The center of the world will turn out to be the Outback of Australia, but it will take us a while to get there. Crying Out Love will take us through typhoons, accidents, death, and memories of teen-aged love before the losses of the past can be finally accepted and life can move on. The original novel by Kyoichi Katayama had sold 3 million copies, at that time making it the most popular Japanese novel in post-war history, leading to a manga, this film version, and a TV series that began only months after the movie was released. The movie itself grossed over 8 billion yen, surpassed only by Howl’s Moving Castle in its year and not topped by any live action film until at least 2018. Even the song sung over the end credits became a #1 single. All in all, it was a genuine phenomenon such had not been seen in Japanese movies since Gojira and What Is Your Name?
While Sakutaro and Ritsuko in Tokyo are preparing to move in together as they get married, Ritsuko discovers a sweater she had worn when little. In it is an audio cassette which causes her to inexplicably run out in the rain to buy a cassette player from a young salesman who doesn’t even remember cassettes. When she plays the tape, she suddenly dashes away, leaving Sakutaro a note that she will be back soon after she has done something she needs to do. Sakutaro* is watching weather reports on a bar TV when he suddenly sees Ritsuko almost get hit by a car behind the TV weatherwoman reporting on preparations for a coming typhoon. She is in Takamatsu, his home town, and he immediately flies there to try to find her before the typhoon hits.
Once he is back home, the movie almost forgets Ritsuko as he is suddenly overwhelmed with memories that he had suppressed of his 11th grade summer, when he and Aki first noticed each other. It is 1986 and neither can afford an exciting new Walkman, so they have a contest to who see who can first win one as a prize for a request read on a late night radio show. He wins by making up a sob story about a girl in his class who had leukemia, at which point all the lights start flashing in the mind of the viewer who recognizes that we are about to enter dying-young-lover territory. This will in fact turn out to be true, though we have a golden summer to get through before Aki is hospitalized. During this time, they often use cassettes to communicate about things that are hard to say face to face.
They take a trip to a small island offshore that they think will be a group outing, but Sakutaro’s buddy pulls the boat back out, stranding them overnight. But the expected introduction to sex does not occur, though they find a camera in an abandoned building which will later become significant. Aki is hospitalized on their return and once school starts again, an elementary school girl who is visiting her mother in the hospital begins to carry the cassettes back and forth and also has the film developed by Sakutaro’s uncle, the town photographer. And at last we find how Ritsuko fits into this. She was carrying Aki’s last cassette when she was herself hit by a car and has now realized that it should be delivered, though she does not know who the recipient should be and because of her own accident did not know that the older girl had died. She almost leaves it in the same shoe locker at school, but realizes that would be senseless and goes to the photographer’s place where she sees a picture he took of Aki and Sakutaro and realizes at last that he is the boy who should get the tape.
When Aki had seen the developed photographs, they were of Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) which she believes must be the center of the universe. And so we come to the last tape, to Sakuturo’s attempt to take Aki to Australia in the middle of another typhoon, to the title, and to Sakutaro’s and Ritsuko’s trip to Australia to scatter ashes and put the past to rest for both of them.
Crying Out Love might certainly qualify as a three-hankie movie (or four, or five), which is not for everyone’s taste, but Isao Yukisada seems to be trying not to openly manipulate audience feelings. Whatever tears may flow from such a trite movie situation, the presentation rarely seems to be trying to force them out of the audience in the way that, for example, Poppoya did. We shift back and forth in time, and the music score is quite restrained, often disappearing at the most tear-jerking moments.
Though it would be easy to dismiss Crying Out Love as simply pandering to a pre-sold audience, historically significant only because of its popularity, it is a surprisingly good movie. Only in the attempt of the kids to sneak out of the hospital and fly off to Australia, even in the middle of a typhoon, does it seem to be pushing the envelope too far, but that was certainly part of the success of the novel and could not have been dropped out. In the flashbacks, we have a vivid and generally realistic depiction of teen-aged love that can rank alongside almost any other movie on such a topic, with all its confusions and intensity on full view.
As Aki, Masama Nagasawa is the very personification of the 16-year-old dream girl for almost any society – pretty but not sexy, athletic, spritely, intelligent, chaste, self-sufficient, and far more emotionally developed than the young Sakutaro (Mirai Miriyama), as girls usually are at this age. Even so, Aki is very real and certainly more sensitive than was the similar Tsugumi, to point to another beautiful-teen-dies-young movie. As the adult Sakutaro, Takao Osawa has little more to do than wander around his home town listening to the old tapes he found at his home, just as Ko Shibasaki is an enigma defined mostly by her limp until a powerful scene between the two at the airport during their own typhoon.
Oddly enough, it is not a “women’s picture” in the traditional sense, such as What Is Your Name? It is not about a woman sacrificing true love for the sake of children or family, nor is it really really a movie about a sad death of a young person. Rather, it is about coming to grips with the death of loved ones and learning to move on. In that sense it is much closer to Yukisada’s own Open House or to Kumai’s Deep River than to Tsugumi or to His Motorbike, Her Island. It is sometimes hard to see that, due to its immense popularity and a critical (and personal) tendency to dismiss movies that bring out the audience’s tears.
* Sakutaro is a fairly unusual name, given to the boy by his father who admired the work of Sakutaro Hagiwara, the poet who introduced free verse to Japan, and there is a running joke of sorts in which people ask him about his odd name and neither he nor anyone else he tells can remember anything Hagiwara wrote.
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