There are quite a few movies adapted from Japanese manga (think Western-based graphic novels) but few of them of quality ever reach our shores and when they do, it’s usually blood-soaked, action-based stuff (“Ghost in the Shell,” “Oldboy,” “Alita: Battle Angel”).
“Our Little Sister” is different in that it’s very (surface) tame and comes from a sub-genre called “josei,” which is the Eastern equivalent of a young adult novel geared toward female teens. The Eastern title for this film and its source material is “Umimachi Diary.”
No Storytelling Fat
“Our Little Sister” is full-blown Eastern art house in its approach and methodology. It is spare, depends on a lot of narrative shorthand, and condenses a great deal of material into a small space. The film does what the most successful adaptations of American novellas do: It distills a larger work into a story with no missed beats and all of the emotional high points—it’s a near-perfect movie.
After the death of their divorced-and-remarried father, three 20-something sisters attend his funeral, where they meet their teen half-sister Suzu (Suzu Hirose) for the first time. Beyond polite, mature, and soft-spoken, Suzu is understandably confused about how to interact with the others, a situation made worse because of her fractured relationship with all of the girls’ largely unfit biological mothers.
In what can be described as a calculated whim, eldest sibling Sachi (Haruka Ayase) invites Suzu to move in with all of them: herself, the middle child Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa), and now the no-longer-the-youngest-sibling Chika (Indou Kaho). After a perfectly timed pregnant pause at a train station, Suzu accepts the offer providing the first of many emotional crescendos.
A nurse and the de facto den mother of the bunch, Sachi is also the principal cook and is constantly at odds with Yoshino, a party girl with iffy taste in men and a tendency to imbibe too much.
Lemons to Lemonade
In adapting the manga by Akimi Yoshida, director Hirokazu Kore-eda strikes an adroit balance between joyous and bittersweet. To some degree or another, all the girls harbor resentment toward their parents yet rechannel their anger and sorrow into positive energy that cements their bond even further.Avoiding obvious emotional peaks and valleys, Kore-eda never strays far from a narrative comfort zone that some may perceive as unchallenging and too safe, but it is ultimately the correct tone for the story.
Less of a typical three-act narrative, the screenplay is more of a collection of short films (roughly three dozen of them), which, while presented in chronological order, frequently take on the feel of loosely connected allegories.
Sisterhood of the Eastern Palate
For serious and casual foodies, the film also includes the preparation and consumption of many southern Japanese regional dishes I’d never heard of, including but not limited to whitebait and toast and homemade plum wine. Some batches of this coveted beverage take decades to fully ferment.Viewers looking for the tumult and the often caustic edge of “The Joy Luck Club,” “Catfish in Black Bean Sauce,” or “The Namesake” might be disappointed and could consider “Our Little Sister” to be a little too uneventful, pedestrian, and ho-hum.
Kore-eda’s film could prove to be too safe for a few, but for those seeking a true reflection of real life in a foreign land and want to witness a fractured family repairing itself under unorthodox circumstances, “Our Little Sister” is an uplifting and endearing must-see.
It is a story that transcends region, ethnicity, gender, time frame, and whatever your own definition of “family” might be.
