#YAMATE SHIORI FULL#
Young, aspiring graffiti artists Manabu (Shôno Hayama) and Yukio (Taiga) empty-headedly hit on the idea of replicating Haruko’s poster all over town, aided by Aina (Mitsuki Takahata), a needy, over-accessorized 20-year-old nail-art beautician with a blinged-up smartphone and a dashboard full of plush toys. Unfolding alongside Haruko’s pre-disappearance story is a later plotline.
#YAMATE SHIORI SERIES#
Within the bewilderingly chopped-up series of flash-forward fragments that opens the movie, we’ve already seen the film’s central image: the graphic stencil version of Haruko’s ‘Missing’ poster, and it infuses all the scenes of her daily life with a kind of dread, especially because we come to care for her so instantaneously. But even before we discover any of this about her, we know one thing: She will disappear. And within all that sound and fury (which signifies quite a lot) there is even room for a touchingly forthright central performance from Yû Aoi.īased on a 2013 novel by Mariko Yamauchi, the film’s main storyline concerns the 27-year-old, unmarried Haruko (Yû Aoi), who works a joyless job in a small office, lives at home with her parents and is unrequitedly in love with Soga (Huey Ishizaki), the weirdo neighbor with whom she used to play as a child. “Japanese Girls Never Die,” AKA “Haruko Azumi Is Missing,” amounts to a patchwork protest against the subjugation and exploitation of women living within a misogynistic culture, but the audacious approach to chronology, the welter of subplots, subthemes, side characters, and surrealist interludes means it’s a lot less eat-your-vegetables than that may suggest. Film Festival, it provides a fascinating counterpoint to the dreamy classicist ethereality of Kiki Sugino’s ghost story “Snow Woman,” but while its rhythms may be more punkishly anarchic, its intentions are, if anything, more serious. One of two homegrown titles playing in competition at the Tokyo Intl. Japanese girls never die, but their options for living within the strictly gendered, codified confines of contemporary Japanese society don’t seem to offer much of an alternative in Daigo Matsui’s splashy, erratic, provocative, and rather brilliant post-modern drama.
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