Yūya Yagira

In Nobody Knows (2004) the boy does the shopping. He counts out his mother's cash, hauls the bags up to the flat, cooks for three younger children and deals with whichever adult is at the door, and Yūya Yagira plays all of it as if nobody were filming. Hirokazu Kore-eda found him through an open audition at twelve, with no acting behind him, and shot for long enough that we can watch him change: the face lengthens, the shoulders drop, the months pass on his body before they pass in the story. Watching that happen while the envelope of money thinned upset us more than any single scene in the film, because it is a childhood being used up in front of us and nobody on screen remarks on it. It is the best thing in a film we recommend without hesitation.

That is a hard act to grow out of. Child performers who are praised for stillness often find, as adults, that stillness alone is not a career, and the step from early acclaim to steady grown-up work is one Yagira was watched taking. He went straight into television and further films, then in the mid-2010s began taking harder leads in independent and genre pictures. Unforgiven (2013), a Japanese remake of the Western, put him in period costume as Goro Sawada. Destruction Babies (2016), as Taira Ashihara, turned the old reticence into something violent and blank, and it is the performance most often set beside Nobody Knows as proof the boy did not stop. We have not reviewed either and will not pretend to a verdict.

The pattern since is clear enough. He is cast as young men on their own, carrying something, or standing just outside the group: surrogate parents, outsiders, men whose morals are not settled. He speaks little and lets his body do the arguing. His Lost Name (2019) gave him Shinichi for Nanako Hirose, a Kore-eda associate making her first film, which looks like a return to the house he started in. Asakusa Kid (2021) asked him to play the young Takeshi Kitano, a very different job of impersonating a famous face. Gannibal (2022) moved him into a long-form horror series as Daigo Agawa, a man with a family, which he does not often get to play.

The weak spots are where you would expect. In broad commercial adaptations such as Gintama (2017) the fit has been questioned, and we can see why: a performer whose instrument is withholding does not obviously belong in a film built on noise. He has worked repeatedly with the director Yukihiko Tsutsumi, which suggests he values a director who knows what he does. Start with Nobody Knows, and start with the shopping. He plays men who are handed a job and get on with it, and the career has looked much the same.