Rebooting

Netflix
5 stars

A year after its January 2023 premiere in Japan, J-drama Rebooting – titled Brush Up Life in Japanese – is now available on Netflix.

The fantasy-comedy time-loop series follows Asami Kondo (Sakura Ando), who works at the local city hall and later dies in a car accident at the age of 33. When she reaches the afterlife – a blank slate of white with a lone receptionist (played by Japanese comedian Bakarhythm, who is also the writer of the series) – she is told she will be reincarnated as an anteater. 

But Asami wants to be reincarnated as a human, so she chooses to “reboot” and live her entire existence once more, with the memories and knowledge of her previous life intact. 

Here are three reasons Rebooting, with its unique blend of humour and sweetness, is this reviewer’s favourite J-drama in years.

1. Reborn (not) rich

Unlike popular K-drama Reborn Rich (2022), in which the protagonist uses what he retains from his previous life to earn big bucks and ace all his tests, Rebooting is humorously mundane. 

Sure, with her adult intelligence, Asami breezes through kindergarten and primary school. But she is not a genius and discovers that so many years past her examination-taking days, she still struggles with high-school tests.

Asami, who has to do more good to reincarnate as a human, also does not save the world or make her family rich by becoming, say, an early investor in tech company Apple. 

Instead, she betters the lives of herself and those around her through fairly trivial things.

As a child, she stops her kindergarten teacher from getting fired by preventing her from embarking on an extramarital affair with a classmate’s dad. She also tries, albeit unsuccessfully, to stop a high-school classmate from pursuing a music career that would fail. 

The drama winks at its own banality in a brilliant bit of meta-commentary.

In one of Asami’s multiple rebooted lifetimes, she becomes a television producer and pitches Rebooting as a series, but her superiors shoot it down for not being dramatic enough.

2. Sisterhood is the true love story

Without going into spoilers, the story does build towards a larger arc through Asami’s multiple reboots, which hinges on her tight-knit trio of friends – her childhood besties Natsuki (Kaho) and Miho (Haruka Kinami), as well as their mysterious former classmate Mari (Asami Mizukawa). 

Their sisterhood is the emotional core of the show. Their day-to-day idle chit-chat is a well-written and well-acted depiction of life-long female friendships.

Rebooting is also refreshingly free of romance, with only a brief plot line involving Asami’s college boyfriend (Tori Matsuzaka). She finds out, to her chagrin, that her good-for-nothing bum of an ex becomes a billionaire in her second lifetime, in which they never date.

Friendship is the defining relationship in the lives of these women, who are fully fulfilled in their 30s without men, marriage or children.

3. Excellent child stars

Ando, 37, best known for films such as Shoplifters (2018) and Monster (2023), is one of the best actresses of her generation. And the series has assembled a stellar adult cast of other beloved Japanese actresses, and cameos by the likes of heart-throb Matsuzaka.

But it is the excellent child stars who serve up a pleasant surprise.

Since much of the story follows Asami living through multiple iterations of her life from the beginning, the three young actresses who play Asami over the years – Yuno Nagao (kindergarten), Ami Wada (primary school) and Runa Yasuhara (high school) – have to shoulder a lot of screen time. And they are more than up to the task. 

All have to portray someone who looks her age but is decades – and eventually, a whole century – older than them. Even the youngest Nagao successfully conveys the world-weariness of an Asami who has “been there, done that”.