Just a Bit Espers

About this title

A TV Asahi drama series about an office worker who is fired, loses everything and becomes an Esper with “just a bit” of psychic power, tasked with the job of saving the world. Akiko Nogi wrote it as an original story.

Just a Bit Espers (ちょっとだけエスパー) aired in nine episodes from October 21 to December 16, 2025, in the Tuesday 9 p.m. drama slot on the TV Asahi network. It was Yo Oizumi’s first lead role in a TV Asahi drama series, and the first TV Asahi drama series written by Akiko Nogi, known for Unnatural and MIU404. It was directed by Yoshiaki Murao and Daisuke Yamauchi, with music by Yu Takami and Nobuaki Nobusawa, and the theme song is Kocchi no Kento’s “Watakushigoto” (わたくしごと). In Japan, episodes were available right after broadcast as free catch-up streams on TVer and ABEMA, as well as on TELASA, and at the time of its run, Netflix released each episode from midnight at the end of each broadcast day (0:00 the following day) in Japan and in more than 190 countries and regions overseas. Netflix Korea lists it as 조금만 초능력자 and rates it 15+.

The protagonist, Bunta (Yo Oizumi), is an office worker who was fired from his company, lost his family and his savings in a divorce, and has been drifting from one internet café to another. One day he receives an invitation to interview at a company called Nonamare. At the final interview, he swallows a single capsule handed to him by the company’s president, Kizashi (Masaki Okada), and is hired, only to be told that he is an Esper as of today. His job is to save the world, but the missions sent to him through an app are all trivial, and they come with a rule that he must not love anyone. In the company housing provided for him, a woman he has never met, Shiki (Aoi Miyazaki), welcomes him, believing he is her real husband, and the two begin living together as a provisional married couple. Bunta’s power, revealed in episode 1, is that he can hear a little of what other people are thinking.

The colleagues he meets on his missions have only “a bit” of power, too: Ohsuke (Dean Fujioka), who runs a flower shop and can make flowers bloom by stroking them; Enjaku (Atsuko Takahata), who can heat things at about 200W just by willing it; and Hanzo (Shohei Uno), who can talk to animals a little but can’t get even Sasuke, a Shiba Inu, to listen to him. Takumi Kitamura plays Ichimatsu, a mysterious college student who approaches Bunta and the others. The series marked Aoi Miyazaki’s first role in a commercial-network drama series in about 13 years, and reunited her with Oizumi for the first time in about seven years, after the two played siblings in the 2018 standalone TV drama Ani Imoto (あにいもうと).

In an interview with Real Sound, Nogi said that in 2016 TV Asahi producer Sari Kijima contacted her, asking her to someday write the script for a drama Kijima would make, and that the project got underway in 2021. Nogi wanted to do a story about wizards and Kijima one about ninjas, and they ended up with a story about Espers, she said. Oizumi was set as the lead from the start, Nogi wrote the roles with the main cast, all confirmed before she began writing, in mind, and most of the main characters’ names were chosen by Kijima. She added that they decided to keep CG to a minimum. Household ratings for individual episodes in the Kanto region, as surveyed by Video Research, were 8.5% for episode 1 and 6.2% for the ninth and final episode. In June 2026, Blu-ray and DVD box sets and a screenplay book from Kawade Shobo Shinsha were released.

Drama Lineup editors · Fact-checked against: kawade.co.jp, mantan-web.jp, oricon.co.jp, netflix.com, realsound.jp, cinematoday.jp, thefirsttimes.jp · 2026-10-24