‘She Taught Me Serendipity': A quiet reminder not to take people for granted

Japan Times

24-04-2025

Akiko Ohku is best known for directing comedies about lonely single women on the lookout for love, including her 2017 breakout hit, 'Tremble All You Want.' Mayu Matsuoka starred as a nerdy office worker obsessed with ammonite fossils and a teenage crush she never got over.
But as Ohku's latest, 'She Taught Me Serendipity,' shows, her films are not purely rom-coms. When the stories turn serious, their protagonists' pain becomes all too real.
'She Taught Me Serendipity' is the director's first to center on a guy — a quirky, immature college student. But the two women who enter his small world both have strong personalities; he is a weak reed by comparison.
Based on Shusuke Fukutoku's novel and scripted by Ohku, the film is thus an ensemble piece, with each of the three main characters delivering a long, soul-baring monologue. This goes against current commercial scriptwriting practice, which prefers staccato dialogue to cater to shrinking audience attention spans. Far from being soporific rambles, however, these monologues have a force and poignance that go straight to the heart. One in particular is a searing confession of love.
We first see our hero, Toru Konishi (Riku Hagiwara), returning to the campus of his Kyoto university after a long hiatus, carrying an open umbrella on a sunny day without a trace of self-consciousness. He meets his only friend, the goofy Yamane (Kodai Kurosaki), and in the evening goes to his part-time job cleaning a public bath. His co-worker, the bubbly 'Sacchan' (Aoi Ito), is a fellow student as well as the talented lead singer of an amateur band.
But Toru's attention is soon drawn to Hana Sakurada (Yuumi Kawai), a loner who is in one of his lecture classes. He contrives to make her acquaintance and discovers that she more than matches him, quirk for quirk — one of her first questions is whether he has ever turned the TV volume up to the max. She also accepts him for what he is, oddball personality and all. Toru believes he's found his soulmate and literally jumps for joy after they part.
The film's opening scenes are fizzy with comic energy, generated by both Ohku's clever, off-center dialogue and the chemistry between Hagiwara and Kawai. But the story strikes deeper notes early on.
When Toru and Hana go to an aquarium — a standard first date destination in Japanese dramas about young love — they talk about people dear to them who have died. Confessing that he neglected his grandmother as she was sliding into dementia, Toru breaks down in tears. Hana accepts that, too.
Wrapped up in this new relationship, Toru becomes indifferent to and even callous with Sacchan, who is secretly in love with him, and Yamane, who feels disrespected. That is, Toru acts like a jerk, and it blows up in his face.
The film, however, does not make black-and-white judgments about this flawed character. Faced with the consequences of his words and actions, Toru suffers and grows as a person. But better reasons for watching are the stellar performances of Kawai and Ito as the women he hurts.
And with no sentimentality whatsoever, 'She Taught Me Serendipity' illuminates the message implied in its title: Encounters with random strangers can be happy accidents we come to value and cherish. Unless we are self-centered idiots, that is.