The Family Saga

Kita no Kuni Kara began in 1981 as a 24-episode serial, and then continued through eight specials until 2002. Twenty-one years. What it did is probably something only television can do. Hidetaka Yoshioka and Tomoko Nakajima, who played Jun and Hotaru, started filming while still in primary school and stayed in the same roles until they were adults. The child actors were not written as having grown up; they actually grew up. The time of the story, the time of the actors' own lives, and the viewer's twenty-one years all move at the same speed. A serial is made with its ending decided, and the limited series (→ The Limited Series Returns) used that shape at its most lavish. This work does the opposite. It does not end; it leaves a gap and comes back. The next meeting is two or three years later, and in between they have genuinely aged. Less a story than a fixed-point observation. The twenty-one years So Kuramoto kept writing in Furano, Hokkaido, are one of the longest answers Japanese drama has given to the question of how to portray a family.