Yui Aragaki won all the awards for her role in “Shokugan”..! Yui Aragaki “broke out of her shell” by playing a woman with “abnormal” sexual preferences.
Actress Yui Aragaki (35) and actor Yuto Isomura (31), who appear in the movie “Shogeki” (directed by Yoshiyuki Kishi), which is currently in theaters, gave stage greetings at theaters in Hiroshima City and Fukuyama City, Hiroshima Prefecture, one of the locations where the movie was shot, on November 22 and 23.
The film, starring actor Goro Inagaki (49), is an adaptation of a novel by Naoki Prize-winning author Ryo Asai. The film depicts the intersecting lives of people with various “unchoosable” backgrounds, such as family environment, sexual orientation, and physical appearance, triggered by a certain incident.
At the 36th Tokyo International Film Festival held earlier this year, the film was entered in the Competition section and won the Best Director Award and the Audience Award. In addition, despite its medium-scale release on November 10 at 209 theaters, the film ranked in the top 10 in the “Domestic Movie Rankings” (according to Box-office News Corp.) for two consecutive weeks after its first week of release.
Niigaki played the role of Natsuki Kiryu, who works as a contract employee at a shopping mall in Hiroshima and spends her days at home with her parents, where there is no change in her life. At the stage greeting, Niigaki said, “When I saw the finished film, words didn’t come out of my mouth right away. I felt a lot of things that would gradually come to me as time went by after I went home. For Niigaki, it seems to have become a work that he was quite attached to.
The lead role in this film is played by Inagaki, but Niigaki’s performance completely eclipsed Inagaki’s. Natsuzuki played the role of Mizuki. Natsuki, who plays the role, has a proclivity to be aroused only by blisters. Her parents and others around her force her to live a “normal” life of getting married and having children, and she spends her days in agony, but her fate is set in motion when she is reunited with her junior high school classmate Sasaki, played by Isomura, when he returns to his hometown.
Since her debut, she had been a purist, known affectionately as Gakki. However, in this film, Niigaki’s “evolution” as an actress is shown in scenes that deal with the limits of diversity, such as when she writhes while watching a video of Blister and when she asks Sasaki, who has come to live with her as her partner, to “experience” a sexual act that she has never done before. It showed the ‘evolution’ of Niigaki as an actress,” said a TV station official.
Since her debut, Aragaki has starred in “Koizora” (’07), “Hanamizuki” (’10), “Kuchibiru ni Uta” (’15), “Mix. (2005), and “Code Blue: Doctor Heli Emergency Rescue” (2006). Of these, he won the “50th Blue Ribbon Award” for Best Newcomer for “Koizora” and other films in which he showed natural acting soon after his debut. She also starred in “Mix” with Eita Nagayama (40), for which she won the 60th Blue Ribbon Award for Best Newcomer. for which she starred opposite Eita Nagayama (40), she won the Best Actress Award at the 60th Blue Ribbon Awards and the Best Actress Award at the 41st Japan Academy Prize, but she has not won that many film awards.
