The Long Goodbye: Crying and Moving Forward

Author: Wu Mei

"A 7-year farewell to my father whose memories are fading, a tearful family affection work" is a recommendation of the japanese movie "The Long Farewell" in the theater. A very seductive sentence that made me choose it among several movies that were released that day.

However, it is not only the relatives who have learned that their father has Alzheimer's disease, from shock to acceptance, escort, reluctance, and farewell.

Like every time I watched a movie, this time I waited until the cast members' subtitles were all played before I got up and left the screening room. So I read that in the movie, Alzheimer's patient Yamazaki Nu was ranked 4th. That's right, "The Long Goodbye" borrows 7 years of dad's memory slowly disappearing, and discusses with the audience the question: should women in less perfect marriages choose to quit or hide it to the end?

Yu Aoi, who ranks first in the cast list, is Fumi, the father's youngest daughter in the movie. In "The Long Farewell", where does Aoi Yu's role surpass her mother? Director Nakano Mitaka was the number one when she was the number one, why? Because, Fumi endorses the marriage concept of most young people today.

Fumi's first scene is to look at the caller ID and stuff her mobile phone into her pocket, and Fumi will break up with her boyfriend who is going back to Hokkaido to grow potatoes. So, how did Nakano Mitsota explain the reason for the breakup of this couple? Watching her boyfriend pour thick ketchup on her elaborate omelet, Fumi felt incredible: How can the omelet I make go with ketchup? Boyfriend replied: I've been thinking for a long time about pouring thick ketchup on the omelet you made for me. After taking a bite of the tomato sauce-poured omelet, he grinned, "I've left when you get home from work." Fumi had to tighten her lips and go out to work, leaving behind a once-strong emotion. There are not many words, but the attitude of Fumi's generation to marriage is vividly expressed.

It is easy to love each other and difficult to keep each other, especially when love enters the daily life of chai rice oil and salt, it becomes difficult to stay together. What destroyed Fumi's relationship? It's nothing more than the trivial matter of pouring ketchup on an omelet. When encountering such a small sesame thing that cannot be on the table but makes people feel diaphragm, how will the older generation of women in Bifme solve it? In Fumi's view, that's their business, asking Fumi to do the multiple choice questions, preferring to be different and wide, even if she knows how lonely the empty window period of feelings is.

Behind Yu Aoi on the cast list is Yuko Takeuchi, the actor of Mari, the eldest daughter of her father. Although Mari is not a few years older than Fumi, the full-time wife who moved to the United States with her husband, a biologist who studies fish, Nakano Tsutomu also explains how alienated the Japanese woman is from the United States in just one scene: Mari is standing by the stove, and the American wife of the guests kindly comes to Mari, praises her cooking level, and asks how the egg rolls in the pot are made. Ma Li's English was simply not enough to deal with the Problem of the Americans, so he had to dance with his hands, and as a result, the egg rolls in the pot were mushy, causing Ma Li to secretly hurt at the black egg rolls.

What makes Mari feel depressed is just the pasty omelet! The husband, who is busy with fish research, always waits until it is dark every day to enter the house, and Ma Li, who does not speak English, has no friends, and only when his son comes home from school can he wait for someone who can talk to him. "Speak Japanese at home," Mari prescribes for sons, but how can a son who quickly integrates into American society act according to his mother's wishes? As a result, the differences between mother and son became more and more different, and finally, they lived under a roof, like strangers. Dad got Alzheimer's disease and gave Mari the chance to fly back to Japan over long distances. The state of her father did worry Mari, however, the days when she returned to Japan to return to her mother and sister through her father's illness were the most comfortable days for Mari, and she looked at her mother's way of taking care of her father wholeheartedly, and she couldn't help but wonder about her marriage: Why can't she have a happy marriage like her mother?

If we don't look at the cast list, we forget that this role played by Tomoko Matsubara has her own name called Higashi Yasuko, and she has the longest appearance in the whole movie, and there is a title that replaces her name, Mom.

After Dad's illness entered the third year, he always shouted that he wanted to go back to his hometown when he was occasionally awake. Knowing that this might be the last time in his life that dad would return to his hometown, his mother made up his mind to travel a long way with his two daughters and accompany him back to the place where he grew up. There, the grass and trees were still the same as in the old days, and my mother suddenly remembered the past when she knew her father in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the scene when she came here with her father to meet her in-laws for the first time. And Dad? He would just sit under the eaves of the old house and stare into the distance, occasionally, eating a piece of watermelon prepared for him by his nephew.

The past and the current situation, how can you not let your mother feel a thousand emotions? She remembered how gentle she had been when she agreed to marry this man! More than 40 years later, because of the disease, this man's food and drink had to be taken care of by her. Listening to their mother's feelings, the daughters couldn't help but think of their father in their memories, the father who was the principal of the middle school, who always seemed to be absent from their family life, always going out early every day, and most of them came home after nightfall. Even when they returned home, their dads would always hide in the study and hold a Natsume solitaire or a large dictionary, so it was really difficult to tell one or two stories about the time that dad spent with them. Fumi did not say, but Fumi's expression tells us that what happiness is it for her mother to marry such a man who is bent on work and completely disregards family life? Mari didn't say anything, but the anxiety in her heart was probably even fiercer than that of her sister: her husband, like his father, only knew how to spend time with his fish day and night, how could he not accept such a marriage like his mother?

If it weren't for the sudden retinal detachment of her mother's right eye, Fumi and Mari probably would never have known that their parents' seemingly quiet marriage was something that their mother had given up in exchange for something.

After her mother was admitted to the hospital, Fumi went home to take care of her father instead of her mother, and she knew that three meals a day were not prepared in front of her father, and she had to coax her father to eat enough; it seemed that his father who was quietly reading was not necessarily in a safe state, and he would tear off the pages and stuff them into his mouth. What's more troublesome is that dad has become so incapacitated that she can't control defecation, and Fumi is always ready to replace her pants for her father... "I really can't figure out how my mother alone did all these things," Fumi said to her sister who was far away in the United States. Ma Li, who is trapped in a fragmented family life, also wants to ask her mother how her mother, who has entered the old age, has taken on the heavy responsibility of taking care of patients with her own strength.

The answer is all in the song that Mom sang when she said goodbye to Dad: Go forward bravely / Don't let the tears fall / Remember the spring days / A lonely night alone / Walk forward while crying...

The reason we only heard my mother's gentle words was because she left her tears in the middle of the night when she was alone. After saying goodbye to their father, Fumi and Mari surround their mothers and recall the scene of their father taking three umbrellas to the playground to greet them. (Wu Mei)