“Dear, Watanabe Hiroko. Of course, I do remember him, but only as someone who has same name as me. And probably, It was not a good memory at all. It was happen since our first day in Junior High School.”

I've been meaning to watch this ever since and to be honest, I don't know why I got this on hold for so long. I watched this film for the first time around 12 AM here and finishing it with tears at around 2 AM.

The film starts with a memorial service of Itsuki Fujii who was a fiance of Hiroko Watanabe. As she looks at his late's fiance high school yearbook, she finds out that his late fiance and his parents used to live in Otaru and that their old house was replaced as a highway. Hiroko Watanabe looks at Itsuki Fujii's name on the high school yearbook and decided to mail a letter to the address that she finds in the yearbook knowing it's her late fiance's old address back in his younger years. As she sends a letter, she didn't expect a reply but she did. The story of unraveling the past through exchanging letters and finding out who's sending the letter to her starts the mark of the past that Hiroko Watanabe never knew about Itsuki Fujii.

There's something about Shunji Iwai's film, it wraps around you with wonder with a sense of humility in each frame. The small details of character notion that tell about them and the height of the possible conflict as you prepare yourself to cry or to feel relief after that.

I did cry because of the dialogue and how the scene blends into it. I cry not because it was so sad; it was a cry of reminiscing to the first love that I never had; yes, something along those lines.