Issey Takahashi

The scene we keep from Whisper of the Heart (1995) is a boy at a workbench under a shop, asking a girl to sing while he plays the violin. She does, badly at first, and then three old men come down the stairs with a lute, a recorder and a tambourine and join in without a word. The boy is Seiji Amasawa, and the voice is Issey Takahashi's, still in his teens. He plays Seiji warmly, and it moved us more than a scene about a school song had any right to. We think it was the tambourine.

It is also the only time we have had a proper chance to weigh him, and the part gives him little to weigh. Seiji knows what he wants, he is already good at it, and Hayao Miyazaki's script hands him no doubts worth the name; next to Shizuku he barely exists. Takahashi does what can be done with a boy who has already arrived, which is to make him kind. Shizuku's friend Yuko, in five minutes, is more truthful than Seiji manages in the whole film, and that is not the actor's fault.

The career since has been long and, for most of it, quiet. He began as a child actor in 1990, voiced a part in Only Yesterday (1991) before Whisper, and spent his twenties in supporting roles: Ikeda-senpai in All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), one of the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003). It was television that changed things, Tami-ō in 2015 and then Quartet in 2017, where the supporting work was noticed for its restraint. Bigger parts followed: Ryu Yasuda in Shin Godzilla (2016), Yūsaku Fukuhara in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Wife of a Spy (2020), and the manga artist Rohan Kishibe in Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan (2020–), a role he has now played across several series and films and which has stuck to him.

What he is cast as, over and over, is the composed man with something odd going on underneath, and Rohan is the purest case. By reputation the delivery turns slightly theatrical when the material asks for it and stays plain when it does not. He has said of Rohan that "in the world of figments, things become reality if you're convinced by them", which is as good a description of a stylised performance as we have heard from an actor. He has also said he worries about being seen through a fixed image, and with Black Jack (2024) added to Rohan the worry is not idle.

We have heard the warmth. The cool we know only by reputation, and reputation is not a review. The boy who was already certain of himself has grown into a man who plays certainty with something wrong behind it, and we would like to see that in a film we can sit down with and judge.