![]() ![]() ![]() Director Takahiro Miki has been down this road before, with Fortuna’s Eye, the fantastical romance (based on a book by Naoki Hyakuta) about an unhappy young man who can see when people are going to die and saves a pretty, equally awkward girl from death. Needless to say, Even if This Love does its level best to live up to its misty forebears. By the standards of the form, and it is indeed a form now, Even if This Love Disappears from the World Tonight | 今夜、世界からこの恋が消えても goes out of its way to pile on the central heroine – and indeed it is almost always a “she” – giving her not only an illness that messes with her life, and will forever, it makes sure she only gets a whiff of a life in the moment.īased on the 2019 novel by Misaki Ichijo – which Barnes & Noble categorises as YA, uh oh – and shot in sunny tones, with soft edges and peopled by flawlessly skinned youths by DOP Hiro Yanagida, the shooter on I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, about – wait for it – a teenaged girl with a terminal illness whose bucket list diary is the impetus for a tragic romance with a classmate. What the fuck is going on in Japan? Why are its writers so miserable as to give us tome after tome after tome about inappropriate tragic romances and the most brazenly dysfunctional families ever? And why are readers consistently turning them, first, into runaway bestsellers, then audiences into box office monsters when the film adaptation invariably comes along? It’s been said the best insight into the national Japanese psyche is through its manga, but these soft focus romances are making a case for themselves, however dissonant the answers might be.
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