
So I randomly saw the movie based off of Mitsuyo Kakuta(角田 光代)’s What is Love (愛はなんだ) and fell in love with the atmosphere of the movie. I have never took an interest in directors before and usually know nothing about them, but for the first time I can say that I am a fan of director and his name is Imaizumi Rikiya(今泉力哉)!
I started watching other movies he has created and found them equally as enjoyable.
I didn’t even realize that What is Love was based off a book until I saw Inhae’s review on it over on her blog, Inside that Japanese Book. I looked more into the author Mitsuyo Kakuta(角田 光代) and she seemed really interesting and has written some award winning stuff so I decided to buy the novel at Kinokuniya’s USA online store for $8.99.
Story review:
Romantic Horror seems to be the best way to describe this type of story.
This is the story of Teruko Yamada and her process of slowly destroying her life over her obsession with Mamoru Tanaka. Since the day she met him at a friends party, she started to lose touch with everything else. Anything unrelated to Mamoru was put in the ‘I don’t care pile’ and left to rot away. Her work performance started to suffer. The coworkers that she used to get along with grew distant as she stopped answering phone calls and started coming into work late. But that was okay with Teruko! She and Mamoru were doing great from her point of view. They weren’t official, but they were hanging out, having fun, and she knew things were going somewhere. He even suggested that she quit her job so that means he was thinking about marriage, right? She started to live the house wife life and take care of all of Mamoru’s needs. Until he started to feel overwhelmed with Teruko and started to pull away.
Continue reading “Japanese Novel Review: 愛はなんだ What is Love by Mitsuyo Kakuta(角田 光代)”