HIKARI

Hikari always knew it was her fate to be a director. Now the world is finally about to learn her name.

- By Chris Nashawaty

Dress ($1,998) by Tory Burch; pumps ($795) by Manolo Blahnik; earrings ($4,600) by Cartier.

SHE STILL SEEMS OUT OF BREATH AS SHE enters the room. She's a tornado of energybright energy. She apologizes for being late even though she's right on time. She's spent every minute of this gorgeously sunny Los Angeles afternoon in a dark, air-conditioned editing suite. Her eyes are eager and alert behind stylish wire-rimmed frames. She is dressed in a white linen shirt unbuttoned just enough to show off a funky, chunky necklace. She's wearing a brown fedora. She pulls it off.

She is forty-eight years old. She tells me to ask her anything. "What you see is what you get." She exudes the warmth and sincerity and excitement of someone who is finally seeing a distant, long-held dream—one that seemed as unlikely to a kid growing up in Osaka, Japan, as visiting Neptune—come to fruition.

Her name is Hikari. Well, technically the name on her birth certificate is Mitsuyo Miyazaki, but even armed with that information you still probably don’t know who she is. She realizes this. But she also knows that it may all be about to change when her new dramatic comedy, Rental Family, hits theaters in November. If you're going to see just one movie about an expat American actor (Brendan Fraser) working for a Japanese service that rents out friends and family members for social situations, this should be the one.