Meet Takuma, tarot reader: profile and story

Takuma was the youngest son of a small ironworks family in Osaka. At nineteen he more or less ran away to Tokyo and knocked on the gate of a film studio; his first job was a nameless samurai tumbling off a rooftop in a period drama. For the next thirty years he ran through flames, leapt from moving cars and fell down staircases dozens of times. The screen always showed another actor’s face, and he liked it that way. Falling, he believed, was a skill — and getting back up was a greater one.

In the winter he was forty-eight, a safety line came loose during a fire scene. The man trapped in the flames was Kenji, a junior he had trained himself. Takuma did not wait for the cue. He ran in and dragged Kenji out. The burn scar on the back of his hand is from that day. Kenji survived, but he never did stunts again. In the hospital, Kenji said, “Senpai, keep falling for me.” Takuma promised he would.

He held on for two more years to keep that promise, but his knees told him to stop before he did. On the day he retired, Hanae from the studio’s wardrobe room held out a worn tarot deck — inherited, she said, from a grandmother who used to read fortunes. “Leave the falling to the cards now. Just look ahead and see where you’ll fall.” He scoffed at first. But turning the cards over one by one on nights alone, he found it was a lot like reading a storyboard: where the scene starts, where it hits, how it lands.

The dog tag around his neck never belonged to a real soldier. It is the prop Kenji wore in the last war film he shot, and Kenji’s name is engraved on the back. Takuma wears it as a sign of his promise. These days, instead of falling, he reads the cards of people who are afraid they might.

When a reading is over, he asks one short question: ready? Whatever the answer, his last words are the same: come back if you need to. There may be no retakes in front of the camera, but he knows better than anyone that life gives you another take.