My Undead Yokai Girlfriend

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My Undead Yokai Girlfriend is an Amazon Original Japanese drama about the strange relationship between a yokai bent on a revenge 500 years in the making and the gamer-otaku college student who summons her by mistake, directed by Takahiro Miki from an original script by American writers Yalun Tu and Zach Hines.

Prime Video released it exclusively in more than 240 countries and territories on March 22, 2024. It runs eight episodes of 30-odd minutes each. An original project not based on any existing work, it is an idea that Yalun Tu and Zach Hines, who are also executive producers, had nurtured for nearly a decade, according to Amazon MGM Studios. It draws on Japan's yokai and otaku cultures and was shot mainly in Kyoto. The theme song is "Tamamonomae," written for the drama by Wednesday Campanella; Hidefumi Kenmochi explained that he started from the image of Izzy, the yokai heroine, and named the song after a legendary fox spirit said to have lived at the end of the Heian period. The Prime Video Korea page rates it 16+, with advisories for violence, alcohol use, foul language and sexual content.

Takahiro Miki began directing music videos in 2000 and made his feature debut in 2010 with Solanin, going on to direct a number of youth and romance films adapted from manga and novels, including Hot Road (2014), Have a Song on Your Lips (2015) and Even If This Love Disappears from the World Tonight (2022). When the release date was announced in February 2024, he said he had been asked to direct about two years earlier. The project was proposed by Amazon Studios' production team, and he says what first drew him in was the setup: a romantic comedy about an otaku college student and a yokai, set in Japan and written by American screenwriters. Because he was making it with American writers, he says he was careful not to over-localize it, while also working plenty of Japanese games and pop culture into the script. For the action and pacing, he looked to the Spider-Man films, Deadpool and Kick-Ass, and he worked with action director Tatsuro Koike to create the fights between yokai. The score is by Shu Kanematsu, and according to Miki, the human beatboxer SO-SO also contributed to the music and appears as a DJ in the party scene in episode 1. For Hayato Sano, it is his first project with Miki in nine years, since his debut film Have a Song on Your Lips.

Hayato Sano plays Tadashi Inukai, nicknamed Hachi, a gamer-otaku college student in the esports club, and Ai Yoshikawa plays Izzy, a yokai who carries a mission of revenge spanning 500 years. This is the first time the two have acted together. In episode 1, Hachi, fed up with being bullied day after day, finds a creepy social media post about a "love spell" and performs the ritual with his friend Tanuki (Antony), but because of a curse attached to the post he summons Izzy, and the two become spiritually bound. In episode 2, Hachi sees the scene of an incident involving Izzy and, with Tanuki, comes up with a plan to send her back to her own world. Takashi Sorimachi plays Hachi's father, Tadayoshi, a detective pursuing a mysterious murder case; Yukiya Kitamura plays a mysterious figure with deep ties to Izzy; and Yuna Taira plays Arisa Renjo, a lecturer at Hachi's university and a yokai hunter, with Dori Sakurada, Nagisa Saito, Naoto Takenaka and Mari Natsuki among the cast.

Hayato Sano said that ever since entering show business he had hoped to see the world someday, and that he was surprised his first globally distributed drama was a Prime Video exclusive with him in the lead, describing the genre as "love × action × comedy × horror." Ai Yoshikawa said she was very surprised when she was first told she would play a "yokai role," and that in playing Izzy, who speaks in an old-fashioned way, she also took on action scenes. Takashi Sorimachi said his character is a somewhat old-fashioned, awkward detective, and that he himself could relate to the way the man struggles to say what he wants to say to his son. Director Miki said he asked the cast to have fun with their roles because they were all outlandish, and recalled that Mari Natsuki said, "I get a lot of roles that aren't human," and enjoyed playing her part. He said this globally distributed project came along just as he was feeling a sense of crisis at having grown used to making films aimed at teenage audiences in Japan, and that from now on he wants to look overseas in making his work as well.

See alsoHave a Song on Your Lips 2015Hot Road 2014Even If This Love Disappears Tonight 2022

Drama Lineup editors · Fact-checked against: bbfc.co.uk, cinematoday.jp, Japanese Wikipedia, news.mynavi.jp, primevideo.com, nichionsakka.com, cinemore.jp, press.amazonmgmstudios.com · 2026-10-18