Released in 1995, Love Letters is based on Shunji Iwai's original novel of the same name. When novels and films came out in the same year, they immediately set off a "love letter fever" throughout Asia. Countless young men and women are deeply attracted by the prose poetic love narrative and the quiet and long aesthetic pictures in the film. The male and female protagonists of the film, Takashi Kashiwara and Miho Nakayama, have become the ideal companions in the hearts of countless young people who are stirred by spring.
Of course, director Shunji Iwai's "Love Letter" can achieve such a huge success, and it is also inseparable from its inheritance of Japan's unique aesthetic style. Due to Japan's location in the Pacific Rim volcanic seismic belt, the history of natural disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis, and the dissipation of countless lives like flying feathers has also given the Yamato nation a very unique experience and way of speaking about death.
That is, the "culture of sadness" with aesthetic concepts such as material mourning and mysterious mystery as the core. This awareness of being able to contemplate and grasp the beauty of the things hidden behind the disappearance of life can be said to be quietly integrated into the lines, plot and pictures of the entire film.
A love letter to heaven
The story of the entire film begins with a love letter. Hiroko Watanabe still remembers her fiancé Fujii on the third anniversary of his death. She lay alone in the snow with her eyes closed to mourn her fiancé, and with a quick breath, she felt that the pain of losing a loved one was not alleviated by the loss of time.
Although Fujii's parents mourned their son's death, in fact, in the depths of their hearts, they only wanted to get rid of the grief of the white-haired man sending the black-haired person as soon as possible. On the day of his death, his father beckoned his relatives and friends to come together to drink Kikuhara sake as a tribute after mourning, but in fact he just wanted to take the opportunity to get drunk. The mother also left the cemetery early in Hiroko's car on the pretext of a headache, in fact she just wanted to stay away from her alcoholic husband.
Hiroko, who came to the house with her mother-in-law, once again came to the room where her fiancé was alive, and she looked around the walls full of photos and paintings, the supported easels and the neatly arranged bookshelves, and the snowflakes outside the white gauze curtains by the window did not fall slowly, feeling as if Fujii had just left here.
Her mother drew from the bookshelf a national high school graduation commemorative book for Hiroko to see what Fujii looked like when she was a teenager. Hiroko turned to the page of the graduation group photo, and the young Fujii's heroic eyebrows were full of untamed, and even the position of his head was different, it was set in an oval frame suspended above the heads of the classmates, like a ghost.
The mother explained that this was because Fujii had transferred before graduation and was unable to catch up with the graduation group photo. Although her mother said that the house where Fujii lived when she went to school in Otaru has now been demolished and turned into a highway, Hiroko still secretly writes down the address on her wrist when her mother-in-law brings her cake.
Hiroko must have done this for two reasons, on the one hand, her curiosity about Fujii as a teenager, and on the other hand, from her romantic attachment as a woman—Fujii's soul must have returned to the place where he once lived and waited for him. So, he sent his first letter to his fiancé according to the address in the memorial book: Fujii Tree, how are you? I am fine.
The letter was sent to the home of another female fujii tree in Otaru, which aroused her curiosity, she did not have a friend in Kobe, how could it be that suddenly a Miss Watanabe Hiroko wrote to her to send greetings? This aroused Fujii's curiosity, so she wrote a reply according to the address she sent, saying that she was fine but had recently caught some cold, and then quickly received a greeting reply and a week's worth of cold medicine wrapped in a small paper package.
In this way, the two strangers began to communicate with each other. It's just that they are not talking to the person they imagined, and Hiroko clings to her romantic fantasies, thinking that she is talking to the heaven Fujii tree. Fujii, on the other hand, thinks she is communicating with a strange woman named Hiroko who lives in Kobe.
The story unfolds through this love letter sent to the other shore.
Second, the secret of twin flowers
Akiba is a good friend of Akira Fujii and Hiroko, a glass art craftsman. On the day the three of them met, the male Fujii turned against the previous Mune in front of the girl, preemptively showed favor to Hiroko and confessed, and Hiroko also accepted the love of the male Fujii and became his fiancée.
Akibamoto also had a crush on Hiroko when he first met her, and he always buried this love deep in his heart.
Later, once the male Fujii, Akiba and a group of friends went to climb the mountain, how to expect that there was a mountain disaster in the middle, and the male Fujii unfortunately died. After his sudden death, he left his fiancée Hiroko and his friend Akiba to slowly digest the grief of losing his lover and friend. At this time, Qiu Ye's deeply buried love dared to gradually surface, and the two gradually came together.
Three years after the death of her ex-fiancé, Hiroko once again received a so-called "reply from heaven", which made Akiba feel mixed feelings for a while. On the one hand, the man's reason told him that this letter could never have been the so-called "letter from heaven" sent by Fujii's ghost.
On the other hand, he is furious that Hiroko still holds the expectation of communicating with the male Fujii, believing that the letter endangers his current relationship with Hiroko. So he decided to find out the truth behind the letter.
Akiha then writes a letter in Hiroko's tone, asking the female Fujii tree for proof that she is Fujii tree. After receiving this letter, the female Fujii Shu felt very puzzled, obviously you sent me a letter without a head at the beginning, why do you want me to prove that "I am myself" now.
She had planned to ignore the incident, but at the suggestion of her colleagues, she sent a forged copy of her driver's license with a photo of herself, hoping to put an end to the matter.
When Akiba, who received the letter, saw that this Fujii tree turned out to be a girl, she immediately turned from worry to joy, and even encouraged Hiroko to visit this "female Fujii tree" together in Otaru, and apologized for her previous rashness. The two people who came to Otaru passed by this "female Fujii Tree" several times because of various coincidences.
The two followed the address on the letter to find her home, but only her grandfather was at home, so Hiroko left a letter in the mailbox at the door, indicating that she had written to find out about her fiancé Fujii Tree.
Shunji Iwai's design here is extremely ingenious, and he closely links three people and two relationships through the similarity and dislocation of names and appearances and serves as the core of the entire film. Among them, the two "Fujii Trees" with the same name, a man and a woman, were classmates in the middle school period, and the male Fujii among them also had a hazy good feeling for the female Fujii.
And Hiroko, who looks very similar to the female Fujii tree, is the fiancée of the male Fujii tree after she became an adult, although in Hiroko's recollection, the male Fujii tree first showed her kindness, but when she proposed marriage, it was Hiroko who dramatically said the words "Let's get married", and then the male Fujii tree only replied with one word "good".
In other words, throughout the film there are two pairs of twin relationships "male Fujii tree - female Fujii tree" (the name is similar) and "Watanabe Hiroko - female Fujii tree" (similar appearance). The coincidence of the name allows Hiroko Watanabe's letter to be mistakenly sent to the home of her fiancé's classmate, which becomes a key element in driving the plot forward.
The coincidence in appearance symbolizes that the male Fujii tree will fall in love with the "female Fujii tree" and Watanabe Hiroko because of their common characteristics that attract him. At the same time, it also provides sufficient and reasonable motivation for Hiroko's insistence on exploring whether her fiancé pursued herself later because she liked a female Fujii Tree who looked similar to herself in junior high school.
The similarity of name and appearance, which are both extremely low probability in daily life, under the unique design of director Shunji Iwai, is not only not obtrusive but also becomes a key element to promote the development of the plot, presumably also an important reason why "Love Letter" has become a classic.
3. Reconciliation with Death
Although "Love Letters" is famous for its aesthetic and pure love style, a more core theme that runs through the whole article is actually death. The film begins with a ceremony to commemorate the three-year-old male Fujii tree, and as a key clue to the love letter, it is a letter sent by Hiroko to the world on the other side. Fujii Shu, the daughter who received the letter by mistake, also experienced the grief of her father's death in the middle school period. It can be said that in the life trajectory of each protagonist in the film, it has been branded with an indelible mark of death.
They may be like Hiroko Watanabe, confined to the grief of death; like the parents of the male Fujii tree, they are struggling to get out of the grief; like the female Fujii tree, they are too young to appreciate the despair of the absoluteness of death; or like Akiba, they have gained new emotional opportunities because of the death of their friends.
Either way, they are struggling with death, and they want to find a way to reconcile the rest of their lives with death. "Reconciliation with death" is also an important theme that director Shunji Iwai focuses on in the film.
The appearance of the male Fujii tree after adulthood has never appeared in the whole film, he has existed as a ghost since the beginning of the movie, he does not exist in the real time and space, but in the mouths of family, friends, lovers and memories, he is incomparably vivid and vivid. The life that has passed is eternally born in the intersection of the memories of the living.
Three years after her fiancé's death, Hiroko still remembers him because he still has too many secrets to answer. Therefore, in her correspondence with the female Fujii tree, Hiroko gradually learns about the fiancé's Kunisaka era, which is both an answer to her inner doubts and a process of saying goodbye to him.
In the process of communicating with the female Fujii tree, the fragments of the male Fujii Tree's Kunishō era are gradually pieced together through letters. Here Shunji Iwai distinguishes between reality time and space and memory time and space through differences in seasons. When Hiroko communicates with the female Fujii tree, it is winter, and it is snowing heavily all day.
In the middle school time recalled by the female Fujii tree, it was always a sunny summer. As Proust said in the book "Remembrance of the Lost Water Years" that the male Fujii Tree once borrowed repeatedly in the film, "The best time is always the time in memory." ”
It turned out that on the first day of enrollment, the two had become the object of ridicule by the surrounding classmates because of the same name, and the two were always "tied together" out of their own will. For example, when two people are on duty, they draw a heart between the names of the two people.
Also, when the class voted collectively, everyone seemed to have agreed to let two people be elected as the librarian with a high vote at the same time, responsible for sorting out and returning the books. Although the male Fujii tree was always lazy and absent from work during his tenure as the head of the book department, the beautiful picture of the sword-eyed and long-sighted teenager quietly reading a book by the window where the curtain fluttered was forever imprinted in the depths of the female Fujii tree.
Another time, the two people's English test papers happened to be wrong, and the male Fujii tree knew that the female Fujii tree was waiting for her to change the paper in the carport, but she deliberately dragged it until dark to delay the appearance, just so that the students around them who did not gossip disturbed them. Then, he pretended to carefully compare the two men's examination papers under the headlights of the female Fujii handshake, and spent a little time with the female Fujii for a while.
Also, Fujii recalls, once he deliberately put a paper bag on his head while riding to school and then walked away. All of the above is enough to show that the male Fujii tree did have a secret affection for the female Fujii in the middle school era.
Looking back now, the reason why the male Fujii always wanted to create an environment where he and the female Fujii were alone was not because he was shy, but because of his unruly attitude and did not want his classmates to know that he liked the female Fujii under their coaxing.
In the process of Hiroko's correspondence with the female Fujii, Hiroko became more and more convinced of her own speculations, the male Fujii was indeed in love with himself at first sight because his appearance was very similar to the female Fujii he liked at that time, and the female Fujii also tasted the hidden feelings of this annoying "male Fujii" in the Middle Ages in the Middle Ages.
In the end, after learning about her fiancé's junior high school era, Hiroko finally let go of her feelings and shouted a sentence to the mountain, "How are you?" I am fine! "Complete the final goodbye to old love."
In addition to this main line of memories of the male Fujii tree, the film also has a dark line around the female Fujii tree, that is, the death of her father in her junior high school. In the real time and space, the increasing symptoms of the female Fujii tree's cold are inexplicably in line with the old incident that her father eventually died of pneumonia due to a cold.
After his father fell seriously ill, his grandfather carried him to the hospital, but eventually died because of his illness. Therefore, although the mother did not say it, she had been complaining deeply that Grandpa insisted on carrying her husband to the hospital instead of waiting for an ambulance, and Grandpa had always blamed himself deeply for not being able to save his son from the brink of death.
The same thing happened again in the female Fujii Tree, who had been ignoring her illness because she had previously focused all her attention on communicating with Hiroko. Finally, one night suddenly fainted.
Grandpa once again carried his seriously ill granddaughter on his back and ran to the hospital in the snow and wind, and finally the female Fujii was rescued, and Grandpa was so tired that he collapsed on the hospital bed. This time, through the desperate running of his life, the grandfather resolved his daughter-in-law's resentment towards himself and realized the consolation of his dead son.