Kenichi Shibuya is a 50-year-old salaryman who divorced a few years back. Since the divorce, his relationship with his daughter has become awkward. One day, Kenichi Shibuya and his boss Yumi Ayase are struck by lightning and die. They go to the afterlife. There in the afterlife they hear of a legendary soup. If someone drinks the legendary soup, that person is reborn, but the reborn person has no memories of their prior life. Kenichi Shibuya then searches for the secrets in the legendary soup, hoping to be reborn, but not forget his daughter.
Acting
Namase's hangdog everyman makes cosmic stakes feel crushingly personal.
Writing
Turns bureaucratic afterlife logistics into genuine theological dread.
Director
Yuki Otsuka
Katsuhisa Namase
Kenichi Shibuya
Manami Konishi
Yumi Ayase
Yuiko Kariya
Mika Shibuya
Shuhei Nomura
Naoyuki Mikami
Alice Hirose
Hitomi Misaki
Ai Hashimoto
Chiaki Nishimura
Suzuka Ohgo
Ayumu Yano
Ayumi Ito
Mika Shibuya
Arata Furuta
Ichi Kondo
Hiroki Matsukata
Tsutomu Ishida
Masato Irie
Keiko Horiuchi
Keisuke Horibe
Tetsuhiro Ikeda
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The 'salaryman' archetype here subverts typical Japanese corporate drama by literally killing the protagonist to examine what he missed while alive.
Director Otsuka reportedly wanted the afterlife bureaucracy to mirror Japan's actual pension office aesthetic—endless waiting for answers about your existence.
JP
