It’s always a pleasant surprise to stumble upon an unexpectedly interesting book or piece of work. I think everyone has had that experience.
Like when you casually walk into a bookstore and find a book that feels like fate.
These days, I hardly see bookstores anymore. Still, I make an effort to visit the few that remain because you never know when you’ll encounter a surprising book.
In urban areas, bookstores like Tsutaya in Japan and Kinokuniya in Singapore are still hanging in there, and I genuinely want to cheer them on.
Hang in there, bookstores! Don’t let Amazon win!
Now, today’s story isn’t about a book but rather an unexpected encounter with an interesting movie.
I came across this movie during my flight from Singapore to Japan.
When you’re on a flight that lasts six hours, it’s become a habit for me to download a drama from Netflix onto my phone to watch, which has become a little source of joy.
However, this time, I didn’t have the luxury of time to download anything beforehand, so I boarded the plane with nothing to watch and decided to check out the in-flight entertainment instead.
While browsing through the list of recommended movies, I was looking for something good.
But honestly, nothing caught my interest. I was probably just tired. Watching a movie takes energy, too.
Thinking that English audio would be particularly tiring, I started looking for movies with Japanese audio. That’s when I stumbled upon a movie clearly about “samurai” just from the thumbnail.
From the thumbnail, it looked like it would be absolutely boring, but since I was feeling a bit restless, I thought I’d start it up and maybe doze off while watching this seemingly uninteresting movie.
As I began watching, it turned out to be just as I expected—really cliché with no freshness. Boring.
The plot was about a samurai from the late Edo period time-slipping into modern times. I thought, how many times have they done this movie? I was just casually watching, thinking it really didn’t look interesting at all.
Plus, the Japanese spoken by the Aizu samurai was so heavily accented that, honestly, even I, as a Japanese person, had trouble understanding some parts. It was tiring. But if I gave up on trying to understand the accented Japanese, it surprisingly didn’t tire my brain too much.
As I waited for sleepiness to kick in, I found myself watching the movie in a daze, and it seemed the setting was a movie village in Uzumasa, Kyoto. It felt familiar.
Having visited the movie village multiple times, I started to feel nostalgic, and even though the movie wasn’t great, positive feelings began to bubble up, gradually pulling me in.
I won’t go into details to avoid spoilers, but it felt like I was getting a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a period drama (a general term for samurai dramas set in the Edo period), and I was intrigued to see how the behind-the-scenes of period dramas worked! It was fantastic and exceeded my expectations. From the middle onward, it turned out to be quite a masterpiece.
Before I knew it, my sleepiness had vanished, and I was glued to the screen.
Even as an action movie, the samurai’s swordplay was impressive, and I found myself thinking, “Wait, this is actually pretty entertaining?!” Wow, the swordsmanship is so cool!
By the end, there were some plot threads that tied up nicely, and I definitely want to recommend watching it all the way through the credits.
“侍タイムスリッパー” (English title: A Samurai in Time)