SHUNJI IWAI: LOVE LETTER (1995) JAPAN CUTS 2025

Love and loss and having the same name

Love Letter, which is from thirty years ago, hasn't really dated any more than it was when it came out. It is a swoony delight, without actually having much swooning. It does have a granddad who wants to carry his child on his back to the hospital in a snowstorm. The main couple are not both admitting they are a couple. The central trope is doomed doubling: the pairing of two people of opposite sexes who have the same name, Fujii Itsuki, and one, the guy, dies tragically young in a climbing accident.

It's nice to have a story where the "love letter" actually is a letter, of the old kind, in fact an exchange of them, some typed and the others handwritten.r It starts when Hiroko Watanabe (Miho Nakayama), who lives in Kobe, decides at the two-year anniversary of his death in a climnbing accident to write a letter to her deceased fiancé Itsuki Fujii, using an old addrtess of his that she finds. Imagine her surprise when she gets an answer. Her letter has reached a female librarian with the same name, Itsuki Fujii, of whom the same-name Itsuki, Hiroko's Itsuki, this Itsuki also has memories because they were in schoiol together and for three years in the same class, much to the she-Itsuki's distress, because they were endlessly teased by the other students for their identical names.

Far fetched, you may say. But young people only waht a shared conceit as a fresh framework on which to hang thoughts about youth, memory, loss, and love. Shared letters uncover memories from school of the lost Itsuki.

Framed within the back-and-forth correspondence of heartbroken Hiroko and librarian Itsuki—a widowed fiancée and the former classmate of her deceased lover (Miho Nakayama in dual roles)—Love Letter focuses on buried recollections as their letters uncover Itsuki’s school-age memories of Hiroko’s dead fiancé. The "soft-focus lyricism" has been slightly exaggerated. Some of these are memories of junior high school, after all. But we have to believe them when they say, with experience, that Iwai's breakthrough captured the hearts of a generation and "the late Miho Nakayama’s eternal mountainside cry 'O genki desu ka?'

The feature film debut of the 1990s auteur Shunji Iwa, some get to revisit it and the rest of us to experience it for the first time.

Love Letter, 117 min., Toronto Sept. 8, 1995. Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Japan Cuts series July 10-20, 2025.

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