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Suzu Hirose’s schedule is run with military precision. On a cold winter’s evening in Tokyo, the Japanese actor and model is in our custody for only a brief moment before she is spirited away by her team to another shoot, like a precious package being shipped from set to set.
Residing at the centre of these logistics could be cause for stress for the 27-year-old but, in the cramped, windowless dressing room where I find her, she’s the picture of serenity. Sitting balled up in a chair, hair and make-up freshly done, she’s wearing a baggy varsity sweater that dwarfs her tiny, glowing face and makes her wide eyes look even wider. It’s like being granted an audience with a fairy.
Hirose was born in Shizuoka, a coastal prefecture south-west of Tokyo, to parents who ran a sign-making business. As a teenager she modelled in the quarterly Japanese fashion magazine Seventeen alongside her elder sister Alice (who also went on to become an actor), as well as starting to work in film and TV. It was working with Hirokazu Kore-eda, the director behind Shoplifters and Monster, on the film Our Little Sister in 2015 that brought her wider renown.
She has spent her adult life in front of the camera and reached a level of fame in Japan that, despite the gruelling schedule, allows her to remain charmingly carefree. “I’m actually pretty sloppy by nature,” she laughs, her voice so low as to be soothing. On filming days, she says, she’ll wake up 10 minutes before she has to leave the house.
Hirose is currently preparing for the global release of her biggest project, A Pale View of Hills, an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel that was first published in 1982, in which she plays the lead. It’s been brought to life by director Kei Ishikawa, who gained traction in 2022 with the quietly powerful A Man, which won plaudits at the Japan Academy Film Prize awards. Like many narratives by Ishiguro – who was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England when he was five – this one probes how Japanese and British identity shifted after the second world war. The film follows Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in rural England in the 1980s, as she tells her daughter about her memories of being a young housewife (played by Hirose) in postwar Nagasaki. In those flashbacks, which form the heart of the film, banal daily tasks (cooking, ironing, tending to a distracted, work-obsessed husband and his headmaster father) have resumed following the atomic bomb in 1945, but the radiation and memories hang in the air. It’s a dreamy, elegant film, permeated by a sense of terror.
Etsuko is the puzzle we untangle as the story unfolds. Why did she leave Japan for England? What happened to her husband? Who is her mercurial friend Sachiko and why does she still linger in Etsuko’s mind? Hirose is luminous in the role, as a woman at once restrained, demure and beautiful but barely holding it together as chaos builds and whirls. It was the resilience of the character that most appealed to Hirose. “I feel it’s very important to see the way women lived in Nagasaki,” she says. “There was a real sense of hope that I think can still reach people today. I felt that the colours and texture of the story were piling up inside me until I managed to understand her. Etsuko is earnest, quietly burning with feeling, but also trying to carve out her own path. She lives very honestly.” Hirose’s approach is driven by instinct: “I don’t think I’m very suited to comedy or entertainment roles,” she says. “I like being able to use my imagination.”
“She’s not a big thinker, she’s more like an athlete,” says Ishikawa. “Throw a curveball at her while filming, and you know she’ll smack it back. She can really react to everything.” Hirose sees it as a matter of getting into the right headspace: “For better or worse, I can’t do anything unless I’m in the right mood.”
For this shoot, stylist Reina Ogawa Clarke wanted to bring out Hirose’s energy and confidence (the actor has been a Louis Vuitton ambassador since 2020). “She looks cute and quiet but she also has this strength about her,” she says. “It’s clear that she knows who she is.”
The global release of A Pale View of Hills is set to bring celebrity beyond her homeland. Next stop Hollywood? A home in the Hills? “Nope!” she says brightly. “I prefer Japan. I like how we live here, our sensibilities.” She doesn’t speak English and is content that way, but enjoys travelling when she can. In 2022 she spent a few nights in London performing at Sadler’s Wells in Hideki Noda’s A Night at The Kabuki, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in 12th-century Japan. Her schedule kept her so busy that she barely saw anything. “Though I did eat some good ramen,” she laughs.
Her free time is spent much like any other Tokyoite in her mid-20s. Her hobbies, she says, are “food and alcohol! If there’s a kind of food that catches my attention, I’ll go to every place that makes it and find a place I like best.” Lately she’s been into tororo nabe, a Japanese hotpot dish made from grated yam that has a slimy consistency. “It’s delicious,” she promises.
And she’s a seasoned kickboxer. “My older brother loved Jackie Chan and watched a lot of action movies when we were growing up, which is what got me into it,” she says. “I’ve been doing it for so long that I can’t give it up. I’m not good at yoga or weight training. I’d much rather do something more aggressive, where I can move.” Could the skills learned in the dojo be applied to real life? She grins: “I think I can hold my own.”
A Pale View of Hills is in UK cinemas from 13 March
