Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The quiet way Netflix has chosen to release Japanese-language mini-series Asura is both fitting and frustrating. Fitting, because promotional fanfare would feel at odds with the gentle, contemplative style of this 1970s-set family drama. Frustrating, because it means that this excellent show by Palme d’Or-winning director Hirokazu Kore-eda may largely go unseen.The premise (adapted from a 1979 TV series) is ripe for glossy melodrama treatment; four adult Tokyo sisters discover that their doddery father has been leading a secret life across town with a mistress and child. But this revelation only serves as the backdrop for an intimate family portrait that slowly, subtly comes together over seven episodes.We begin with tone-setting anticlimax. Having assembled her siblings with the ominous announcement that she has “news”, serious-minded third sister Takiko (Yu Aoi) is bewildered that her suspicions about her father’s infidelity are met with little more than bemusement. “Dad’s a guy after all,” is the consensus of Makiko (Machiko Ono), Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa) and Sakiko (Suzu Hirose), all of whom, we learn, have good reasons to expect no better from men.Knowing that the truth will bring their mother humiliation and heartache, they agree to keep matters between them — and an eye on their parents. In doing so, a bond that has been frayed by incompatible lifestyles is reformed, and a childhood long left behind is revisited. At family dinners the sisters bicker and banter like teens, despite the eldest two already being parents.These scenes are cosy, cheering and imbued with a feeling of warmth by the excellent ensemble. The show takes care to give each sister a distinct character and trajectory. There are clashes in personality — especially between the retiring Takiko and boisterous Sakiko — tensions over philosophies and morals, and even discrepancies in their childhood memories. Yet there are also times when their frustrations with one another betray their insecurities; Makiko’s meddling in Sakiko’s relationship with an unfaithful boyfriend, for instance, is obviously born of her sense of helplessness about her own husband’s infidelity. Running throughout the show is an underlying conflict between the complexity that Kore-eda gives the four central women and the way they are constantly underestimated and misunderstood by the chauvinistic men in their lives — and even by themselves. It’s only on learning about the father’s affair that the sisters start to recognise that their mother “was a woman too”; one who yearned and compromised and knew the same disappointments they do.Asura has much to say about sex and gender, about being a sibling and a daughter, but Kore-eda never allows the commentary to eclipse the human story. And while it can feel too deliberately paced at times, so much of that story unfolds in unspoken, understated moments or scenes that give significance to everyday events: the cooking of a meal, the arrival of a newspaper, shopping being spilled.The result is one of Netflix’s most unique offerings for a while. Pity they don’t seem to want the world to know it.★★★★☆On Netflix now
