An: Sweet Red Bean Paste — A Life Story

Japan: A Country of Straight Lines

Japan's sensibility differs subtly from Korea's. Last month I visited Kyoto and Osaka, and despite being two very different cities, I noticed a strange common thread between them. One is a modernized, vertical city; the other carries centuries of history.

That common thread is the straight line. Japanese architecture is precise. If Korean architecture holds the beauty of natural curves and harmonious combinations, Japanese architecture possesses a beauty of clean, unadorned straight lines — the tatami mat, sparse and orderly, is a perfect example.

This linear thinking runs through Japanese culture as well. A reverence for principles and etiquette, a deep reluctance to impose on others — these feel less like a celebration of togetherness and more like an insistence on individual uprightness.

Interestingly, this linear sensibility also connects to modernism. You can read Japan's character in the tall towers of Osaka and the neatly partitioned residential blocks. Perhaps it was this same quality that made Japan so receptive to Western culture during the Meiji era.

Cherry Blossoms: The Beauty of Curves

Even in a culture of straight lines, there are exceptions. Cherry blossoms may be the most representative. Flowers in full bloom, petals drifting down — they carry a sense of slowness, of curves. In a country of rigidity, this kind of ease is rare, and that may be precisely why cherry blossoms hold such romantic currency in Japan. It's no coincidence they appear so frequently in Japanese film — they touch that particular nerve.

In An, cherry blossoms stir the emotions. For these isolated protagonists, the blossoms are romance. Petals falling softly carry an aesthetic utterly removed from our frantic, competitive lives.

The Moon: A Quiet Romance

Alongside the cherry blossoms, I believe the moon holds the other great symbolic weight in this film. Tokue and Wakana both share conversations beneath moonlight. The soft glow of the moon and the scattering petals are both metaphor and symbol.

They also carry the film's deeper meditation on life. The moon waxes and wanes; cherry blossoms bloom and fall. Both symbols hold the sorrow of passing and the hope of return. The cherry tree planted after Tokue's death, I think, signals that her way of living will bloom again through Sentaro and Wakana.

An: The Sweet Bean Paste

Dorayaki's soul is the red bean paste — an — and it speaks to how one approaches life. We often say in Korean, "a steamed bun without the filling" — hollow, pointless. Sentaro's preoccupation with the paste for his dorayaki is, I think, a preoccupation with what lies at the center of one's life.

Watching Tokue speak to the beans as she cooks them, talking to them as if they were old friends, makes you reconsider your own relationship to life. The close-up shot of the deep, warm-colored beans made me think: had I ever noticed how beautiful they were?

Hansen's Disease

All three main characters are in some way estranged from the world. Tokue because of the leprosy she contracted in childhood; Sentaro because of a past imprisonment born of a hot temper; and Wakana because of family poverty that makes connection with the world difficult.

There is a scene where Sentaro and Wakana travel to a care facility for Hansen's disease patients to visit Tokue. I had vaguely imagined something like a psychiatric hospital — but the village in the film looked more like a country hamlet. Many trees, warm sunlight, elderly people sitting together, laughing and talking. I, too, had been carrying prejudice.

Of course, the people there carry decades of accumulated loneliness and heartbreak. But the world the film shows us is an extension of the cherry blossoms and the moonlight. Perhaps they are not to be pitied — perhaps they are living a life we should learn from, or even envy.

White Space

The film is full of space — deliberately unhurried. Those who crave spectacle and action will find it dull. Those who need tightly plotted twists will call it thin and predictable. But those who can sit with a slow tempo, who can savor the in-between shots of trees and flowers and birds and the moon, will find a quiet, lingering beauty.

This is also, I think, why the film takes its title from an — red bean paste. It asks whether our lives, so accustomed to the sweet, immediate rush of the instant, have any patience left to savor something that reveals itself slowly.

Life is something to be chewed carefully and appreciated.

The best scene in the film, for me, is the one near the end where Tokue records her final words onto a cassette tape for Sentaro and Wakana. A voice from beyond — patient, unhurried — carrying on.