Tag: Kotona Minami

Meets the World (ミーツ・ザ・ワールド, Daigo Matsui, 2025)

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Adapted from the novel by Hitomi Kanehara, Daigo Matsui’s Meets the World (ミーツ・ザ・ワールド) takes its name from the heroine’s love of a BL manga in which all the characters are anthropomorphised versions of various cuts of meat that can be ordered at yakiniku restaurants. But it’s also, in a way, an apt description of her experiences as she begins to open herself up to the act of living while considering where it is she belongs and what it is that will actually make her happy.

This comes about largely due to an encounter with the mysterious Rai (Kotona Minami), a beautiful yet melancholy young woman who rescues her one night while she’s drunk and disorientated in the street. Rai offers her a literal sanctuary, but also challenges Yukari’s (Hana Sugisaki) view of the world by constantly questioning and undermining things that she had assumed to be true but without telling her what she should think or do. Rai offers her these little nudges, but at the same time lives in an apartment strewn with rubbish and repeatedly says that she longs for death. Yukari begins by clearing up, reminding her that one’s living arrangements reflect the state of one’s mind, but she finds it much more difficult to clean up Rai’s mental state or relieve her internalised listlessness and lack of enthusiasm for living.

In some senses, it’s true that Yukari becomes more fixated on the idea of saving Rai as a means of saving herself than she does on her personal growth, but at the same time gains greater experience and understanding through interacting with Rai’s social circle at the aptly named Loneliness bar. The irony is that though she becomes frustrated that she can’t seem to truly connect with Rai or reduce her desire for death, she rejects the same kind of interest from her mother (Mariko Tsutsui) whose calls she is forever avoiding. Her mother only really wants the same thing that Yukari wants from Rai and would seemingly be happy enough with a few texts as proof of life, though it’s something that Yukari doesn’t want to give her for whatever reason. She says that she didn’t like living alone with her mother after her father’s death, but there’s the same kind of absence felt in Rai’s apartment which she previously shared with the only person she claims to have loved but is now no longer in her life.

It speaks to Yukari’s naivety that she thinks she could heal Rai simply by reuniting her with this person, while she comes to realise that romance may not be the answer she was looking for either. Yukari had enthusiastically begun looking for a husband at 27 despite never having dated before because she thought it was what she was supposed to do, yet what makes her happiest is her obsessive interest in her favourite manga. These kinds of hobbies are often looked down by the surrounding society and it’s clear that Yukari has a degree of internalised shame regarding her interest in them. Even at her mother’s house, she hides all anime merch behind a curtain out of sight and keeps it a secret from her colleagues at the bank where she works. When Yukari eventually does mention her love of anime, her colleague begins to smirk a little as if she thinks that explains quite a lot and is internally laughing at Yukari while remaining superficially polite. Yukari’s prim and proper supervisor, meanwhile, gives her a stern look though it isn’t clear if that’s because she thinks Yukari’s hobbies are inappropriate for a woman her age, or because she may have similar hobbies of her own. 

In any case, it’s true that through her friendship with Rai she learns to be open about her interests and be fully herself in all environments, accepting that love and dating may not be right for her or at least that she doesn’t need to force them to satisfy the demands of others. It could be said that what she has with her anime characters is a one-sided relationship, but that’s also true of those around her including the host Asahi (Rihito Itagaki) who sees his marriage founder as his wife grows tired of supporting him as the number one host while he can’t win her back just as himself. Ironically, these kinds of one-sided relationships are a professional hazard that can otherwise lead to toxicity and violence. A gloomy writer, Yuki (Yu Aoi), also recounts the postnatal depression that led to the end of her marriage and subsequent realisation that what she had was the kind of happiness that someone who thought themselves unhappy wanted to find, but did not actually work out for her. 

What they are is in effect a series of bubbles that occasionally float close to each other or perhaps intersect without really connecting. Nevertheless, they offer each other a gentle sense of solidarity just by existing. Matsui films in a 4:3 ratio that seems constrained, but also has a cosy, protective quality while implying that loneliness is a natural fact of life that can’t be entirely cured, yet even if someone is not actually with you physically, or may not even physically exist, one’s love for them can still endure and be a healthy source of comfort and support while everyone has the right to live as they please free from the judgement of others.

Meets the World screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Petals and Memories (花まんま, Tetsu Maeda, 2025)

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In many Japanese family dramas, there is an inherent sense of impending tragedy born of the notion that one family must necessarily be broken for another to be formed. Cultural sensibilities might insist that someone can only be part of one family at any time and any attempt to play a part in another is an act of betrayal. But reality is not so clean-cut and just because a woman gets married, it doesn’t really mean that she becomes a stranger to the people who raised her nor that they must completely sever ties with her even as they wish her well as she transitions to a new stage of life.

This is though what older brother Toshiki (Ryohei Suzuki) fears in Tetsu Maeda’s supernaturally tinged familial drama Petals and Memories (花まんま, Hanamanma). Adapted from a short story by Minato Shukawa, the story has an old-fashioned quality in which it could easily have been set back in the Showa era were it not for the fact that Kiyomi, the spirit that his sister Fumiko (Kasumi Arimura) claims to carry, was killed in the climatic year of 1995 which saw both the Kobe earthquake and sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. In any case, Toshiki has a distinctly Showa-era vision of masculinity and remains incredibly protective of his sister even if Fumiko has moved up in the world with her job in a university and engagement to a young professor who has the ability to converse with crows.

After their truck driver father was killed in an accident and their mother passed away in Toshiki’s teens, he’s essentially been forced into a parental position. Toshiki left school early and got a job in the factory where he still works in order to fulfil his father’s dreams of sending Fumiko to university. As such, he occasionally paints himself as a martyr and is keen to remind people how difficult it was for his mother to raise them on her own and that he’s sacrificed his future to provide for Fumiko. Her upcoming marriage is then to him a minor betrayal even if it’s also, culturally speaking, the fulfilment of his parents’ hopes for their daughter and thereby the end of his obligation.

The problem with that is Toshiki himself doesn’t have much of an identity outside of “big brother,” and is unable to see Fumiko as anything other than his little sister. When she tells him that she has memories of a previous life, he rejects them and says that he can’t bear to see his sister as “someone else”, repeatedly reasserting that she’s the daughter of his parents rather than those of Kiyomi. But Fumiko is also fiancée to Taro (Oji Suzuka) and friend to Komako (First Summer Uika). As she tries to counter him, more than anything she is simply herself which is something else Toshiki rejects in his categorisation of her only as his sister. Nevertheless, when she tells him that interacting with Kiyomi’s grieving father Mr Shigeto taught her what it was like to have a father seeing that she has no memory of her own is insensitive given that Toshiki has essentially been a father to her for most of her life. 

In clinging to his identity as a big brother, Toshiki may really be attempting to stave off his own fear of orphanhood as a man with no other family, but what he’s forced to reckon with is that his sister is “someone else” after all and not merely an extension of himself. In coming to terms with Kiyomi’s presence and extending compassion to her bereaved family rather than reacting in fear that they were trying to take his sister away from him, Toshiki begins to realise both that he didn’t actually raise Fumiko all alone but benefitted from the extended family of a community and that in her marriage his world is actually expanding rather than contracting. As the old adage goes, he’s not losing a sister so much as gaining a brother. In the “hanamanma” flower bento of the Japanese title, it becomes clear that Kiyomi’s love for her family transcended death and that she is not really lost to them even this most final parting but remains with them in spirit and memory. 

Petals and Memories screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ice Cream Fever (アイスクリームフィーバー, Tetsuya Chihara, 2023)

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“Cold and sweet” is the way a customer to Million Ice Cream describes their produce, but it might also be an odd way to describe its comforts echoing the melancholy of the series of women who pass through its doors in Tetsuya Chihara’s adaptation of a short story by Mieko Kawakami, Ice Cream Fever (アイスクリームフィーバー). For each of the heroines it represents a kind of purgatorial space as they find themselves torn between past and future while seeking new directions.

For Natsumi (Riho Yoshioka), who took the job working part-time at the ice cream shop after experiencing burn out in her career as a designer, that new direction appears in the form of Saho (Serena Motola), an alluring yet sullen woman dressed all in black who turns out to be a formerly successful novelist plagued by writer’s block. A series of flirtatious encounters seem to rejuvenate the creative impulses of both women with Natsumi returning to doodling new signs for the shop and Saho beginning to write again, though there remains something distant and elusive between them. Saho later describes herself as like a summer storm destined to pass by in an instant and soon forgotten though in an ironic way her aloofness and enduring mystery may in fact be a way to ensure she is not forgotten while she at least seems unable to embrace her romantic desires instead sublimating them into her literature.

This inability to forget has also marred the life of Yu (Marika Matsumoto), a similarly lost woman approaching middle age who is suddenly approached by a niece she’s never met because she cut ties with her sister after she stole her boyfriend. Her mother having now passed away, Miwa (Kotona Minami) has come to Tokyo in search of her father and though seemingly aware of the circumstances of her familial estrangement enlists her aunt to help find him thereby forcing Yu to confront the past and reassess her life. Like Natsumi she is also becoming disillusioned with contemporary working culture and contemplating making a change. While she is a devotee of ice cream, it’s the local bathhouse, “an oasis for working women” as she describes it, that her been her refuge. When it suddenly closes due to the elderly owner’s (Hairi Katagiri) own decision to pursue a different kind of life, Yu wonders if she might be happier giving up her high powered corporate job to take it over. 

The dilemma both women face is reflective of a generational shift away from a desire for conventional success achieved by hitting each of life’s landmark events to that for immediate individual happiness derived from small comforts such as an ice cream cone or a soak in a large bath. The irony is that Miwa comes to Tokyo in search of an absent father and finds her aunt, while Yu is able to make peace with her past and accept the new gift life has given her in accepting a maternal role in her niece’s life. What both women choose are pleasant lives rooted in community and giving pleasure to others rather ones of consumerist desire or external validation.

Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean romantic resolution. While one woman’s decision may reflect a desire to move on, the other’s may not but rather an intention to wait if also to do so in a happier and more fulfilling environment that unlike the Mexican salamanders in Saho’s tank she has chosen for herself. Gradually we come to understand these events are unfolding at differing time intervals though weaving through around each other, pursuing a logic of memory rather a more literal reality while driven by the natural rhythms of a life which continues onward around them in continual oscillation. Gradually spinning outward it ropes in the unfulfilled romantic desires of Natsumi’s punkish co-worker choosing to move on in the realisation that her feelings have not been acknowledged and are unlikely to be returned, along with the cruel irony of the happy life seemingly being lived by Miwa’s long absent father. With its gentle framing and pastel colours, the film has an atmosphere of calm and serenity that belies its underlying melancholy in the frosty sweetness of a dormant love kept in the deep chill waiting for summer’s return.

Ice Cream Fever screens in New York July 20 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (English subtitles)