There is a mild, modest satisfaction when we ask Hikari how she feels about her career to date.

“So far, so good,” she says briskly.

It is a little more than that.

The Japanese-born director established her art-house credentials in 2019 with her prize-winning feature debut 37 Seconds.

She went on to direct episodes of prestige American TV, including the water-cooler show Beef.

Now comes her second feature-length movie, Rental Family, a gentle, sometimes mournful Tokyo-set comedy that strikes a contemporary nerve.

The film made its theatrical debut in Japan on February 27, following its successful North American roll-out in late 2025.

It stars Oscar winner Brendan Fraser as Phillip, an out-of-work American actor living in Tokyo who finds gainful employment when he joins a “rental family” agency.

The film taps into a real-life phenomenon of agencies that supply temporary surrogates to those in need, with actors playing stand-in lovers, family members, colleagues or whatever the client may require.

Hikari and her co-writer Stephen Blahut met real “rental family” workers as part of their research and discovered just why there is a demand for such services.

“Some of [the clients’ stories] are quite sad in the sense that they lost a family member, and they want them to be in their presence, because they miss them so much,” Hikari says.

“Lost family from car accidents or whatever … they’ll pick up somebody who looks like them.

And as they walk into the room, they ask them to do exactly what they want them to do or be home by the time they get home.

Because they just miss that person.

And there’s a bit of a sadness to it.” Hikari feels it taps into themes of loneliness, which is a growing problem in society as modern technology leaves more people isolated.

“It’s just happening everywhere in the world, especially in Japan.

I just found out: 40 per cent of people struggle with loneliness in Tokyo,” she says, adding, “I think there’s something very universal about that.

Not just in Japan.

Again, it’s happening everywhere.” In the film, Phillip is initially hired to play a “sad American” at a man’s staged funeral, which he reluctantly goes along with.

But the real rub comes as he is asked by a new client (Shino Shinozaki) to pose as her 11-year-old daughter’s long-absent father.

It is all part of a ruse to convince the selection committee of a top private school to take the young girl, but inevitably, the lines become blurred as she comes to believe Fraser’s fake father is for real.

Hikari can relate.

She remembers being lied to as a child, much like in the film.

“I’ve been lied to by my own mother: that my father was dead,” she reveals.

This deeply personal falsehood fed directly into the Rental Family script.

Hikari was seven when she discovered that her father was still alive.

“I was outside jump roping, and then this neighbour came to me and said, ‘You know where your father went?’ I said, ‘No, he’s dead!’ And she’s like, ‘No, he left for another woman!’” Shocked, she confronted her mother, who – thinking quickly – pointed to the TV and....