Lost Paradise

Yoshimitsu Morita's 1997 film is adapted from Junichi Watanabe's novel of the same name. Kuki is a middle-aged newspaperman who has been pushed to the side at work and regrets having given his life to it. Rinko is inside an unhappy marriage. What starts between them brings each of them the thing their own lives no longer hold, and it steadily pushes everything else out of the frame. The film neither applauds the affair nor punishes it; it watches two people lose the world around them one piece at a time. Koji Yakusho and Hitomi Kuroki star. The novel sold in the millions in Japan and the film became one of the most talked-about releases of its year.