Kengo Kora

In The Tale of The Princess Kaguya (2013) Kengo Kora has perhaps fifteen minutes as Sutemaru, the boy from the woods, and he is a voice, not a face. It is enough. Kaguya's whole quarrel with the capital, its silks and its plucked eyebrows, is that she would rather be with him, and Isao Takahata trusts us to feel that without giving the boy much to do. We did feel it, and it surprised us: every time the film left the palace for the hills we sat up, and a good part of the reason was a voice we had barely heard.

That is roughly how he has been used. Kora came up through television and independent Japanese film in the mid-2000s, was noticed as Ama in Yukio Ninagawa's Snakes and Earrings (2008) and as Kizuki in Tran Anh Hung's Norwegian Wood (2010), and got his lead with A Story of Yonosuke (2013), playing an optimistic, socially clumsy young man of the kind he has been offered ever since. Critics tend to say the same things about him: introspective, awkward, naturalistic, no visible effort. Since then there has been Shin Godzilla (2016) as Yusuke Shimura, Shoplifters (2018), voice work, and television including House of Ninjas (2024).

The Kore-eda film is the one to click through to, and it makes our point for us. In Shoplifters he plays Takumi Maezono, and our review did not single him out. That is not an insult. Kore-eda's households work because nobody pulls focus, and Kora does not; he is a face at the table, listening, which is what the film needs and what he seems to prefer. He has said as much: "Listening is important, probably more so than looking." An actor who believes that will be easy to miss in a crowded frame, and in our pages so far he has been.

The caveat, then, is partly ours. We have written about him only in a supporting part and a voice, and the reputation rests on leads we have not reviewed, above all Yonosuke, which we will not judge from other people's descriptions. What we can say from what we have seen is that he is an actor other characters miss when he is not there, which is a rarer gift than it sounds and a hard one to notice while it is happening. The case for him will be made in a lead, and we would like to be handed one we can write about at length.