Maeko Oyama

At a movie studio in 1988, rookie director Hanako Hayashi is making her directorial debut, the erotic As Far as Love Will Take Us. She's under pressure from her producer and crew. When she is about to shoot the climax of the film, numerous problems arise. To make matters worse, the set is visited by a censor from the Film Certification Committee, and the key scenes end up being cut out to avoid an R rating. Can Hanako realise her dream?

This is a story of when I liked to draw manga alone. I would always draw manga by myself at school, but then someone started to follow me. “Am I being stalked?!” To run away from them, I hid in a random car trunk. “Okay, they can’t find me here.” But as soon as I thought of that, the trunk closed, and I got locked in. My phone was dead too. What do I do?!

The title of Tanaka Toshihiko’s ambitious exploration of human relationships is polysemous. A genderless given name, the kanji character can similarly represent a variety of meanings. As such, it’s the perfect symbol for this portrait of early thirtysomething company employee Matsushita Hikari. Her life is stable and seemingly without worry, unlike many of those around her. But it’s through their struggles that they find their counterparts in life – the balance in relationships that steadies them. Hikari lacks this ballast and this begins to worry her. However, on a trip into the mountains of Hokkaido she encounters a Deaf landscape photographer, Masato. Through him Hikari embarks on a journey that will transform her sense of being and connectedness with the world.

Shimako, who works for a travel agency in Tokyo, loves Scandinavia and lives alone in a small apartment surrounded by Scandinavian goods, food, music, and other items that make her feel like she's in Finland. One day, the president of the company where she works suddenly announces the company's bankruptcy, and this leads her to develop feelings for her favorite country, Finland.