Kokuho Review – Sang-il Lee’s Grand Portrait of Art, Ambition, and the Cost of Legacy

In Kokuho, Japan’s official submission for the 2025 Academy Awards, director Sang-il Lee crafts a film as rich, layered, and heartbreaking as the centuries-old art form it depicts. Centered on the world of kabuki theater—with its strict hierarchies, its inherited traditions, and its haunting beauty—the film explores how art becomes both a salvation and a curse for those who dedicate their lives to it.

Spanning five decades and nearly three hours in length, Kokuho is as operatic as its subject matter demands: a sweeping story of mentorship, rivalry, and artistic transcendence. It is powered by two magnificent central performances from Ryo Yoshizawa and Ryusei Yokohama, guided by a commanding turn from Ken Watanabe, and elevated by visual poetry that lingers long after the final curtain falls.

A Story Rooted in Art and Bloodlines

The title Kokuho translates literally to “national treasure,” a term that in Japan carries deep cultural and spiritual weight. The film takes inspiration from Shuichi Yoshida’s novel of the same name and, like much of Lee’s previous work (Villain, Rage), is fascinated by moral complexity and human frailty.

The story begins in Nagasaki in the mid-1960s, amid a rare snowfall that feels almost supernatural in its quiet beauty. Inside a lavish New Year’s banquet hosted by a local yakuza, a visiting kabuki star, Hanjiro Hanai (Ken Watanabe), notices something extraordinary: the host’s teenage son Kikuo (played by Soya Kurokawa), who performs a female role with astonishing commitment and emotion. Hanai sees in him the spark of true artistry — raw, dangerous, and pure.

But life quickly turns cruel. After his father is murdered, young Kikuo attempts to avenge him and fails. To save him from following the same violent path, his stepmother sends him to Osaka to apprentice under Hanai, who heads the prestigious House of Tanba-ya, one of kabuki’s oldest and most respected lineages.

There, Kikuo meets Shunsuke (Keitatsu Koshiyama), Hanai’s biological son. The two are the same age, similar in build, yet opposite in background — Kikuo the orphaned son of a gangster, Shunsuke the heir to a dynasty. Their relationship begins with rivalry but quickly evolves into a complex brotherhood of shared struggle, jealousy, and mutual respect.

Training, Transformation, and the Theater of Pain

Hanai’s methods are old-fashioned and cruel, bordering on abuse. He humiliates his students, throws them to the floor, forces them to repeat movements until exhaustion. Yet beneath the physical brutality lies an unyielding devotion to tradition — the belief that beauty can only be born through suffering.

One of the film’s most arresting early moments arrives when Hanai bestows upon Kikuo a new stage name: Toichiro Hanai. By giving the boy his own family name, he symbolically adopts him into the Tanba-ya lineage — a gesture both generous and dangerous, as it ignites a quiet tension between the two boys. Shunsuke feels the threat immediately, and Sachiko (Shinobu Terajima), Hanai’s wife, looks on with a mother’s unease.

Kikuo, meanwhile, bears a literal mark of his past — a yakuza tattoo of a fierce eagle-owl across his back, hidden under his kimono. It is a constant reminder of the violence he comes from, and of the purity he is trying to reach. As he learns to embody the feminine grace of the onnagata (the male actors who play women on the kabuki stage), the film transforms into a meditation on identity, performance, and metamorphosis.

An aging onnagata named Mangiku (Min Tanaka) delivers one of the film’s many haunting truths: “Your beauty may destroy your art.” His warning foreshadows everything that follows.

The Rise of Two Stars

The story leaps ahead to 1972. Kikuo and Shunsuke are now young adults — played by Ryo Yoshizawa and Ryusei Yokohama — and both have become rising stars in the kabuki scene. Their synchronized performances as onnagata captivate audiences; they move together with such grace and precision that they seem to share one heartbeat.

Offstage, however, cracks begin to show. The same ambition that once united them now drives them apart. Kikuo, consumed by perfection, rejects ordinary life and relationships. Shunsuke, eager for validation, courts fame, publicity, and wealthy patrons. What began as brotherhood turns into a rivalry that quietly devastates them both.

A key sequence shows Kikuo performing the lead role in the tragic play Love Suicide, while his lover Harue (Mitsuki Takahata) and Shunsuke watch from the audience. The scene cuts between the stylized drama on stage and the raw emotion in the audience — a breathtaking moment where art and life merge. Kikuo’s performance becomes a kind of spiritual exorcism, a surrender to something larger than himself. It is one of the film’s emotional peaks, and Yoshizawa delivers it with heartbreaking intensity.

Craftsmanship and Cinematic Elegance

From a purely visual standpoint, Kokuho is mesmerizing. Cinematographer Sofian El Fani (Blue Is the Warmest Color) captures the textures of skin, silk, and shadow with painterly precision. His camera lingers on faces painted white with kabuki makeup — eyes that reveal everything behind a mask meant to conceal.

Production designer Yohei Taneda (Kill Bill: Vol. 1, When Marnie Was There) builds a universe of contrasts: smoky rehearsal rooms, ornate theaters, cramped dressing spaces filled with tension and powder. Costume designer Kumiko Ogawa creates garments that breathe life into the characters — not just their stage personas, but their private selves.

The film’s music, composed by Marihiko Hara, moves between delicate, almost minimalist motifs and lush orchestral passages. At times, it swells with the same grandeur as a kabuki performance; at others, it fades into silence, leaving only the sound of breath and footsteps on stage.

Themes of Art, Obsession, and Inheritance

More than anything, Kokuho is about the price of artistic devotion. The world of kabuki, as depicted here, is not just an art form but a spiritual order — one that demands complete sacrifice. Lee does not question the gender politics of the onnagata tradition; instead, he accepts it as the story’s given reality and explores how this stylized femininity becomes a test of masculinity, endurance, and soul.

When Hanai calls one of his students a “national treasure,” he means it as both praise and warning: a true artist will leave nothing behind except their art. The film treats this idea with both awe and sorrow.

Kikuo becomes the embodiment of this paradox. His pursuit of transcendence isolates him; his relationships collapse under the weight of his ambition. He has a child with a geisha (Ai Mikami) he barely knows and later becomes involved with the daughter (Nana Mori) of an established kabuki actor — relationships that blur the line between affection and opportunism. Yet Yoshizawa refuses to make Kikuo a villain. Instead, he portrays him as a man possessed by his art, painfully aware that every triumph brings him closer to emptiness.

Shunsuke, on the other hand, is the mirror image of what Kikuo might have been: more human, more fragile, but perhaps also more real. Ryusei Yokohama’s performance carries deep empathy; his Shunsuke is not untalented, only overshadowed. His tragedy lies in knowing that mastery can’t be forced, and that love and loyalty can’t survive where obsession reigns.

Ken Watanabe and the Weight of Tradition

Ken Watanabe brings gravitas and quiet melancholy to Hanjiro Hanai, the mentor who shapes and ultimately scars both young men. There is a poignant irony in his teachings — he preaches purity but hides ego, discipline but harbors guilt. His advice to Kikuo — “Let kabuki be your revenge” — becomes the film’s central thesis: that art can transform pain into beauty, but never erase its source.

By the time decades have passed, the House of Tanba-ya has changed, yet the cycles of ambition and sacrifice continue. The apprentice becomes the master, the student repeats the sins of the teacher. The film closes on an image that feels both triumphant and tragic — a reminder that the stage, like life, always demands another performance.

A Grand, Flawed, and Beautiful Epic

At 175 minutes, Kokuho is not without excess. Its pacing sometimes wavers, and the narrative jumps across decades can feel abrupt. Yet these flaws are part of its texture. Like kabuki itself, the film is deliberate, ornate, and emotionally heightened — not meant for quick consumption, but for slow absorption.

Lee’s direction is unashamedly cinematic. He fuses melodrama with restraint, tradition with modernity, creating a film that feels timeless even as it spans half a century. Screenwriter Satoko Okudera adapts Yoshida’s novel with lyrical efficiency, weaving social history, family drama, and artistic philosophy into a coherent whole.

In the end, Kokuho is not simply about kabuki. It is about what it means to dedicate your life to something ephemeral — a performance, an ideal, a fleeting moment of beauty. It asks whether greatness is worth the loneliness it demands, and whether the legacy of art can ever truly compensate for the loss of self.

Sang-il Lee’s Kokuho is a cinematic ritual — a film that moves with the rhythm of a heartbeat, that aches with memory, and that celebrates the eternal struggle between art and humanity.

Magnificent in scope, intimate in feeling, and anchored by career-best performances from Yoshizawa and Yokohama, it stands as one of the year’s most ambitious and emotionally resonant works.

It is, in every sense of the word, a national treasure.