General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

It's Your Turn (あなたの番です)

It's Your Turn (あなたの番です, Anata no Ban desu; also known as Your Turn to Kill) is a Japanese television mystery drama broadcast on Nippon TV from April 14 to September 8, 2019, in which a newlywed couple is drawn into a chain of murders set off by a joke "exchange murder game" among the residents of their apartment building.¹^•² It was conceived and planned by Yasushi Akimoto and written by Mitsunori Fukuhara, and it aired in the network's Sunday 22:30 drama slot.³

Key fact	Detail
Broadcast	NTV, Sundays 22:30, April 14 – September 8, 2019; 20 episodes plus 1 special across two seasons¹
Premise	Thirteen apartment residents each wrote the name of a person they want to kill and drew lots, starting a "swap murder game"; deaths begin the same night²
Leads	Tomoyo Harada as Nana Tezuka and Kei Tanaka as Shota, newlyweds with a 15-year age gap who love mysteries²
Planning	Conceived and planned by Yasushi Akimoto; script by Mitsunori Fukuhara³
Viewership	Average rating 9.25%; theme song "STAND-ALONE" by Aimer¹
Structure	Two consecutive cours (six months), the first such NTV drama in 25 years; Nana is killed in the final episode of Season I and Season II's theme is revenge⁴^•³
Extensions	Hulu spinoff Tobira no Mukou (19 episodes of about 20 minutes) and a 2021 theatrical film (140 minutes)⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Premise

Nana and Shota Tezuka are a newly married couple with a 15-year age difference; Nana is a kind, dependable wife and Shota her cheerful, naive husband, and both love mysteries. After buying a new home they expect a peaceful life, but people in their apartment building begin dying one after another. At a monthly residents' meeting, thirteen neighbors each wrote the name of a person they wanted to kill on a slip of paper and drew lots at random, setting the "swap murder game" in motion. The idea, floated half as a joke, was that killing each other's targets would leave no motive and make detection harder. That same night, the building manager Tokoshima falls from the rooftop, and a voting slip reading "the manager" is found on the notice board.²^•⁷

The game's rule is that whoever has someone killed must in turn kill the person named on the slip they drew. Threatening notes reading "It's your turn" arrive as the deaths continue, and the couple, unable to tell which neighbors are telling the truth about the names they wrote and drew, investigate themselves.⁸

Production and broadcast

Producer Hiroe Suzuma first discussed the project with Akimoto in autumn 2017, after the drama Aishitetatte, Himitsu wa Aru; Akimoto proposed a story in which residents of an apartment building play an exchange murder game through their management association. The plan coincided with an internal proposal to attempt a two-cour, 20-episode drama.⁹ Running two consecutive cours was unusual for the network: the last NTV drama to do so had been Shizuka naru Don in 1994–1995, 25 years earlier.⁴

The cast numbered more than 30 characters and included Nanase Nishino as Kuroshima Sawa, Ryusei Yokohama as Nikaido Shinobu, Tomoyo Harada and Kei Tanaka in the leads, and Naoto Takenaka as the manager.¹⁰^•¹¹ The drama's marketing tagline was "Someone dies every week."¹²

Reception and the SNS "examine" phenomenon

The series started slowly. Early ratings were in the 8% range for the first episode and then hovered in the 6% range, but discussion on social media was intense, and the ratings climbed into double digits by the July 14 broadcast of episode 13.¹³ A turning point came at the end of the first chapter, when Nana herself was killed, an outcome commentators described as a breach of the usual convention that a drama's lead survives to the end.¹² The second chapter, Anata no Ban desu: Hangeki-hen (Counterattack), follows Shota as he works to solve his wife's death and take revenge, and ratings rose further at the transition between the two chapters.¹³^•³

Because the drama was an original script, not based on a novel or manga, viewers themselves solved the mysteries and guessed the perpetrator on social media, an activity known as kōsatsu ("examination"). The Theatre Yearbook 2020 described this proactive use of SNS to engage viewers as a new approach that drew attention.³ The show also set all-time follower records for an NTV prime-time drama on both Twitter and Instagram during its run.¹⁴ Nippon TV's fiscal 2019 report described its dramas that year as a hit topped by Your Turn to Kill.¹⁵

An AI-linked conversation service, "AI Nana-chan," tied to the Hangeki-hen chapter was launched in August 2019.¹⁶

Spinoff and film

The Hulu original spinoff Anata no Ban desu: Tobira no Mukou ("Beyond the Door") follows the apartment residents other than the Tezuka family, in 19 episodes of about 20 minutes each; episodes 18 and 19 cover Kuroshima's past and are considered key to the main story.⁵

The theatrical film Anata no Ban desu: Gekijōban (2021, 140 minutes) is set in an alternate world in which it was Shota, not Nana, who attended the residents' meeting, so the exchange murder game never began. In this world, a serial murder occurs at the couple's wedding party held aboard a cruise ship with the apartment residents as guests.⁶ The film received its first terrestrial broadcast, uncut, on November 18, 2022.¹⁷

Availability

As of the most recent service checks cited in the sources, Hulu is the only platform streaming the full television series, including the Hangeki-hen chapter and the Tobira no Mukou spinoff, alongside the film; other major services carry only the theatrical film, and TSUTAYA DISCAS offers the series and film on DVD rental.¹⁸ Availability varies by region and changes over time, so the current status should be checked on each service's official page.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › Japanese contemporary drama

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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