My Rainy Days

My Rainy Days (2009) is adapted from a mobile phone novel, and that detail is more interesting than the film. In mid 2000s Japan a genre called keitai shōsetsu took off: novels written on phones, read on phones, published in instalments. The sentences are short and the line breaks frequent, because they are written for a small screen. Tenshi no Koi, the source here, had been read thirteen million times by 2009. The story: seventeen year old Rio lives by seeing older men with money, and does it to fill a gap. She meets Kouki, who teaches at a university, and feels something for the first time. Then it turns out both of them are carrying a secret. The film carries every trait of its source: emotions are stated out loud, coincidences pile up, and the last act is heavy. It is not a literary work and does not try to be. Nozomi Sasaki was known as a model and this was her first lead. It is also director Yuri Kanchiku's first film. For anyone who wants to see what Japanese youth melodrama looked like at that moment it is a good specimen; these films sell heavily in Japan and are barely known outside it. It runs 119 minutes. Good for: Japanese melodrama, first love stories, and films designed to make you cry. Less good for: a relationship between an adult and a minor sits at the centre and the film does not interrogate it enough. There is also terminal illness.