Renoir

We accompany eleven-year-old Fuki in the summer of 1987, during the difficult phase of late childhood, overshadowed by her father's terminal cancer and her mother's emotional distance. Her father Keiji commutes between the hospital and home, clinging to his work even though his strength is waning, while her overwhelmed mother Utako tries to maintain both family and career. Fuki faces all this with stoic curiosity. She writes a school essay about her desire to “be an orphan” and experiments with telepathy, hypnosis, and mystical rituals, inspired by television fortune tellers. Her fantasies blur with reality: she “hypnotizes” a grieving neighbor into making a grim confession, imagines her own funeral, and listens to the lonely voices of Tokyo phone dating callers. These idiosyncratic explorations are her attempt to understand death and connect with a seemingly indifferent world. In the process, she is also confronted with her own vulnerability.