After quite a bit of searching, finally, I caught this film at the nearby Art Cinema. There was a larger crowd than I thought there’d be; half of the theater like me, persons attending alone. This is the kind of crowd I love seeing such a film in, because specific reasons, possibly highly cultivated reasons, almost certainly brought them there.

For me it was Yoo Ah Inat first, but then my reason changed. As I read more about the reception at Cannes, and the origin of the screenplay as based a short story by Haruki Murakami, I began to prepare myself for a theater experience that would be an entirely new to me.

I love to read Murakami just for the moods he sets, and that he brings the reader so well into a sort of suspended space of no…