About Dele
Dele is a 2018 Japanese live-action drama that aired on TV Asahi across eight episodes from July to September 2018. It follows Keishi Sakagami, a withdrawn programmer who uses a wheelchair and rarely leaves his cramped office, where he quietly operates a service called dele.LIFE. For a fee arranged in advance, Keishi promises to permanently erase the private digital data a client leaves behind once they have died, sparing the bereaved from secrets that were never meant to be found.
To confirm that a client has actually passed away before a deletion is triggered, Keishi hires Yutaro Mashiba, a restless and physically capable young man who works as a freelance jack-of-all-trades. Mashiba is sent into the field to verify each death in person, and again and again he cannot resist looking closer. A routine errand becomes an investigation when the data he is meant to destroy hints at a crime, a cover-up, or a final message the dead person was desperate to send.
Each episode pairs the housebound Keishi, who reads people through their screens and keystrokes, with the impulsive Mashiba, who reads them face to face, and the friction between the two men drives the series. Operating from the office above them is Mai Sakagami, a lawyer who keeps the small enterprise tethered to the law even as the cases test it. Quiet, humane, and morally searching, Dele turns a question many fans share into a recurring drama: what do we owe the dead, and who has the right to decide what their data should say about them.
