Three sisters have grown up together in the pleasant town of Kamakura, Japan. They stayed with their mother when their father ran away with another woman, and they stayed with the house when their mother ran away with another man.

After some years, the sisters hear their father has died; and at his funeral, they find he has left behind Suzu, their serious-minded, 13-year-old half-sister, as well as a flaky widow who isn’t likely to make a good single mother. The three sisters – now aged 19 through to 29 – ask Suzu to come and live with them.

Based on “Seaside Town Diary”, a popular Japanese josei manga (Western translation: chick lit comic), Our Little Sister is the story of four very different women – or perhaps only three of them are very different; the oldest sister senses a kindred spirit in the 13-year-old Suzu – learning to adapt to one another. Not so much a story of conflict as a gentle story of different strands of ivy twining around one another.

Director Hirokazu Koreeda has been here before, specialising in rambling stories that closely examine how non-standard families work (Like Father, Like Son), or sometimes don’t work (Nobody Knows). This is one of the ones that works, and Koreeda knows how to make the simple material engrossing.