Sky of Love

Mika has just started high school. Her phone number gets passed around and she begins texting someone she does not know. He is Hiro, known as one of the most troublesome students in the school, which surprises her when she finds out. He is not what he appears. The relationship begins and heavy things follow one after another: jealousy, violence, loss and an illness. Natsuki Imai directs. Yui Aragaki plays Mika and Haruma Miura plays Hiro. The source is a mobile phone novel. Koizora was written on a phone and published in instalments in Japan, reaching millions of readers; the author wrote as Mika and the story was said to be true. The format created a new wave of publishing in Japan at the time. The film's success comes from that: the readers of the book went to the cinema and it became one of the highest grossing Japanese films of its year. The narrative never lowers the emotional pitch. Every section ends in a catastrophe and the film openly sets out to make the audience cry. The hardest passage is the violence in the middle of the relationship, and the film does not skate over it. Who it is for: viewers curious about Japanese teen melodrama and the mobile novel generation. Who it is not for: the emotional manipulation is very plain, the events pile up, and the characters' decisions are often unconvincing.