There isn’t much “plot” in April Story. The bulk of the film follows Uzuki Nireno (played by J-pop singer Takako Matsu) as she settles into Tokyo for the first time, moving from Hokkaido for college. Uzuki’s life becomes a series of half-connections: trying to offer her neighbor gifts or leftovers from dinner, join the fly fishing club in school, and just attempting to make friends in a city far from home. Director Shunji Iwai balances the banality of these interactions with a sense of quiet melodrama, the kind that permeates teenage and young adult life, all of it underscored by soft piano music composed by the director himself.
It’s not until two-thirds of the way through Iwai’s easy-goring film that a sort of narrative begins to reveal itself: Uzuki, it turns out, originally came to this specific university in Tokyo—Musashino—to follow a boy from her high school, Yamazaki (Seiichi Tanabe), who works at a bookstore named Musashino-do. It’s a bit of nominative coincidence that’s common in Iwai’s cinema, like the characters from the same town of opposite genders who share the same name in his debut feature Love Letter. But Love Letter is a big movie trying to say something “big,” as was his follow-up Swallowtail Butterfly. April Story, on the other hand, is Iwai’s attempt to make something small; a short story compared to the novels he writes as the basis for his work.
That smallness, though, contributes to why the climax and “twist” of April Story feel so big. When Uzuki first brushes by Yamazaki at Musashino-do, her high school years flash back, and she sees Yamazaki as he was to her then: a rock star playing guitar in a field, with golden light illuminating his face against the fog. He was bigger than life. Now, he’s just someone that works at a little bookshop in Tokyo.
Uzuki finally manufactures an interaction with him at the counter, buying a book while a poster for their native Hokkaido hangs in the background. He recognizes her. They both smile as he points out she was a year below him. He’s happy to see her, someone he probably wouldn’t have paid attention to back home, because here they’re drops in the sea, because they’re now both alone in the city, and suddenly both alone in it together. This small piece of recognition feels momentous in Iwai’s otherwise incredibly simple film, imbuing everything that came before it—all the wanderings and miscommunications and awkward moments—with a sense of destiny.
It was only in the last week that I learned of Iwai’s interest in education. During a recent Q&A at Metrograph in New York, Iwai brought up how lonely he was as a child, which resulted in bullying and subsequently led to him studying education in school, going so far as to posit his own theory about how the space of academic institutions at all levels creates these fraught and violent social settings. This opened up something for me about Iwai’s cinema—his tenderness towards the naive, the rapidly readjusting social hierarchies of his characters, his interest in loneliness—and made me realize why he often reaches for meaning at the end of his works. Even when interactions seem pointless, they can lead somewhere. It’s why his sentimentality can sneak up, too, transforming a simple drama into a complete tear-jerker at a moment’s notice right at the end as we realize, suddenly, that the whole world is really tied together.