film is a familiar pattern in her career. And the commercials never stopped. Many viewers still meet her first in a beer or fast-food advert, which is why her best screen work can read as a correction to an image she did not entirely choose.

She has spent 2026 pushing further from that image. In Netflix’s Human Vapor, Shinzo Katayama’s reboot of Toho’s 1960 science-fiction film, written by Yeon Sang-ho, she and Kento Hayashi play siblings who run a streaming channel, alongside Shun Oguri and Yu Aoi; the series opened at number one in Japan. On stage she returned to Noda’s company in a new production with Sadao Abe and Eri Fukatsu that toured from Tokyo to London. In October came You, Like a Star, Michihito Fujii’s film of another Yu Nagira novel, in which she and Ryusei Yokohama play two teenagers on a Seto Inland Sea island whose love is tested across fifteen years.

The next stretch is already booked. Takahisa Zeze’s All That Exists, opposite Hidetoshi Nishijima, casts her as a young gallery owner tied to an unsolved double kidnapping and opens in February 2027. A month earlier, in January, Netflix releases Yu Irie’s comedy From NEET to Peak, in which she plays the country’s top idol, pursued by a man who has not left his room in eight years. It is a part built on the very ubiquity she has spent her career outrunning, and she seems to know it.