Nagasaki, 1964. At the New Year's banquet of the yakuza organization Tachibana, the boy Kikuo dances a passage from "Sekinoto" as an onnagata. The moment the performance ends, a rival organization storms in, and the boy's father dies in front of him. "Kokuho" begins by laying art's most beautiful moment and blood's closest moment over each other inside the same room.
It is a 2025 work by director Lee Sang-il. Based on Yoshida Shuichi's 2018 novel of the same title, the screenplay was written by Okudera Satoko, with Yoshizawa Ryo and Yokohama Ryusei as the two young actors and Watanabe Ken as Hanai Hanjiro II. It premiered on May 18 in the Directors' Fortnight at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, then opened in Japan on June 6.
Kikuo, having lost his father, plots revenge but fails, and the following year he crosses into the world of a distinguished kabuki family. That house has a son of its own. The setup in which a man who will inherit by blood and a man who will reach for it by talent collide under one roof is this film's engine. How often the word succession wears the same face as betrayal, the film looks at long and without hurry.
Discussions of intangible heritage on our side generally run in the language of institutions. Designation and recognition, the number of transmission scholarship students, subsidy line items. But the succession that "Kokuho" shows is made of the angle of a toe, the rhythm of a bending neck, the habit of a hand mixing white makeup. A craft that passes only from body to body cannot be transcribed, and when one person collapses, that much disappears.
Nor does it gloss over the tension between preservation and use. Kabuki is not a relic in a museum but a commercial art that must sell tickets every day, and when the person standing on stage changes, the audience changes too. The film pinpoints where deciding whom to put on stage becomes deciding what to preserve.
The direction shoots the hands and feet, and the sensation of clothing pressing on the body, ahead of the face. This is also why the makeup and hairstyling drew particular praise. Makeup is not used as a device to conceal a character.
It functions as the very process by which a person moves into another body. The cinematography binds the artificiality of stage lighting and the damp darkness of the dressing room into a single world. Acting, direction, and cinematography all drew favorable reviews because these three layers are looking at the same place.
There are parts that are less persuasive. Because the contrast between the two characters is designed so sharply, there are stretches after the midpoint where the events do little more than confirm that blueprint. The yakuza-origin premise, too, retains only its weight as a symbol as the film moves toward the later stretch, compared with its intensity early on. Even so, once the stage scenes begin, this predictability loses its force.
It earned 128 million dollars in Japan and became the highest-grossing live-action film of all time there, and as Japan's submission in the international feature film category at the 98th Academy Awards it made the December shortlist and was nominated for makeup. What remains long after the attendance records are forgotten is the rhythm of the hand mixing the white makeup.
Viewers who find the labor behind the stage tedious have no particular reason to buy a ticket. The same goes for those who expected action from the yakuza-origin premise, and those who only want to see how the contest between the two characters is settled will tire from the middle onward. What this film holds onto at length is the time spent mixing makeup and layering on clothes, and for anyone without the will to sit through that time, little is left.
