Burn the House Down

About this title

Burn the House Down is a Japanese Netflix series based on Moyashi Fujisawa's manga of the same title, about a daughter who had to leave her home after her mother took the blame for a fire 13 years earlier, and who goes back into her old house as a housekeeper under a false name to uncover the truth about that day.

Netflix released all eight episodes worldwide at once on July 13, 2023. The original manga was serialized by Moyashi Fujisawa in Kodansha's women's manga magazine Kiss from 2017 to 2021 and completed in eight volumes. Netflix developed and produced the series, with Office Crescendo as the production company. The music is by Takeshi Kobayashi, and the theme song is Vaundy's "Carnival." A trailer featuring part of the song came out first, on July 5, and the full song could be heard for the first time in the end credits from the release date. The Netflix Korea page rates it 15+.

The series was directed by Yuichiro Hirakawa, who made the film The Promised Neverland and the TBS drama Heaven and Hell: Soul Exchange, with Koji Shintoku co-directing. The screenplay is by Arisa Kaneko, who wrote the film Helter Skelter and the TBS drama An Incurable Case of Love. Composer Takeshi Kobayashi is known for film scores, including for films directed by Shunji Iwai. When Netflix announced the production in July 2022, it noted that this was the first Netflix project for both leads, Mei Nagano and Kyoka Suzuki. Producer Kei Haruna pointed to the opening premise of a woman "infiltrating" the mansion where she lived as a child as a housekeeping service worker, and explained that the lavish mansion production design served as the stage where the two women face off.

Mei Nagano plays the heroine, Anzu Murata, and Kyoka Suzuki plays Makiko, the second wife in the Mitarai family. Anzu was the eldest daughter of the Mitarai family, which has run a hospital for generations, but after a fire at the mansion 13 years earlier, she left home with her mother, Satsuki (Michiko Kichise). Her father, Osamu (Mitsuhiro Oikawa), later remarried Makiko. In episode 1, Anzu takes a housekeeping job under the name Shizuka Yamauchi and steps back into the mansion where she grew up. In episode 2, Anzu's younger sister, Yuzu (Yuri Tsunematsu), tries to work out how to find out more about the Mitarai family's affairs, while Makiko begins speaking in public about her past, which was not all glamour. Asuka Kudo plays Makiko's elder son, Kiichi, who shuts himself away in his room; Taishi Nakagawa plays her younger son, Shinji, a medical student; and Kie Kitano plays Claire, a friend who helps Anzu go undercover. Mari Hamada and Sakurako Konishi also appear.

At the production announcement, Mei Nagano said that bringing a single panel of the manga to the screen was difficult and took a lot of trial and error, and that she racked her brain every day during filming to create both a sense of speed and a slight sense of unease. Kyoka Suzuki described Makiko as "a very unsettling, frightening woman" and said that her exchanges of dialogue with Nagano's Anzu turned out to be a lot of fun. Yuichiro Hirakawa promised a twist in every episode, and the manga's creator, Moyashi Fujisawa, said it was a great surprise to hear that actors and filmmakers who had been an influence were involved. By Netflix's weekly figures (views are hours viewed divided by the title's total runtime), it ranked No. 4 on the Non-English TV list in its first week (July 10–16) with 2.6 million views and No. 2 the next week with 3.5 million views, staying on that chart for three weeks. It spent six weeks in Japan's weekly Top 10, reaching No. 1 in its second week, and over its entire run it made the weekly Top 10 in 44 countries and territories.

See alsoHeaven and Hell: Soul Exchange 2021An Incurable Case of Love 2020

Drama Lineup editors · Fact-checked against: eiga.com, thefirsttimes.jp, netflix.com, Japanese Wikipedia, about.netflix.com, kisscomic.com, realsound.jp, cinematoday.jp · 2026-10-18