Film

Obayashi has made several films about memory and lost loves, and Haruka, Nostalgia is the most famous. These films connect with another major Obayashi theme: the young, innocent woman--termed shojo in Japanese. While now a centerpiece of Japanese culture, from girls comics to Hayao Miyazaki's heroines, the shojo in Obayashi are liminal figures inhabiting the boundaries between past and present and life and death, confronting the heroes with their own mortality. In this film, a writer of shojo novels returns to his hometown of Otaru and encounters first a young woman and then, mysteriously, his own, youthful self, forcing him to remember a girl he once loved and rejected.
 
1993, 165 min., 35mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. Hiroshi Katsuno, Hikari Ishida, Yoji Matsuda, Toshinori Omi, Bengaru.

Part of Nobuhiko Obayashi: A Retrospective.

Tickets: $12/$9 Japan Society members, seniors & students

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