인간과 신의 혼혈인 반신
아수라 (阿修羅, 산스크리트어: असुर, 영어: Asura)는 인도 신화 에 등장하는 인간과 신의 혼혈인 반신 이다. 인드라 와 같은 신 에 대적하는 악한 무리로 나타난다. [1] 아수라와 신들 사이의 전쟁은 인도 신화 의 바탕을 이룬다. 힌두교 의 초기 경전인 《리그 베다》에 이미 신들과 암흑의 대적이 싸우는 이야기가 나오고, 라마야나, 마하바라타 등에서도 아수라와의 대결이 묘사된다. [2] 이러한 배경 때문에 아수라를 제압하는 것이 신들의 권능으로 이해되었다.
ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/아수라
아수라 - 위키백과, 우리 모두의 백과사전
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Asura (Japanese: 阿修羅のごとく, Hepburn: Asura no Gotoku) is a Japanese streaming drama television series directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda.[1] It is an adaptation of the 1979 series Ashura no Gotoku,[2] and stars Rie Miyazawa, Machiko Ono, Yū Aoi and Suzu Hirose.[3][4] The series premiered on Netflix on January 9, 2025.[5]
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Asura
star ratingstar rating
Drama
420 minutes ‧ 2025
Brian Tallerico
January 10, 2025
4 min read
Asura
The Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda has long been fascinated with the definition of family, chronicling how it can shift in films like “Nobody Knows,” “Shoplifters,” and “Monster.” He’s a deeply empathetic, subtle filmmaker, and he brings his notable skill set to his second dramatic series for Netflix, the family saga “Asura,” now available around the world. His gentle touch with character holds together a project that sometimes feels longer than it needs to be. Still, that extended runtime allows Kore-eda to come at his complex characters from multiple emotional angles, and for us to see ourselves a bit in all of them.
Kore-eda wrote and directed all seven episodes of this adaptation of the ‘70s Japanese novel of the same name by Mukoda Kuniko, the story of a father’s infidelity and how it sends ripples out to his daughters and the people in their lives.
Set in Tokyo, “Asura” stars the legendary Jun Kunimura (“The Wailing”) as an ordinary septuagenarian patriarch with four grown daughters. The shyest of his girls, Takiko (Yu Aoi), hires a private investigator to look into her suspicions about her father and discovers that not only does dad have a mistress, but there’s a child in his life that calls him papa. The excellent premiere episode centers on Takiko telling her sisters and watching how differently they react to the news that they may have never really known their dad, spiraling through panic, sadness, and maybe even just a form of resigned acceptance. Do they tell mom, played by Keiko Matsuzaka? Confront dad? Or should they respect the privacy of their parents?
Of course, given how much Kore-eda values character over concept,
the key to “Asura” is in the three-dimensionality of the sisters. Takiko seems the most fragile of the four, but her life changes when she starts dating the shy private investigator who blew her family’s life apart. The oldest sister, Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa), handles the news unexpectedly because she happens to be the other woman for her boss; youngest sister Hire (Kisetsu Fujiwara) seems to almost accept dad’s infidelity because she knows her boxer boyfriend has the same tendencies; finally, Machiko Ono gives the best performance in the show as Makiko, a mother of two and husband to Takao (Masahiro Motoki), who makes excuses for his father-in-law probably because he plans to follow the same path someday.
The infidelity that kicks off “Asura” is really just a catalyst to unpack the lives of these characters in what becomes a family saga that includes funerals, weddings, and a bunch of things in between. Interestingly, one could almost watch the first three hours as a feature film with a solid ending. Then Kore-eda picks up the characters down the road of their lives, detailing how what unfolded between these sisters and their parents shifted their trajectories. Can good come from something that rattles a family? Takiko seems to find marital bliss with the man who helped shatter the same for her parents—what a great idea for a melodrama that is on its own, forcing us to look at how even the worst days of our lives can play a role in our best ones.
Seven hours feels a bit long for “Asura,” and Kore-eda has a habit of lingering in the runtime, repeating a few character beats, especially around chapters five and six, when it feels like the show has lost some of the momentum from its rich characters. Still, it’s never boring because of how much Kore-eda values the emotional journeys of his characters, and how he directs an entire cast to nary a single weak performance (and several great ones).
“Squid Game” has dominated the Netflix charts for the last couple weeks, reportedly opening to higher streaming numbers than anything in the history of the company. While it doesn’t have nearly the same hook as the show about a killer competition, my hope is that a few of those viewers slide over to the woefully-underpromoted “Asura,” proving to Netflix that there’s space for both kinds of shows in their catalog. And maybe leading a few viewers to one of the best filmmakers in the world.
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‘Asura’ Is a First-Class Domestic Drama
Written and directed by the Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Shoplifters”), this Netflix series is so good it makes other shows look bad.
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Margaret Lyons
By Margaret Lyons
Jan. 30, 2025
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ImageA woman sits at a kitchen table, hand on her chin, looking forlorn.
Machiko Ono in a scene from “Asura.”Credit...Netflix
“Asura,” a seven-episode Japanese drama on Netflix (in Japanese, with subtitles, or dubbed), is the full package: a detailed, human-scale domestic drama with plenty to say, fascinating characters to say it and the stylishness to make it sing. The downside is that other shows feel paltry and thin in comparison. The upside is everything else.
The show begins in 1979 and centers on four sisters. Ooooh, do they call each other on the phone! The story is set in motion when the prim, unmarried librarian sister, Takiko (Yu Aoi), discovers that their father has been having an affair, for years, and has a young son with his girlfriend.
Takiko is horrified, but her sisters are less doctrinaire: Sakiko (Suzu Hirose), the dramatic and immature one, blames Takiko for meddling. The oldest sister, Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa), is a widow with a married boyfriend, and she’s reluctant to throw stones. Makiko (Machiko Ono), married with two teenagers, is the first among equals, and she suspects her own dismissive husband is cheating on her. Maybe the ties that bind are the polite fictions everyone can agree on. Cut one, and you might accidentally cut them all.
Each sister bristles under the control of men, and each finds it much easier to see the shallowness of the others’ excuses than to confront her own suffering. Such is sisterhood. As the years go by, they become both more entrenched in their choices but less committed to them; by the time you realize how stuck you are, you really are stuck.
Scenes from “Asura” feel like scenes from life, with conversations that comfortably include snappy jokes, deep intimacy, physical wrestling, meal-planning and petty but profound complaints about family dynamics, all in the span of a few minutes. Food is a huge element of the show, and the characters are constantly cooking, eating or discussing when they’re going to cook and eat. It’s the easy nutshell for so many other behaviors: You always take the good ones; here, have this, it hurts my fake tooth; you always take the bad ones — treat yourself for once; I can’t believe you ate that with her.
Every episode of “Asura” was written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Shoplifters”), adapted from a novel by Kuniko Mukoda. Visually, the show is sumptuous, evocative in its vintage feel but not contrived or ostentatious.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter. More about Margaret Lyons
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Asura Is Already the Best New Show of 2025
So why isn’t Netflix giving Hirokazu Kore-eda’s family drama its due?
By Geoffrey Bunting
Jan 22, 20251:35 PM
The four Takezawa sisters.
Netflix
2025 is less than a month old, but we may have already seen the best show of the year. Or we would have, had Netflix done anything to notify us of its existence. Asura, directed by celebrated Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, is a compassionate yet incisive dissection of family, betrayal, and 1970s Japan told through the travails of the Takezawa sisters. Each frame, bathed in Polaroid light, looks as if it would be at home in a family photo album—an artistic choice that should come as no surprise if you are familiar with Kore-eda’s oeuvre and his fascination with familial dynamics. This theme spreads across many of his works, including the Oscar-nominated Shoplifters, Monster, his previous Netflix series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, and Our Little Sister (it too an adaptation of a book and an examination of how families power through adversity together). Kore-eda’s calm, collected eye never rushes in pursuit of the story but lets the narrative unfold in a way that has made him a favorite of modern audiences.
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Kore-eda, in other words, remains a big get for Netflix. Which makes it all the more galling that the streamer released Asura Jan. 9 with nary a murmur, disappearing the series into its black hole of content almost instantly. But this poignant, joyful story of four sisters and their very different reactions to upheaval should not be missed, even if Netflix can’t be bothered to promote its own series.
Though the women of Asura are the heart of the show, it begins with their septuagenarian father Kôtarô (Jun Kunimura). Takiko (Yû Aoi), one of his adult daughters, reveals to her sisters that their father has been conducting a yearslong affair with a woman decades his junior. Leaving the home he shares with his wife, Fuji (Keiko Matsuzaka), twice a week on the pretense of work, he uses that time to visit with his girlfriend and their young son. Takiko is adamant that they tell their mother. The oldest sister, widowed Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa), however, urges restraint, concerned her own affair with her married boss might come to light. The youngest sister, Sakiko (Suzu Hirose), wants only to antagonize Takiko. Makiko (Machiko Ono) agrees with Tsunako but appears visibly shaken; she suspects her own husband, Takao (Masahiro Motoki), of having an affair with his younger secretary.
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Their disparate responses might feel muted to a modern audience, but Kore-eda is careful to place Asura squarely within the context of the male-centric Japan of the 1970s, an era in which the sisters’ almost-blasé reactions to Kôtarô’s behavior—“Dad’s a guy, after all,” Makiko says—aren’t unusual. From there, Kore-eda leads us through a complex and compassionate dismantling of those mores, persistently on the side of the women while stopping short of retrospective judgment. If the sisters are initially only disquieted by their father’s infidelity, as the series progresses, they are all eventually forced to address the fallout. Fashioning new shapes to their lives, they find new love, embrace passions that are socially frowned-upon, and simply let the rage boil over from time to time—all ripples of change inspired by an anonymous letter in the local newspaper that laments, “Is it really happiness for women like us to live without making waves?”
The Takezawa sisters’ rebellion against the stillness that Japanese society forces upon them is gentle but profound. If Kore-eda can be a little indulgent in exploring this, it is only to better highlight the subtle, often understated ways these characters begin to reverberate with his signature humanism through the smallest gestures. Indeed, though not short of melodrama, Asura thrives on its tiniest moments to create moving images of these characters from their initial snapshots. It’s Tsunako rushing to her sister’s and getting distracted by nearby flowers. It’s Makiko bumping into a clock someone has left on the floor and putting it back in silent frustration at her broader misfortunes. It’s the way Takiko pushes her hair behind her ears when uncomfortable, or how fragile Sakiko’s arrogant facade is when no one is looking. These are tiny handshakes with the audience that ground Asura not in fiction but in our world. The stories of the Takezawa sisters, the mirth and the melancholy, could very well be our own.
It’s a masterful showing, and though Asura is at its best when all four sisters are together, it is Ono’s portrayal of Makiko that increasingly anchors the series. With parallels to her mother’s plight, the character shifts on a dime from bright-eyed and vibrant with her sisters to silently weeping in the hallway, where her family (and her bumbling husband) can’t see her. The wealth of expression she finds in silence, as Makiko barely contains her understandable fury and misery at her lot in life, is surely one of the best televisual performances we’ve seen. In a just world, it would be appropriately and loudly lauded, not hidden away wherever Netflix’s algorithm stashes its neglected gems.
Credit where credit is due: Netflix has made international media more accessible than ever. Hosting an impressive library of international drama, film, and especially anime, Netflix has arguably paved the way for the surge in popularity that non-English media is currently enjoying. But this global success increasingly feels less by design and more an accident, considering how often Netflix—and other streaming giants, to be fair, from Disney to Prime Video—fails to let viewers know that its non-English titles exist.
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With Netflix’s continuing ability to attract filmmakers of Kore-eda’s caliber, the streamer’s lack of enthusiasm for the results of those artists’ work feels especially egregious. Asura threatens to join other great Japanese shows on the platform—like Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, Atelier, and First Love—in relative obscurity, even though the success of singular hits like Squid Game proves that global audiences can and will read subtitles. When Netflix won’t make noise for one of Japan’s most globally recognized filmmakers, what hope is there for the next season of Thank You, Next later this year, or for Last Samurai Standing? What becomes of the next great K-drama or the steady rise of Taiwanese horror on the platform? Are they all to be consigned to being discovered only when we absent-mindedly trawl Netflix’s leagues-deep catalog for something new to watch?
If that thought depresses you, I might suggest Asura—somewhat ironically—as the perfect antidote to warm your soul. In its perfect mirror of real-life, human drama, the series is already, and will remain, one of 2025’s best. I implore you not to let it join a host of other great Japanese media on Netflix in algorithmic hell. It deserves so much more.
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