‘Nagi Notes’ Review: Koji Fukada Returns with a Sweet and Quietly Spectacular Farm Drama About the Pleasures of Being Seen

A rural farm town some 630 kilometers west of Tokyo, Nagi is the kind of place where everybody knows each other. That makes it a wonderfully fertile setting for a film by rising Japanese auteur Koji Fukada (“Love Life,” “A Girl Missing”), whose characters often struggle to know themselves. 

That potential is on full display from the first moments of Fukada’s characteristically probing ( if uncharacteristically sweet) “Nagi Notes,” as divorced architect Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi) has only just gotten off the train from the big city when she’s stopped by a quiet local kid named Keita (Kiyora Fujiwara) who’s got a drawing of her saved on his phone for some reason. Keita sees Yuri for who she is despite never having met her before; Yuri’s ex-husband couldn’t do that despite being married to her for several years.

Inspired by a 1994 Oriza Hirata play called “Tōkyō Notes” (which was itself based on Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”), Fukada’s gentle adaptation is far too curious and clear-eyed to risk becoming a simple paean to the pureness of country living, but the film palpably taps into the kind of focus that’s only possible in a place so free of distractions, and to the freedom that comes with it — including the freedom to leave.  

Yuri is perfectly familiar with that particular freedom, of course (she left her husband, after all), but she continues to grapple with the consequences of exercising it for herself. In Japan, women typically join their partner’s family when they marry, and detach from it when they get divorced. Yuri split from her spouse because she wanted to go where she pleased, and the number one destination she had in mind was her ex’s hometown of Nagi, where his sculptor sister Yoriko (“Confessions” star Takako Matsu) still lives in the house where they were raised. Yuri and Yoriko grew close when they were siblings-in-law, and neither of them see any reason to leave their relationship behind just because one of them went through a break-up. The patriarchy is punishing enough within the confines of a marriage. 

Fukada — always measured and never insistent — invites us to observe Yuri and Yoriko observing each other, even though Yoriko seems to do the lion’s share of the looking. An unassuming beauty with sad eyes and a closet full of flannel, Yoriko has long been animated by her strikingly cosmopolitan former sister-in-law (Yuri’s sharp bob and upscale coats betray her as a cityslicker with every step), and she immediately asks her guest to sit for a sculpture. 

The conversations they share in the artist’s barn are soft but searching, Yoriko carving a camphorwood bust of her model’s face as the two women slowly work themselves back to a familial intimacy on unfamiliar terms. Fukada has always been fascinated by how other people are used to map the fractures that form within ourselves, and it’s greatly rewarding to watch him apply that interest with a greater eye towards closeness than distance for once. Yuri and Yoriko are two people who are hoping to see and be seen in a society that would much sooner look the other way from women in their plights, and “Nagi Notes” is at its best and most nuanced when it finds these characters using each other to triangulate their own positions. “You can be lonely wherever you are,” the sculptor tells the architect in one of the unfussy scenes where they gingerly open up to each other, but Yuri doesn’t feel lonely here.

Perhaps that’s just because Yuri is no longer solitary in her sense of abandonment, or maybe it’s because Yuriko is so gifted at collaborating with the essence of her material. There are stray hints of something more from time to time, few of them more overt than a warm smile, but the erosion of their mutual otherness has a romantic force all its own — one strong enough to hold this movie together even as it delicately surrenders to a series of subplots about the other people in town. 

Nagi, as Fukada imagines it, is empty but filled with voices — voices that are easily heard from every house in the area but seldom backed up by any kind of direct address. The loudest and most disembodied of those voices belongs to the dulcet-toned man whose daily radio broadcasts project a local sense of calm and community, at least in contrast to the violent drumbeat of explosions caused by training maneuvers at the nearby government base (whose semi-welcome presence helped pay for Nagi to have its own museum of contemporary art). The quietest belongs to the rare brant bird that squawks just out of sight along the rice paddies and riverbanks. The rest are referenced in the context of the film’s many ruined marriages, in which people spoke without looking one another in the eye. 

The people we meet in Nagi only tend to see each other in the sketches they make at Yuriko’s drawing class. Her two favorite students eventually require the help of a camera obscura to flip their worlds upside down, but — with a furtive sensitivity that recalls Hirokazu Kore-eda’s recent “Monster” — teen boys Keita and Haruki (Kawaguchi Waku) will benefit from these lessons in looking. Sketching may not offer these kids the same “freedom from acceptance” that Yuriko gets from sculpting, but it shows them what it means, and puts them on a path towards the kind of liberation that Yuri has always felt denied in her own life. 

The boys’ subplot emerges as a crucial thread in “Nagi Notes” (slowly at first, and then all at once), lending teenage urgency to Fukada’s otherwise lilting story about the all too conditional nature of modern family. Everything that happens in this deceptively relaxed and serene film is a matter of life and death (there’s even a ghost for good measure!), but the older characters need to be reminded of that before it’s too late. Training explosions, brush fires, and TV news reports of the war in Ukraine fringe the action — or lack thereof, as this is a movie whose climax hinges on the daring escape of three runaway farm cows — with dire reminders for Yuri and Yoriko to find whatever degree of peace they can for themselves, but such noise, smoke, and dread is just as likely to obfuscate their searches as it is to motivate them. 

But the beauty of Fukada’s immaculately rendered drama lies in what that obfuscation reveals about who its characters are, and how they’ve been rendered all but invisible by the impositions of a world that demands explanation without understanding. If “Nagi Notes” is so watchful and unforced that it often seems as though it isn’t looking for answers — or for anything — as hard as it should be, Fukada’s elegant plotting gradually allows this quiet film to assume the forcefulness of a full-throated shout. One that screams “KEEP GOING!” to people who might have otherwise been stuck in place forever, and not just because they live in a town as small as Nagi.

Grade: B+

“Nagi Notes” premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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