The last love letter…

In 2020, the Japanese movie director, Shuji Iwate made a return with a beautiful movie, titled Last Letter. The story lines are simple, yet they give rise to a network of ideas and feelings, that make you want to look back, to view how your own life plot has converged towards the present. In a way, the movie itself is a look back into a different work of art by the same director, Love Letter (1995), that came to the theaters more than a quarter of a century ago. This is a review of both these movies, Love Letter (1995) and Last Letter (2020). Grab your coffee and follow me.

Love Letter (1995) marks the filmmaking career, paving the way for later masterpieces, such as “Swallowtail Butterfly” (1996) and “All About Lily Chou-Chou” (2001). It is set up in two distant cities in Japan, the central city Kobe (you might have heard the name from the famous beef it produces) and the northern city, Otaru. Two different moods, marked by completely different weather. The movie opens up in Kobe, with the funeral scene of Itsuki Fujii, who died in a mountain climbing accident. His fiancée, Hiroko Watanabe, still in longing for her lost lover, decides to write a letter and sends it to the late Itsuki’s childhood hometown address. Only, the address doesn’t exist anymore, because his house was demolished and a highway was built there. So, Hiroko, doesn’t expect anyone to receive the letter. For her, it’s just a letter sent to heaven, to her lover who now must be there. However, out of nowhere, she received a reply. It turns out that in Otaru, lives another person, a girl by the exact same name, Itsuki Fujii (in Japanese, this name is gender neutral). Moreover, the girl Itsuki had also known the boy Itsuki. They were classmates in junior high school. What follows is an enchanting and melancholic letter communication through which the two women rebuild the memories of the late Itsuki Fujii.

Love Letter is a remarkable story of living with the memories of a past of, now unreachable, time, yet learning to move forward with them, not getting stuck in a never-ending loop of wishful thinking. The fact that the two women are actually played by the same actress, Miho Nakayama is mind-blowing. A masterful performance indeed.

In Last Letter (2020), the story also revolves around the death of a person. This time we have the suicide of Misaki, just before her high school reunion, that sets the tone for the scene. When the time for reunion comes, Misaki’s sister, Yuki, goes instead of her late sister. However, due to the similarity between the two sisters, in addition to the long time passed since their school days, the former classmates mistake her for Misaki. Thus, Yuki takes the place of her dead sister. With that comes a confession of a long-held love. Mr. Kyoshiro Otosaka confesses that he never had forgotten Misaki, that he kept loving her and that he, now a novelist, had written a novel for her, titled Misaki. The movie revolves around this complex network of life stories of people who hold on to their images of things and people, even though the latter most likely have gone through enormous changes. Imagine meeting your high school classmates a quarter of a century later and expecting them to be the exact same people as they were back then, in that tender age of big change.

There are clear parallels between the two movies, Love Letter and Last Letter and it is obvious that they exist by design. Director Iwate chooses to bring the same theme of how live evolves through time and how we as people deal subjectively with this evolution. Time forms layers of our stories and it is important not to lose track of ourselves in these marvelous complex structures.

For an end note, I am a person who has a deep natural tendency to lean towards melancholy and therefore I was more connected to the ’95 movie, its colors and characters. I had a feeling that my girlfriend could relate more to the 2022 movie. She was particularly humored by the presence of the (apparently) famous singer, songwriter and actor, Masaharu Fukuyama, nicknamed Masha, in Last Letter. Y. grew up listening to his radio shows and she is a fan of him. I teased her the next day of watching the movie, by telling her that I saw Masha at a restaurant, eating lunch./*54745756836*/