General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Kirishima Thing (桐島、部活やめるってよ)

The Kirishima Thing (桐島、部活やめるってよ, Kirishima, Bukatsu Yamerutteyo, literally "Kirishima says he's quitting the club") is a 2012 Japanese ensemble drama directed by Daihachi Yoshida, adapted from Ryo Asai's debut novel of the same name. Its story follows the students of a provincial high school after word spreads that Kirishima, the popular captain of the volleyball club, has suddenly quit his club activity; the title character himself never appears on screen.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Japanese release	August 11, 2012; 103 minutes; distributed by Showgate¹
Source	Debut novel by Ryo Asai, winner of the 22nd Subaru Prize for New Writers, written while he was a student at Waseda University¹
Director and screenplay	Daihachi Yoshida; screenplay by Kohei Kiyasu and Yoshida¹
Central device	The same Friday afternoon is retold repeatedly from different students' viewpoints, while Kirishima is never shown²
Principal cast	Ryunosuke Kamiki (Maeda Ryoya), Ai Hashimoto (Kasumi), Suzuka Ohgo (Aya), Masahiro Higashide (Hiroki Kikuchi)¹
Major awards	Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing at the 36th Japan Academy Prizes (2013)¹
Theme song	Yu Takahashi¹

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The film is set in a prefectural high school in a provincial town whose social life is organized into an unspoken hierarchy of groups: the popular athletes and their circle, the girls at the center of class attention, the brass band, the badminton club, and the film club at the bottom.¹^•² On an ordinary Friday, news runs through the school that Kirishima, the volleyball club captain and the school's most popular student, has quit the team without explanation. His decision unsettles his own circle, whose members depend on him for their routines and status, while barely touching the film club members led by the quiet, unremarkable Maeda Ryoya, who are absorbed in shooting a low-budget zombie film for a competition.¹^•³

Multiple viewpoints. The narrative is divided into seven chapters, each following a different group, and the same stretch of Friday time is replayed from each perspective so that the storylines interlock.⁴ The moment when each group learns that "Kirishima is quitting the club" appears four separate times, once for each circle of students, making visible that students sharing the same classroom inhabit entirely different worlds.⁴ Kirishima himself is never cast or shown; he exists only in the reactions, rumors, and recollections of the people around him.³^•⁵

Origin of the novel and its title

Ryo Asai wrote the novel while a student at Waseda University and won the 22nd Subaru Prize for New Writers with it, making it his debut work.¹^•⁶ In an interview with his publisher, Asai explained that the now-famous title was not chosen as a title at first: the first chapter opens with the line "Eh, seriously?", and the words "Kirishima, bukatsu yamerutteyo" originally preceded it as dialogue. When the manuscript was finished and a title was needed, he detached that opening line and made it the book's title.⁷ He later said he was surprised and pleased that, after the 2012 film adaptation, the phrase became a running joke that readers kept riffing on, and that among his writing it is the one he hopes survives anonymously.⁷

Production and cast

Yoshida Daihachi, whose previous film Show Some Love, You Losers! (Funuke domo, kanashimi no ai wo misero) had been selected for the Critics' Week at the 60th Cannes Film Festival, directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Kohei Kiyasu; it was his first work set in the teenage milieu.² Ryunosuke Kamiki played Maeda, the film club member who idolizes movies; Ai Hashimoto played Kasumi, the badminton club member Maeda admires; Suzuka Ohgo played Aya, an inconspicuous brass band player; and Masahiro Higashide played Hiroki Kikuchi, Kirishima's friend who has quit baseball for the "go-home" club.¹^•⁸ The production consortium was credited as the "Kirishima" Film Club, with Nippon Television among the producing companies, and Showgate handled distribution.³

Reception and awards

The film opened in Japan on August 11, 2012, and, spread by word of mouth as a new kind of youth film, achieved an unusual long theatrical run.¹^•³ At the 36th Japan Academy Prizes (2013) it won Best Picture, Best Director for Yoshida, and Best Editing for Mototaka Kusakabe, with Excellence awards for the screenplay and New Actor awards for Hashimoto and Higashide.¹ It also received Excellence Film at the 67th Mainichi Film Awards and Best Director at the 37th Hochi Film Awards in 2012.⁹

Critics focused on the film's treatment of school hierarchy. The Japan Times reviewer Mark Schilling, writing on the film's 2012 release, described high schools as mercilessly hierarchical societies and noted that the story reaches the audience through Kirishima's flummoxed classmates rather than through Kirishima himself, in multiple revelation scenes of the same moment.¹⁰ A Japanese film-criticism site characterized the film as a coldly realistic portrait of high school life as a miniature of a stratified society, in which the news of one student quitting a club exposes the invisible hierarchy formed by the school's loosely separated groups.¹¹ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer score of 71% from a single listed review, with a 1h 43m drama classification.¹²

Legacy

The phrase "Kirishima, bukatsu yamerutteyo" entered Japanese internet usage as a template for announcing someone else's departure, and Asai has said he receives complaints from people actually named Kirishima that the title makes quitting clubs awkward for them.⁶ The film's structural device, an absent center whose disappearance reorganizes a social world, is the aspect most often cited in later commentary on the film.³^•⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released 2010 onward

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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