The best Tsuyoshi Koyama’s drama movies

Japan, 1943, during World War II. Young Suzu leaves her village near Hiroshima to marry and live with her in-laws in Kure, a military harbor. Her creativity to overcome deprivation quickly makes her indispensable at home. Inhabited by an ancestral wisdom, Suzu impregnates the simple gestures of everyday life with poetry and beauty. The many hardships, the loss of loved ones, the frequent air raids of the enemy, nothing alters her enthusiasm…

In 1955 in western Japan, nine-year-old Shinko knows she comes from a family that dates back to over a thousand years. This long genealogy and stories about it feed her daydreams: she invents an imaginary friendship with a young girl in the Japan of a thousand years ago. One day, Kiiko, a timid child from Tokyo, is transferred into Shinko's class at school. Struggling to fit in, she finds a friend in Shinko. They set off together on a magical adventure into a story from ancient history.Adapted from the Takagi Nobuko novel Mai Mai Shinko — winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize —, this animated feature film portrays the relationship of two children linked not only by friendship, but also by that power that transcends eras: imagination. And perhaps it might become reality?

During World War II, Suzu, an eighteen-year-old girl living in Hiroshima, Japan, gets married through arrangement and moves to Kure city where a Japanese major naval base was established. She manages to keep daily life for her new family despite the war situation is getting worse. One day, she is lost the way to home and happens to meet the same age girl Rin in a red-light district. Suzu and Rin have become friends but Rin has some secrets that Suzu is worried about. And moreover, the war does not allow them as is.