Miss Osaka 2021

Ines, a young Danish woman, followed her boyfriend Lucas on a business trip to Northern Norway. At a hotel restaurant, she met Maria, an enigmatic and seductive Japanese woman who claimed she was there to see the aurora. Maria spoke of a club where you could be who you wanted to be—a paradise for dreamers, a place of true freedom. The two women quickly grow close, sharing a night that feels almost magical under the glittering sky of the north, a memory that will haunt Ines for reasons she cannot yet name.

Ines’s intoxicated night drifts into a chilling silence as she wakes to find the car by the frozen riverside empty and Maria gone, with only a pair of red shoes lying at the water’s edge. The reality that Maria is dead settles in with brutal clarity, and Ines realizes her connection to the tragedy is about to pull her into something she never anticipated.

Driven by desperation and a desire to stay close to the life she has started to crave, Ines flies to Japan with Maria’s passport and plane ticket. She moves into Maria’s apartment in Sakai City and, using Maria’s business card printed with the name Miss Osaka Mimi-ko, she visits the downtown Osaka nightclub Miss Osaka. There she is hired under the name April, stepping onto a stage where she can be someone else entirely. The club, a bustling microcosm of glitter and hidden longing, is a place where men come for pseudo love and fleeting fantasies, and Ines begins to learn the language, customs, and rhythms of hostess life.

As she grows more confident, Ines—now navigating a new country, a new identity, and a rapidly transforming sense of self—receives more and more nominations. A respected regular, a man named Shigeo, becomes a fixture in this world, and it is said that Mimi-ko is the only one who can capture his attention. Seizing the moment, Ines leans into the persona she’s created and secures a bold victory in a Keirin, a feat that marks her rise within the club and deepens the complex web of desire and loyalty around her.

Yet the success comes with a heavier price. Shigeo’s obsession with Mimi-ko evolves into a magnetic pull toward Ines, blurring lines and forcing hard choices. When Shigeo hears the story of Maria’s death, he recoils, rejecting Ines and exposing the fragility of the life she’s built. Ayano, a colleague at the club, starts to sense something is off about Ines, adding a layer of danger to her already precarious situation. Faced with exposure, Ines quits the club, leaves Maria’s apartment to avoid being seen, and retreats to a capsule hotel, trying to salvage what remains of her precarious new life.

Meanwhile, the shadow of Norway lingers as Maria’s body is found there, tying the fateful thread back to the night that began it all. The story unfolds as a careful study of identity, longing, and the consequences of choosing a life built on borrowed identities and forbidden dreams, a quiet and relentless meditation on what it costs to be someone else in a world that refuses to let go.