33-year-old female civil servant died in a car accident... The Japanese are too good at telling stories

Author | Seven seven

In the past, when I failed exams and daydreamed, I used to lie on my desk during class and think: If only I could reincarnate and relive once with all my memories, I would bypass the detour and be promoted to a gifted child.

This matter probably many people thought about when they were children, and the Japanese drama "Restart Life" with a Douban score of 9.4 filmed it.

"Restart Life" scored 9.4 points on Douban

It's just that the plot is one Pacific Ocean away from the ideal direction.

Asami (played by Sakura Ando) is a local civil servant, unmarried and childless, who lives an ordinary and happy life with her family and two good friends, Natsuki and Miho.

She died in a car accident at the age of 33 and woke up in a pure white space with only one front desk. The front desk told her that there were two options in front of her:

Reincarnated as an anteater in Guatemala, or return to your infancy self with memories of the present world, accumulating yin virtue in exchange for the opportunity to reincarnate as an adult.

Asami was faced with two choices

Asami chose the latter without hesitation, will her life start from then on?

01

Female friendship is booming

Let's answer the question above: not at all!

Asami was able to cope easily in elementary school with the experience of the first round of life, but after middle school, she struggled just as hard to study, and she was admitted to the same high school.

The difference is that the university was admitted to the faculty of medicine, but because of the fear of blood, he later became a pharmacist and worked in a pharmacy near the first round of units - yes, everything did not change much.

Asami who became a pharmacist

However, in the second round, in order to accumulate Yin, Asami also made a lot of efforts, such as picking up garbage from a young age, stopping the extramarital affairs between kindergarten teachers and classmates' fathers, solving the dilemma of high school teachers being mistaken for satyrs, helping her grandfather use the right drugs to prolong life, and avoiding her friend Reina from falling in love with a married man.

When Asami avoids the first round of car accidents, thinking that she has accumulated enough virtue, she soon has another car accident. Asami returns to the pure white space, and the front desk tells her that this time she will be reincarnated as an Indo-Pacific big-eyed mackerel. Fortunately, life can be repeated.

In the third round, Asami worked harder to accumulate Yin virtue, but the plot of life was still not too bad. After that, she went through the fourth and fifth rounds of life.

Such a plot seems too ordinary, and they have lived so many rounds, why should the highlight of life only be to help teachers and stop extramarital affairs, shouldn't they reach the height of a savior? Only by reaching this height can we accumulate enough yin virtue to reincarnate as an adult, right?

In the third round of rebirth, Asami's life is not much different

Don't worry, as a high-scoring drama with a Douban score of 9.4, the screenwriter has long paved the way for us.

In the fourth round of life, Asami decided to study hard from a young age, grow up to become a person who contributes to society, and strive to be reincarnated as a person in the next life. However, because she has been studying since she was a child, Asami lost the opportunity to become friends with Natsuki and Miho, the third diehard.

"The bell at five, for some reason, stung my heart more than usual." Looking at the figure of the departing friend of the previous three lives, Asami sighed so. The relaxed and funny atmosphere of the whole drama suddenly became a little sad.

When we grow up, do we often have such a feeling: the older we are, the more difficult it is to make confidant friends, and childhood friends are always the most simple and happy.

Childhood friendships have a depth that is stronger than love.

Asami and her three friends have been with each other since childhood

Remember: who is the one who will accompany you to the bathroom after class? Who is the one who was penalized for standing with you passing the note in class? Who is the person you hope to be her best friend? Who is the person who accompanied you to make phone porridge all night when you fell out of love? In addition to crying for love, have we ever cried for friendship? Especially before adulthood.

Women's friendship is a mutual appreciation, companionship, and mutual cherishing that has been accumulated over the years - like a safety net tightly sewn with needles and threads, covering each other's joys, sorrows and sorrows.

In "Restart Life", we can see a lot of such trivial clips: chatting about TV series together, exchanging stickers together, taking stickers together, gossip together, eating snacks together, doing all seemingly meaningless but happy things together - Asami's three lives are spent in such happiness. So in the fourth life, having lost friends, life turned pale.

Asami and her buddy's daily trivial but happy life

However, the turning point came - Asami's former class, the girl who was always unattainable and always the first place in the exam appeared - in fact, she is living the fifth round of life. And her purpose in restarting her life is to save her friends who died in a plane crash, and to prevent this air crash to save more people. The two friends who died in a plane crash are Asami's dead friends Natsuki and Miho.

Ah, they were actually originally a "foursome of friends"! While Asami feels the pain of losing her friend, Truth shares her pain. But she would rather endure this pain, but also restart her life again and again to save her friends - such a vigorous female friendship is not lost to any "crossing drama" that goes for love.

02

How contemporary women treat themselves

Cloaked in "rebirth", "Restart Life" is actually a real female drama, which tells us two things about women: friendship between women can also be vigorous, and how contemporary women deal with themselves - the former has been "vigorously" reflected in the plot, and the latter is scattered in the daily conversations between Asami and the diehards.

According to the plot setting, Asami was born in 1989, which is known in Japan as the "loose education generation", that is, the transition from cramming education to relaxed education.

People born in this generation pay more attention to work-life balance, pay attention to self-awareness, and free themselves from the "bubble generation" of "working for the family".

Compared with China, which is known as the post-80s and post-90s, this generation of Chinese young people also pays more attention to education, life and self-growth, and this generation has become the backbone of social production.

"Restart Life" sets the tone for Asami's life from the beginning: financially independent, with a stable income, hard work and hard life, unmarried and childless, eating twice a month with a dead party, although talking about trivial things, but warm and kind.

Younger sister Haruka asks older sister Asami: Not married? Judging from Asami's reaction, she didn't seem to have thought about it: "I have a place to live, and I can use my money freely..."

Many people, even early Japanese dramas, portrayed Japanese women in the image of "if you work hard to get married, you will become happy", but in fact, even in a traditional patriarchal country like Japan, the power of women is valued by society.

Asami

Asami and her dead friends are not married, and they discuss three single women, who may remain single forever and live together later as old women. But wouldn't it be miserable if one of them got sick? The conclusion is that everyone can live in the same nursing home together, maybe the future nursing home will become super high-tech!

Speaking of this, several girls laughed happily.

Such a plot has a certain social reality. Japan has long since entered a super-aging society, but in terms of the world, the aging of the population has become one of the most important trends of the 21st century. Such female conversations between Asami and her dead friends often appear in our daily lives:

"The house is so expensive, we will buy a house to live in together in the future."

"In the future, let's move to the countryside to retire together, and we can also plant fields and raise flowers together."

"In the future, there should be a community of the elderly, let's live together, and playing mahjong will not be one of the three."

Real life can't be renewed, but at least in our lifetime, we can choose our own life. As long as you live happily and kindly, marriage is a choice, childbearing is a choice, and being single is a choice. Even if in the future life, the loved one is not there and the loved one is gone, at least we still have sincere friends.

Asami and three friends

In fact, "Restart Life" has another highlight - Xiaojing, who supports her boyfriend Xiaofu's dream, finally can't survive and chooses to divorce.

After the divorce, the lives of the two people changed for the better. There is no moral criticism in the play, Xiao Jing is actually full of courage to support the other half for love, and it also takes courage to recognize the reality of divorce after being tortured by life; And Xiaofu who chases dreams, giving up dreams also requires courage.

No woman should be called a "silly woman", and no man should be called a "little white face", but people will face different moods and choices at different stages. In the end, everyone can gather in the box and sing together, which is the most abundant comfort that life gives kindness.

03

There is nothing wrong with ordinary life

If it weren't for reincarnation, Asami would actually be extremely happy in her ordinary life. But from childhood to adulthood, have we been instilled with such values: study well, it is best to become a scientist or a rich man in the future, and doctors, lawyers, engineers are also good choices. Of course, this does not deny the importance of the economy, but sometimes we are also overly demanded and expected by families and society.

As mentioned earlier, Asami was born into the "relaxed education generation" of Japanese society, so her parents fell around the "bubble generation", that is, the generation that fought the economy. Since then, Japanese society has entered the "employment ice age generation", which has left many people suffering from the economy.

A still from "Restart Life"

Compared with China, the parents of the post-80s and 90s have also experienced hardships, so this generation will have particularly high expectations for their children. When the post-80s and 90s become parents, perhaps their children will become the "loose education generation".

Although Asami's parents are very gentle in the play, if you look at the entire East Asian society, "becoming a rich, capable, and social status person" is the pressure that the post-80s and 90s generation are facing at this moment. Those who are already married, some old, some young; Those who are not yet married are older men and women; Those who don't want to work too hard are called "lying flat".

Stress strikes from all sides – family, society, self-expectations, and so on.

But what is a truly happy life? The protagonist in "Restart Life" gives us another answer: there is nothing wrong with ordinary life, these women are not bound, ordinary but happy. Asami's first colleague, Minako, a local civil servant, perfectly embodies this "ordinary happiness."

Minako

When Asami was in the fourth round, Minako Kawaguchi was already passing her eighth round, and each round followed the same route, even if she was reincarnated as a bird in the next life, because she lived happily in the first round, so how many times the same life was repeated still happy.

"[Each round] has hardly changed, not only for work, but also for interests and relationships, even clothes, those few pieces in turn." Minako Kawaguchi said.

The biggest highlight of "Restart Life" is not only the screenwriting skills, it allows us, especially the post-80s and 90s, who are becoming the backbone of society, to get breathing space when watching the drama, and see the different choices of different people, as well as the different circumstances developed behind different choices.

The characters in these plays seem to be us and the people around us, who have spent more than 30 years in this world, and they still retain some ideals and innocence when they begin to understand reality.

There is a saying in Zen that refers to the different stages of life: "Seeing a mountain is a mountain, seeing a mountain is not a mountain, seeing a mountain is still a mountain." "Everyone's age and circumstances are different, but the life of the 30s has long passed the stage of "seeing the mountain is the mountain".

For example, Xiaofu, who has chased his dreams and recognized his ordinary; For example, Xiao Jing, who has loved seriously and recognized her powerlessness; And the diehard "foursome" accepted such a "wasted self" from the beginning and obtained ordinary but real happiness in the trivial little days day after day.

Even though Makoto and Asami save the world in the final reboot of their lives, they finally choose to return to their hometown and do an ordinary job with their family and friends. Being alive, working, smiling, and kind is the best effort you have made for your life.

As I was writing this, the editor said to me, "It's fun to think about being an anteater, living in Central America, having no natural enemies, and being comfortable." ”

I said, "Yes. I want to be a Komodo dragon in Indonesia, basking in the sun every day, having no natural enemies, and looking very fierce. ”

Edit | Wu Qing

Typesetting | Fifi

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