General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Under the Open Sky (すばらしき世界)

Under the Open Sky (すばらしき世界, Subarashiki sekai) is a 2021 Japanese drama directed by Miwa Nishikawa, starring Koji Yakusho as Mikami Masao, a middle-aged former yakuza released after serving a 13-year prison sentence for murder who tries to re-enter society and find the mother from whom he was separated as a child.¹^•² The film is 126 minutes long, was distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures Japan, and opened in Japanese theaters on February 11, 2021.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Miwa Nishikawa, her first feature adapted from another writer's work³
Source	Ryuzo Saki's novel Mibuncho ("Inmate Files"), first published in the April 1990 issue of Gunso; setting moved about 35 years later to the present⁴^•²
Lead role	Koji Yakusho as Mikami Masao, released after 13 years for murder²
Supporting cast	Taiga Nakano (Tsunoda), Masami Nagasawa (Yoshizawa), Isao Hashizume, Meiko Kaji, Seiji Rokkaku, Yukiya Kitamura, Hakuryu, Midoriko Kimura, Narumi Yasuda²
Release	February 11, 2021, Warner Bros. Pictures Japan, 126 minutes¹
Major honors	Official Selection, 2020 Toronto International Film Festival; Silver Hugo for Best Performance (Yakusho) and Audience Choice Award, 2020 Chicago International Film Festival⁵
Japan Academy Prize	Excellence Awards at the 45th ceremony (2022) for Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, and Lighting¹

Spoilers

Story

Mikami Masao (Yakusho) has spent most of his life in the criminal underworld and in prison. Released after 13 years for murder, he resolves to live honestly, but work is hard to find, he lacks the money for a driver's license, and his short temper keeps causing trouble.¹^•⁶ With no friends or family and no marketable skills, he relies on the guarantor lawyer Shoji (Isao Hashizume) and his wife (Meiko Kaji) while searching for his long-lost mother.¹^•⁷

A television company takes an interest in his story. Young director Tsunoda Ryotaro (Taiga Nakano) and his capable producer Yoshizawa (Masami Nagasawa) approach Mikami intending to shape his reintegration and his search for his mother into a moving documentary.¹^•⁷ As Tsunoda follows Mikami's difficult past and present, he is drawn in by the man's strange appeal and decides to write nonfiction about him; the moment he begins writing, tragedy strikes.⁸ Reviews note that the film ends by showing Mikami's chronic illness worsening after he rushes out in a storm to bring in laundry, an ending that underlines how little of the promised support actually reaches him.⁹

Origin in Saki's Mibuncho

The source is Ryuzo Saki's long novel Mibuncho, serialized in Gunso in April 1990. The title refers to the confidential prison ledger recording an inmate's criminal history and background; the model for the protagonist sent Saki a copy of his own file, which he had transcribed in full as a defendant's right during his trial, and asked him to write a novel from it.⁴ In the novel, the protagonist, an orphan raised in the postwar chaos who entered the underworld, completes a total of 23 years of imprisonment and is released in 1986 (Showa 61); the book intersperses his post-release life with verbatim passages from the file, psychiatric reports, and court records.⁴

Nishikawa learned of the book through the 2015 obituary of Saki, in which the writer Kaoru Furukawa called Mibuncho, rather than the better-known Vengeance Is Mine, the true peak of Saki's work. She ordered a used copy of the out-of-print book and found herself unable to put it down.⁴ She described the novel as an unusual crime story: rather than dwelling on the murder, it simply follows an ordinary middle-aged man's daily collisions and setbacks as he tries to reclaim an ordinary life.⁴^•¹⁰

Production

This was the first feature Nishikawa adapted from someone else's work; until then she had directed only from her own original scripts, and she had declined earlier offers to adapt celebrated novels for fear of the inevitable comparison.³^•¹¹ Writing the screenplay took about three years, during which she researched prisons, government welfare offices, and the modern yakuza world, interviewing people with prison experience and retired gangsters. She concluded that after the anti-organized-crime law, antisocial groups were being eradicated, and that this change had to be reflected in the film.¹² In interviews she has said that former gangsters are now shut out of society with no provision for how they might return to it, and that the people who once were treated as a social evil have become vulnerable.¹³

The film was produced with Hirokazu Kore-eda's Bun-buku company, and Nishikawa began her career as an assistant on his early films.³^•¹³ Finishing work was interrupted in early 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic halted production near completion.¹⁴ The title was changed from Mibuncho at the production side's request; Nishikawa has explained that the story is really about the people surrounding Mikami, seen through his struggle, and that the new title carries a deliberate double meaning.¹⁵^•¹⁶

Reception and awards

The film premiered in the Official Selection of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.⁵ At the 2020 Chicago International Film Festival it won the Audience Choice Award for Best International Feature and the Silver Hugo for Best Performance for Yakusho; it also took audience awards at the Seattle and Helsinki international festivals.⁵^•¹⁷ In Japan it ranked first in first-day satisfaction surveys, and at the 45th Japan Academy Prize (2022) it received Excellence Awards for Picture, Director, Screenplay, Lead Actor (Yakusho), Supporting Actor (Nakano), Cinematography (Norimichi Kasamatsu), and Lighting.¹⁸^•¹ It also won the Mainichi Film Competition awards for Supporting Actor, Cinematography, and Music, the Kinema Junpo Best Actor award for Yakusho, and the Blue Ribbon Award for Director (Nishikawa) and Supporting Actor (Nakano).¹⁷

Japanese critics singled out Yakusho's performance. The Cinema Today writers' average rating was 4.7 out of 5, and one critic counted three on-screen scenes in which Mikami cries, calling the role a career-defining display of the actor's range.¹⁹ On Eiga.com, 685 user reviews average 4.0 out of 5.⁹ Reviewers also noted the film's refusal to make its protagonist simply sympathetic: the social system that denies a second chance to anyone who has left the rails, and the exclusionary gaze directed at dropouts, are presented alongside Mikami's own difficult personality.¹⁹^•⁹ The critic Takasaki Toshio of Eiga.com placed Mikami in the lineage of the "holy fool" outsider running from Bando Tsumasaburo's richi-mura character in The Life of Matsu the Untamed to Kiyoshi Atsumi's Tora-san, deepened by the mother-longing motif of Hasegawa Shin's Mabuta no haha.⁸

Aftermath

The novel's account of Mikami's childhood in the immediate postwar chaos became the seed of Nishikawa's next project: a film about war orphans, her first on the theme of war, in production for the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II. She has said that the original novel contains passages about the protagonist's boyhood that she wanted to film but could not fit, and that this unfinished business led her to research how war orphans grew into the postwar underworld.¹⁴^•²⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2020 to 2022

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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