Let Me Eat Your Pancreas

A high school student finds a notebook in a hospital. There is a title on the cover: Living with Dying. It belongs to his classmate Sakura. She has a disease of the pancreas and does not have long; nobody outside her family knows. Now one more person does. Sakura asks him to keep it and offers something in return: she will spend the time she has left with him. He is someone who talks to no one. The two do the things on her list; a journey, a meal, an argument. The narrative also shows twelve years later. Sho Tsukikawa directs. Minami Hamabe, Takumi Kitamura, Shun Oguri and Karen Otomo are in the cast. It is a Japanese production. The source is Yoru Sumino's novel, which was published online first and then in print. An animated adaptation of the same novel was made a year later. The narrative runs on two planes of time; the school years and his later life as a teacher are interleaved. The matter it treats is not the illness but how the remaining time is used; the film keeps the hospital scenes few. The narrative makes a turn and does not give the closing it has led you to expect. The title comes from a line in the book and is explained inside the narrative. The film did well at the Japanese box office and Minami Hamabe became known through it. Its limit is method; the emotional steering is high, the shape familiar, and the narrative long. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese youth drama and melodrama. Who it is not for: the emotional dose is high, it is long, and the ending bitter.