like a flowing river

... a japanese movie i watched in the afternoon on tv.

the cast was all made up of old men and women.. who surprisingly... looked pretty... good...esp the male and female lead. the lady aged gracefully and is everything i wanna be when i'm 60. one look at the male lead.. and you know he was eye-candy when he's younger. the only young person around in the whole show was hideaki takizawa... i was so surprised... and he looked so good! the first scene which he appeared as akira...it was raining and it was the funeral of his sister.. so it was an all-black affair.. and he held on to his sister's picture... and walked through the rain... he looked up to the female lead, who was sitting in the bus with such a look that just oozed of pain and sadness.

i nearly died.

i thought it was going to be bloody boring. but surprise surprise... i ended with tears in my eyes.... on my face, to be exact. it's about yuriko ( this aged lady) who suddenly gave up everything in tokyo to go back to this old village. being free-spirited, the old villagers there didn't quite liked her at first... after all ... she wore bright colours ( another character , yuki said old people cannot and should not wear red.) and was from tokyo ( they think tokyo's very warped...after all ... akira's sister went to tokyo and ended up dead... think she met some unpleasant stuffs while there...). but eventually she managed to make everyone change their views about growing old and coping with it.

we should just do what we want, what we wish.

but little known to them...yuriko is suffering from cancer and is in the terminal stage...she only has three months left and had come back specially to apologize. that's all because sixty years ago, her father, the head of the fishermen in that village, made everyone go out to sea on a stormy night...knowing that if they do not go out to sea, they will lose their means of livelihood. in the end... no one came back from that fateful night. all the villagers put the blame on yuriko and her mother and they had to leave. yuriko was regretful that she could not say goodbye to her friends then so she came back.

at first... some of them couldn't accept her and was pretty hostile but in the end... they eventually came to terms with it and they all became good friends again. too bad yuriko later died from her illness and she shot a video for them.. telling them all about how she was feeling through the years..

i believe if we don't say "goodbye", we'll always meet again. now i can say goodbye to all of you.

i cried at some of the parts...it just tug at your heartstrings and you couldn't help it. akira didn't come out much... but i guess his existence is to show that everyone.. anyone can have their own problems, no matter what they are. he was hesitant about going to america to learn photography...something which he really wanted to do. yuriko encouraged him to go for it and then he went to pursue his dreams.

when i come back in the summer next year, i'll take your picture in front of the sakura tree.

but he doesn't know she's dying. and it was really sad at this part.

well.. i guess that's what the whole thing is trying to say... a song which yuriko sang in her video for her friends goes....life is like the river flowing...it won't stop...

my river...is twisted, warped and stormy. just like some choppy sea. i know i'm making this all up. my problems are all self-induced and i'm drowning in my own... paranoia and insecurity. i'm just making my own life miserable. i don't enjoy doing this but this is a habit that's hard to break. sometimes... i wonder... what's my problems compared to others?

you can't compare happiness

yeah then surely i can compare pain.. right? my pain...whether self-inflicted or from outer forces....are topping the pain meters. i can drown in my own blood that's draining from my heart. it gushes out and slaps me in the face...telling me to go to hell.

to hell it shall be then.

listening to: shinhwa -- deep sorrow