Ichiko 2023

Higashiōsaka serves as the backdrop for a deep, unflinching portrait of a family breaking under pressure. Natsumi Kawanabe, a twice-divorced single mother, works at a bar and shares a cramped apartment with her two young daughters. The elder daughter, Ichiko Hana Sugisaki Kawanabe, faces a confusing predicament: she has no official family register because Natsumi became pregnant again soon after divorcing a violent husband, leaving Ichiko’s birth record in limbo due to the so‑called “300-day post-divorce issue.” The younger daughter, Tsukiko, battles muscular dystrophy, a progressively disabling condition that adds strain to the household.

A social worker named Koizumi Daichi Watanabe becomes a constant presence in their lives, tangled in an affair with Natsumi and drawn into the care routine that Tsukiko’s illness demands. As Tsukiko’s condition worsens, Natsumi and Ichiko shoulder the heavy tasks of caregiving—providing oxygen therapy, suctioning phlegm, and assisting with toileting—moments that test their limits and reveal how fragile their daily existence has become. On a sweltering day, the temptation to remove the life-sustaining oxygen underscores the desperate, boundary-pushing choices unfolding around them.

Tragedy compounds the tension when Koizumi’s ongoing abuse of Ichiko comes to light. After Tsukiko dies, Koizumi’s control hardens into a brutal oppression, culminating in a nightmarish act that changes the course of Ichiko’s life. During the aftermath, her classmate Hidekazu Kita Yuki Morinaga witnesses a key moment from a balcony, a fragment of a harsh truth that hints at the complexity of Ichiko’s life and the way fear and silence can intersect.

Ichiko makes a radical break from the world she once knew and becomes homeless. She encounters Kiki Yoshida Seina Nakata, a hopeful aspiring pastry chef who dreams of a future cake shop, and she invites Ichiko to imagine a life beyond survival. Ichiko’s resolve hardens into a new kind of independence as she begins working as a live‑in newspaper delivery person, and the bond with Kiki slowly seeds a fragile, hopeful dream amidst the ruin.

Years pass, and Kita reappears in Ichiko’s orbit, now a distant figure who still harbors feelings for her. Ichiko finds a form of belonging again when she meets Yoshinori Hasegawa Ryuya Wakaba, a man who knows nothing of Ichiko’s past and who offers companionship that feels like a possible home. For a time, they build a shared life that seems to promise happiness, even as the past lingers in the shadows.

The relationship between Ichiko and Hasegawa reaches a turning point when he presents a yukata and, with a hopeful glow, the idea of legitimacy—a marriage certificate and a proposal. The very next day, a television report reveals the discovery of an unidentified skeletonized body on Mt. Ikoma, turning Ichiko’s fragile stability into a public, forensic mystery. As she contemplates vanishing from Hasegawa, she leaves behind a bag that contains clues about what she has hidden and what she has become.

Detective Goto Shohei Uno arrives, probing the truth behind the name “Ichiko Kawabe” and challenging the illusion of her existence. The investigator’s questions lead Hasegawa to revisit the newspaper store where Ichiko once worked and to speak with Kiki Yoshida once more, in a bid to piece together Ichiko’s whereabouts. The discovery that the Mt. Ikoma skeleton might be Tsukiko Kawabe adds a grave new layer to the mystery, and a health insurance card along with a family photo surface as crucial, damning evidence in the search for truth. The back of the photo bears an address in Minami, Tokushima, guiding Hasegawa to Natsumi, who is living under the alias Michiko Yamaura.

With new information in hand, Hasegawa returns to Higashiōsaka and confronts Kita’s apartment, where Ichiko has already vanished once more. Kita provides essential context about Tsukiko’s high school years and the Koizumi murder, and both Kita and Hasegawa realize a shared, stubborn conviction: I love Ichiko. I want to help her. That vow threads through the rest of the narrative, binding the living to a single, difficult aim.

Into this fragile circle comes Fuyuko Kitami [Ruka Ishikawa], a young woman who reaches Kita’s door after finding Ichiko through a social media connection. She speaks with blunt, chilling honesty about desperation, claiming that Ichiko could help her die, and she presents her health insurance card as a sign of where she stands. Kita senses the danger and the tension in the moment, while Ichiko, from a distance, communicates a plan and a place—“I’m at the beach.” The drive toward a seaside town becomes a final, fateful journey when Kita and Kitami reach Ichiko, who awaits them there. The story closes on a haunting note: a car sinks to the bottom of the sea in Shirahama, Wakayama, and the bodies of a man and a woman in their twenties are recovered, leaving unresolved questions hanging over every relationship that mapped Ichiko’s life.

In this sprawling, unwaveringly real drama, the film threads together love, secrecy, and the consequences of choosing to protect someone you cannot save. It weighs the cost of healing against the cost of silence, and it asks whether a life can be reimagined after years of concealment, or if the truth, once revealed, forever alters the path forward. And through it all, the characters—each marked by their own scars—move through a landscape where family, memory, and the hunger for a second chance collide in stark, human ways.