The Honest Realtor: Japanese Comedy with a Curse of Integrity

The Honest Realtor (2022)
Directed by: Seiichi Nagumo
Written by: Shogo Imamura (based on manga by Akiko Higashimura)
Starring: Tomohisa Yamashita (Nagase Saichi), Haruka Fukuhara (Sakura Tsukishita), Asuka Kudo, Kanji Furutachi
Available on: Amazon Prime Video

Early last year, I was condemned by my parents to a most arid few months in front of the telly. I was only allowed to have the thing on with my grandmother supervising. She was there because of what I described at the time as a most regrettable misunderstanding. One result was that I spent more time than usual in my bedroom, with headphones on and the door locked. Another was that I found myself watching some very odd things on the 55” lovely in the telly room. One evening, while scrolling through Amazon Prime, we stumbled on a Japanese comedy series called The Honest Realtor. It turned out to be one of the few nice surprises of my grandmother-enforced television diet.

The premise is simple. A real estate agent named Nagase Saichi is cursed so that he cannot lie. If a house is haunted, he has to say so. If a flat smells of mould and despair, he blurts it out. If the neighbours are yakuza, he’s forced to warn you before you sign the papers. This is an inversion of everything we expect from estate agents, in Japan or anywhere else. Normally, their job is to shovel glossy half-truths about “cosy” bedsits and “up-and-coming” slums. Here, the curse makes honesty unavoidable, and so hilarity follows.

What keeps it funny is not just the premise but the delivery. Tomohisa Yamashita, playing Nagase, does sincerity very well. He’s handsome, but not in a bland, forgettable way. He has presence. When he blurts out some unvarnished fact that ruins a sale, he doesn’t look like a clown mugging for the camera. He looks like a man genuinely trapped by his own decency. Next to him is Haruka Fukuhara as Sakura Tsukishita, the junior agent. She has the difficult job of reacting—shocked embarrassed—and she carries it off perfectly. The chemistry between the two is obvious, without ever tipping into cheap sentimentality.

It is, on the whole, uplifting television. Watching people who are condemned to be honest—even when it sabotages their own interests—feels like a tonic in an age where everything is a lie. No one in Britain, least of all our politicians, would survive an episode under the same curse. Boris Johnson’s tongue would combust by the end of the opening credits.

There’s another thing worth mentioning. The Japanese actors don’t age the way Western ones do. Yamashita is in his late thirties; Fukuhara is in her late twenties. On screen, they look a decade younger. Partly this is good genes, but mostly it is because they look after themselves. They don’t become obese and prematurely broken-down like the sort of people who stagger about film studios in England and America. They set an example of how adults can carry themselves with dignity. It is proof that beauty and discipline are linked, something we should take as a lesson rather than dismiss as “unrealistic standards.”

So, for once, I am happy to recommend a piece of television. The Honest Realtor is not high art, but it doesn’t need to be. It is clever. It is funny. It is surprisingly wholesome. You will laugh, and you may even find yourself wishing that your next estate agent had the same curse.