It’s easy to roll your eyes and dismiss this film as yet another popular Japanese romance weepie, but the truth is it’s a dramatic interpretation and enactment of a real person’s last days, a young woman given the short end of the stick by Fate. On one hand you’re tempted to frivolously park this under clichés, but on the other, realizing that it’s based on a true story (with dramatized moments of course), your interest is piqued into trying to understand the filmmakers’ decision to turn her story into a feature film; something in it must have inspired them to do so.

Nana Eikura takes on the role of Chie Nagashima, a sprightly young girl who meets up with the boy Taro Akasu (Eita). From their random, memorable encounter, they strike up a serious relationship over time, only for Chie to confess, when she can’t hide her condition any longer, that she’s suffering from breast cancer. From a guy’s perspective, cancer might just be another disease to do battle with, given the advances of modern medicine, but I do feel that it makes a more significant impact from a female’s perspective, especially when advanced stages of the cancer calls for removal of the breast and strikes a blow against a woman feeling complete.

The film at no time tries to preach heavy-handedly about breast cancer. It takes a different approach, shrewdly keeping the subject to mere mentions, hopefully thus winning over audiences and encouraging them to research the condition further as a legacy of the film. As a romantic movie, this doesn’t steer clear of saccharine moments shared by the two lovebirds though director Ryuichi Hiroki smartly balances these with enough looming dark clouds. For instance, the physical intimacy which they share very early in the film soon gives way to a separation of sorts and their cycling at high speed at night, crossing junctions without slowing down, brings out the sense of danger always peeking from a corner in their relationship.

Writer Hiroshi Saito thankfully tunes down the melodrama of his earlier effort 252: Signal of Life, here portraying his characters with quiet dignity instead. Ryuichi Hiroki, having become familiar with female-centric art house films, knows how to put the spotlight on Chie as a likable character you feel for, thus enabling you to share her struggles and pain, her knowledge that each day alive is a miracle and a gift, yet being too weak to make the most of it. It is this dilemma that hits hardest, especially if life has been without aim or fulfillment.

One cannot help but wonder what one would do in Taro’s shoes, making great personal sacrifices for someone you love deeply, to the extent even of upsetting one’s parents. I feel that with genuine, deep feelings for someone, you’re likely to be as stubborn as a mule and optimistic too – especially when the characters, as here, are so youthful and defiant with youth’s belief in its invincibility in the prime of life. An outcome of the actual documentary that Chie had shot, and this film for that matter, was to mitigate this sense of complacency, since it’s quite horrific how inaction can result in such a drastic outcome in a short frame of time.

If I have a favourite scene in this film, it has to be the one in which Taro and Chie’s father (Akira Emoto) share a private moment in Chie’s hospital room when she has a night off. In an extremely touching interchange a stoic man breaks down and shows his tremendous gratitude to someone who up to then had been a stranger, finally understanding the positive effects Taro has had on his daughter. This single scene won this film over for me, and triumphed over many others that equally tug at one’s heartstrings.

At the end of the movie after the credits, the filmmakers roll a dedication to the real Chie, and to those interested, give a glimpse of the television documentary she agreed to make. It’s in Japanese with Chinese subtitles, but don’t let that put you off. Stefan S