Japan, like so many developed democracies, is undergoing a slow-burn crisis of national identity. The far-right has been on the rise for years. Anti-immigrant sentiment is surging. The population crisis has created an inverted demographic triangle that keeps the elderly working indefinitely while simultaneously disenfranchising the young.

Taken together, one can’t help but hear a ghostly refrain: What is Japan, amid all of this? What was it once, and what could it be, in the future?

Japan, like so many developed democracies, is undergoing a slow-burn crisis of national identity. The far-right has been on the rise for years. Anti-immigrant sentiment is surging. The population crisis has created an inverted demographic triangle that keeps the elderly working indefinitely while simultaneously disenfranchising the young.

Taken together, one can’t help but hear a ghostly refrain: What is Japan, amid all of this? What was it once, and what could it be, in the future?

These questions are taken up with remarkable elegance by director Lee Sang-il in Kokuho, a stunning period drama set in the world of Kabuki theater, based on a 2018 novel by Shuichi Yoshida. It’s also the highest-grossing live action Japanese film of all time. Though it wasn’t exactly made on a shoestring budget, Kokuho’s popularity seems driven less by marketing spectacle than word-of-mouth raves, drawing everyone from Gen Z streaming natives to elderly viewers who hadn’t set foot in a theater in years.

While Kokuho is beautiful and superbly acted, there’s obviously something deeper that drew audiences to this movie. In my view, it is this very question of identity—a reflection of the contemporary Japanese mood—that makes Kokuho so compelling. It is a meditation on how a nation conceives of itself, told through the lives of two very different young men, trying to win a sense of self against the backdrop of a shape-shifting nation.

Soya Kurokawa and Keitatsu Koshiyama in a still from Kokuho.GKids

The film’s plot is simple enough. Set 1960s Japan, it follows Kikuo, heir to a Nagasaki yakuza clan, who loses everything after his father’s murder. Having caught the eye of Hanjiro Hanai, the head of a Kabuki household in Osaka, Kikuo leaves Nagasaki and moves in with the Hanai family, training under Hanjiro to become a Kabuki actor. Hanjiro also has his own heir—a son named Shunsuke—who quickly becomes Kikuo’s best friend and rival. What unfolds is a decades-long drama of succession among adopted brothers, as Kikuo and Shunsuke vie for Hanjiro’s approval and the love of the wider, Kabuki-going public.

This tension—between insider and outsider, between legacy heir and newcomer—has obvious parallels to Japan’s own dilemma of whether to embrace change as a nation or cling to tradition.

Ryo Yoshizawa in a still from Kokuho.GKids

Yet Kokuho offers depth and humanity to both Kikuo (the underdog with a tainted yakuza past) and Shunuke (the........

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