Sefure no Pride: Lamentation Blu-ray

It was supposed to be just that kind of relationship. Shadows from the past and decisions about the future close in on Shoko and Kazuki in Lamentation, the first of the two films that bring the Sefure no Pride series towards its conclusion in Final Love. Desire and an intense human drama intertwine as four adults search for love amid despair.

Shoko Morimura is a twice-divorced single mother raising her daughter while working for a mail-order company. Kazuki Kitada, her first love, is a once-divorced gynaecologist admired for his skill and looks. After meeting again at a school reunion and spending a night together, they continued seeing each other, developing their own relationship as friends with benefits.

Kazuki travels alone to a clinic on a remote island to help a former mentor whose health has declined. In its quiet surroundings, he begins to imagine a future there with Shoko and her child. Moved by his feelings, Shoko prepares to take a major step towards a new happiness.

At that moment, her former husband, who had hurt her in the past, returns as a stalker determined to separate them. Kazuki’s former wife, whose life has fallen into disarray, also appears unexpectedly. A strange connection brings the two former spouses together, and these visitors from the past impose a harsh twist of fate on Shoko and Kazuki. Their past and future collide as the consequences of human weakness threaten to engulf them.

The series adapts Yoriko Minato’s manga, published by Futabasha’s JOUR Comics, which had sold more than 5.4 million copies across print and digital editions. Its woman’s perspective on tangled emotions and sexual desire, together with a story full of changes, earned a strong following among adult women. Aika Yukihira and Sho Aoyagi first brought the pair to the screen in First Love and Determination in 2023, tracing their attraction, uncertainty and shifting relationship.

Yukihira portrays Shoko’s allure alongside her resilience, warmth and approachable charm. Since her first leading role in Hideo Jojo’s Be My Slave Chapter 2: Please Call Me Master in 2018, her work has ranged across film and television, including Ichikei no Karasu and Reversal Orchestra. Aoyagi, a Gekidan EXILE member known for HiGH&LOW, Alice in Borderland and Anpan, explores another side of his acting through Kazuki’s kindness, generosity and the changes brought by his time with Shoko. Moemi Katayama and Riria Sakagami return to the ensemble.

Director Hideo Jojo has made more than one hundred works, from sharply edged genre films to bittersweet stories of youth, with Warau Mushi and A Wicked Summer among his 2025 releases. Having begun in erotic cinema, he creates a sensual world in which the characters’ recognisable humanity comes to the foreground.