Just Only Love, and the Claim She Gave Up to Stay Near Him

It is late, and Teruko has only just got home when the phone rings. It is Mamoru. He has a cold. If she is on her way home, he says, could she pick something up for him? She is already home. She says she is still out. She fills a shopping bag, runs to his flat and makes him a pot of miso-stewed udon, and some time after midnight he asks whether she would mind heading home now. She goes.

What follows discusses the whole film, its ending included. That first small lie holds all of it. She was already home; she says she is still out, so that running to him will look like a detour rather than a sprint. It is a lie that makes her love look smaller than it is. Two hours later, near the end, comes another lie of exactly that kind, told in her own flat, and the distance between the first lie and the last is what this essay sets out to measure.

Yamada Teruko is twenty-eight, and since the night she met Tanaka Mamoru she has fitted her whole life around him. She loses her job over it and counts the loss as freedom. Her oldest friend tells her to stop. The usual description of a woman like this writes itself: no pride, no sense, a cautionary tale with good jokes. This essay thinks that description gets her exactly wrong. Count what Teruko gives up over the course of the film and you have a list of claims: the claim to be his girlfriend, the claim to be loved back, and at the very end the claim to have loved him at all. Count what she never gives up and you have one thing. Being near him.

Beside her the film sets a young man who makes the opposite trade. Nakahara loves Teruko’s friend Yoko the way Teruko loves Mamoru, and the two of them recognise each other at once. He is the first to walk away, and what he keeps is the one thing Teruko surrenders: the right to say, out loud, that he loves her. The film does not tell us which of them chose better. Its Japanese title, Ai ga nanda, can be heard as a question, what is love, or as a shrug, love, so what, and the film never settles which. Neither will this essay.

The facts, once. Just Only Love was directed by Imaizumi Rikiya from a screenplay he wrote with Sawai Kaori, adapted from the 2003 novel of the same name by the Naoki Prize-winning writer Kakuta Mitsuyo. Kishii Yukino plays Teruko and Narita Ryo plays Mamoru, with Fukagawa Mai as Yoko, Wakaba Ryuya as Nakahara and Eguchi Noriko as Sumire. It runs 123 minutes. It was first shown in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October 2018 and opened in Japanese cinemas, distributed by Elephant House, on 19 April 2019. Kishii is on screen for almost all of it; the director has said there are only two or three scenes she is not in.

It was a small film that did not stay small. It opened in seventy-two cinemas. Over the ten-day Golden Week holiday that spring, screenings at its main cinema, Theatre Shinjuku, sold out day after day, to audiences made up mostly of women from their late teens to their thirties, and of couples. The cinema reported its busiest run since the long-running animated hit In This Corner of the World, and people began coming back to see it again. By June its run had spread to a hundred and fifty-two cinemas. One evening in May, Theatre Shinjuku held an event with no film in it at all: ninety minutes of people talking about love, and about this story, in a cinema with the projector off.

The Japanese title needs a sentence of its own. Ga nanda is how Japanese brushes an obstacle aside: name the thing in your way, add ga nanda, and you have said so what about it. So what about the rain. So what about my age. Put love in that slot and the phrase shrugs at love itself; say it slowly and it becomes an honest question instead, what is love? The film lives between the two. Its English title, the director has said, was already the English title of the novel, and he kept it.

The last scenes, which this essay discusses, are the film’s own. The ending departs from the novel; the director has said it came to him when the screenplay had stalled, while an actor friend read the whole script through at his home. He has also said he does not know himself whether Teruko’s last scene is real or a dream, rescue or despair, and that he leaves it to whoever is watching. What follows reads the film, not the novel. Dialogue is paraphrased, not quoted.

The story first, because everything later stands on it. Teruko meets Mamoru at the after-party of a wedding and falls for him on the spot. He works for a publisher. At work or in the middle of the night, a call from him comes first. She lets her work slide so that she is always free when he rings. Her boss warns her. She is fired, and she counts it as freedom.

For a while it looks as if it might become something. After a night of drinking that runs until morning she stays at his flat, and they sleep together, and she believes she has become his girlfriend. The film does not mock her for believing it. It gives them a stretch of real sweetness: washing each other’s hair in the bath; his finger dipped in ketchup and held out for her to taste, a moment Narita is said to have improvised. Then Teruko does what a girlfriend would do. She hangs his washing out on his balcony. She folds his socks into his storage box, her way rather than his. She leaves a clay pot for two in his kitchen.

He withdraws. He starts calling her Yamada-san instead of Teru-chan, the surname in place of the pet name, one small cold step back. One morning he sends her home at dawn. Then he stops calling at all. The director has said he filmed Mamoru coming home to find her on his balcony hugging his clothes, watching her with a cold face, and that his co-writer and producers talked him out of using it, because it would have been the only moment in the film seen from Mamoru’s side. Apart from a single low shot that hints at his eyes, the film stays on her side of the glass.

Months later he rings again, and she drops everything and goes. He is sitting beside Sumire, an older woman, blunt and chain-smoking, with whom he is plainly in love and who is plainly not interested in him. Teruko is furious that she exists, and the fury does not last. Out on the street she raps her grievances against Sumire, and every item on the list comes out sounding like a reason to like her. Sumire, for her part, takes to Teruko. A strange foursome forms, Teruko and Mamoru and Sumire and Nakahara, drinking together, spending a weekend at a villa by a lake. One night, after an evening out with Sumire, Teruko and Mamoru end up in bed again, and lying beside her he tells her there is nothing about him worth loving.

Here is what the usual description misses. Teruko has a rule, and the synopsis released with the film states it plainly: desperate to keep things as they are, she never contacts him first, and she never tells him she loves him. The lie about being out on that first night is the rule at work. So is everything offhand about her in his company. Her whole craft is making an enormous love look like a small one.

The rule slipped most visibly in the stretch after they first slept together, when she let herself behave like his girlfriend, and that is exactly when he withdrew. The pot for two and the socks folded her way were her love at its real size, and it was more than he wanted. The lesson she takes from it is not the one her friends would like her to take. It is not that he does not love her. She knows that. It is that her love must never be allowed to show its size. What looks like a woman without pride is a woman spending her pride on a disguise.

Why keep a rule like that, instead of simply leaving? It is worth hearing her out before anyone answers for her. The first reason is the plainest. Near him, she is happy. The film does not pretend the good days were a delusion. The hair-washing and the ketchup were real, and nothing that happens later makes them less so.

The second is that her job was never where her life was. At one point she says she is not alive to keep the world turning, and she has a private theory that luck in love and luck at work run in opposite directions. It is not an unusual feeling at twenty-eight, that the work filling the week is not what the week is for. Teruko is unusual only in saying it aloud and living by it.

The third is harder to see from outside. Being near him includes being told things. When he says there is nothing about him worth loving, he is saying it to her and to nobody else. The director has described that position from his own life: sitting alone with a woman he loved while she told him about someone else she loved, not seen as a possibility at all but close enough to be confided in, sadness and gladness in the same room. Teruko does not have Mamoru’s love. She has his confidences, and they are not nothing.

And she is not falling apart. This matters, because it is what keeps her from being pitiable, and the film is careful about it. She eats. She sleeps. She raps. She has jokes, a temper and a friend she can fight with. The director gave her a younger colleague who envies the force of her feeling, so that at least one person in the film would be on her side, and then, he has said, made the colleague a woman about to be married, to sting Teruko a little more. He has also said that he himself envies Teruko, and that being able to love someone that directly seems to him a very good thing. Nobody envies a victim.

Attachment research has a vocabulary for all this, and it helps, provided it is used as a lens and not a label. John Bowlby, who developed attachment theory, thought of the attachment system as asking one question over and over. In the psychologist R. Chris Fraley’s summary, the question is whether the attachment figure is nearby, accessible and attentive. Since Hazan and Shaver proposed in 1987 that adult romantic love could be understood as an attachment process, researchers have been asking the same question of lovers.

Read Teruko through that question and her trade looks less like folly than like arithmetic. Nearby: she makes sure of it. Accessible: she keeps every evening free. Attentive is the one she gives up. His attention belongs to Sumire, and she has agreed to live without it. Two out of three is not what anyone would choose. It is not nothing, either, and for a woman who wants above all not to lose him, it may be the most that was ever on offer.

The lens only helps while it stays a lens. This Library argued in “Reading Attached Without Turning Attachment Styles Into Destiny” that a pattern happens inside a relationship and not only inside a person, and that the humane question is less what someone’s style is than what happens to them with this particular person. Just Only Love could almost be a demonstration. Teruko is not like this with everyone: with Yoko she is blunt, with her boss careless, with Sumire curious. The intensity belongs to one relationship. And Mamoru, who backs away from Teruko whenever she comes close, behaves around Sumire exactly as Teruko behaves around him: eager, attentive, hoping to be looked at. The film puts the same man in both positions, sometimes in the same evening.

It goes all the way round. Yoko is to Nakahara what Mamoru is to Teruko. Nakahara is to Yoko what Teruko is to Mamoru. Sumire, the only one of them chasing nobody, is Mamoru’s Mamoru. Nobody in the film is only the one who chases or only the one who is chased. It is a position, not a personality, and anyone can find themselves standing in either.

The lens shows one more thing, and it is in Teruko’s favour. The film’s synopsis describes a Mamoru who can be laughing happily one minute and, the moment she tries to come a little closer, shut her out without warning. Watchfulness around a man like that is not only a fact about the one watching. It is information about him.

Nakahara is a photographer’s assistant, and he loves Yoko. He runs her errands at any hour. What he wants, he says, is to be somewhere she can call him whenever she happens to feel lonely. The director has called him Teruko’s mirror: the same devotion, a different decision. The two of them know each other on sight, two people who will do anything for someone who does not love them back.

At the lakeside villa, Sumire asks him straight out what he and Yoko are, and what makes it different from sleeping together with no strings. He tells her she would not understand. Teruko and Mamoru sit and listen, and the director has said the scene is about them as much as about him. Then, in what might be the film’s manners in miniature, Sumire, who has just said what nobody else would, goes off to cook, and a little later is calling out to Nakahara that she has found some asparagus.

Later Nakahara tells Teruko that he is going to stop seeing Yoko. He has come to feel that his devotion is spoiling her. Teruko goes for him. He should just admit, she says, that he is giving up because he cannot have her. He answers that he really does love Yoko, and asks to be allowed, at least, to be free to give up. He would like to be happy, he says. As he walks away he spits. The director has said he suggested that on set, so that Nakahara would not simply leave as a nice young man, and asked Wakaba to make sure it never looked as if he were spitting at Teruko.

Teruko’s fury makes sense once you see what he is doing. He is keeping the claim and giving up the nearness. He says, in so many words, that he loves Yoko, which is the one sentence Teruko has never said to Mamoru, and then he walks away from the only place he could have gone on seeing her. It is her trade exactly reversed, carried out in front of her by the one person who understands it. Of course she goes for him. People rarely go for a stranger that hard.

Afterwards Teruko turns on Yoko, and the two old friends have a bitter quarrel. The director has said that Yoko grew up watching her parents, the man strong and the woman doing as she was told, and that her way with men comes from wanting no part of that arrangement. It explains her. It is not offered as an excuse. Then Yoko does something nobody asked her to do. She rings Mamoru and tells him what she thinks of the way he has been treating her friend.

The last visit answers the first night. This time it is Teruko who is ill in bed, and Mamoru who comes round and makes the udon. In the novel their last meeting is in a bar near her home; the director has said he moved it into her flat to pair it with the opening, and to give Teruko, who has always been the one who goes to him, a moment of being the one he comes to. Mamoru has come to be decent, in his fashion. He tells her he loves Sumire, and that they should stop this undefined thing between them.

It is worth noticing what kind of sentence that is. A familiar script for starting a romance in Japan runs through a kokuhaku, a confession: somebody says, in so many words, I like you, will you go out with me, and from that moment there is a couple. The director has described how the script bends with age. At school you confess and then you are together; later in life people may sleep together first and only then ask whether they are going out, and if nobody ever says anything, one of them may believe they are a couple while the other does not. Teruko’s rule means she has never made a confession, so the whole film takes place in the space before one. And the only confession it contains is Mamoru’s, of love for somebody else.

Teruko knows that if she makes this awkward she will never see him again. So she tells him she does not care about him any more. She tells him not to imagine she still likes him. She asks him to introduce her to one of his friends. It is a lie, and it is the most exact lie she could have told. She has said plainly, in the film, that for her there are only the people she loves and everybody else, who does not matter. Now she files Mamoru, out loud, under the second heading, and it works. They will go on meeting, as friends.

The film gives this last move a witness: Teruko as a schoolgirl, who turns up more than once to ask the adult the questions the adult will not ask herself. The director has explained why. He worried that the move Teruko makes at the end, to keep things as they are, might not read on screen by itself, and he did not want a voice-over explaining it; a child could simply ask whether she is really sure, whether she does not in fact love him. The child, he has said, ends up the more grown-up of the two.

He has also put the whole shape of the film in a sentence. At first, he has said, Teruko wanted to be Mamoru’s girlfriend; somewhere along the way her aim became keeping what they had from breaking. He is drawn, he says, to people who make that their goal, and has little interest in heroes who achieve things. It is a generous way to see her, and an accurate one. The film’s first lie made her love look small so that she could go to him. Its last makes her love look like nothing so that she can stay. It is the same discipline at its full size. It is not a collapse. It is a completion.

Earlier in the film, on a day out, Teruko and Mamoru stand in front of the elephants at a zoo, and he says that one day he will quit his job and look after elephants. It is an idle remark. Teruko cries. She hears a future in it, and herself somewhere inside the future.

At the end Teruko is working as a keeper at a zoo, feeding an elephant. Early on she wondered, in her own voice, why she was still not Tanaka Mamoru’s girlfriend. At the end, in the same voice, she says she is still not Tanaka Mamoru. One word has dropped out of the sentence. She has said along the way that she wants to become him. She has taken the one daydream of his she ever heard and made it her working day.

What that means, the film declines to say, and it is right to. The director himself says he does not know whether the scene is real or a dream, rescue or despair. What follows is this essay’s reading and nothing more. Teruko has found a way to be near Mamoru that no longer needs his permission. She is living the future he mentioned and probably forgot. Whether that is the freest thing she does in the film or the deepest form of the same devotion, it may well be both. What the film shows is a woman in work she chose, looking after an animal far too large to hold, which will never need to love her back.

Meanwhile Nakahara has put on an exhibition of his photographs. Yoko finds it, stands smiling in front of a picture of herself, and turns to look at him. That is all: a look. The one who left is given a glance; the one who stayed is given an elephant. Neither is a wedding, and the film hands out no prize for the right way to love.

Japanese has a phrase for a woman in Teruko’s position: tsugō no ii onna, the convenient woman. The synopsis released with the film uses it, and it is worth hearing what it assumes. It describes a woman entirely from the man’s side, by what she costs him, which is nothing. The film spends two hours showing that Teruko is not convenient in the least. She is loud, she does things nobody asked for, and she is too much. She turns up with a pot for two. She is inconvenient in every way but one: out loud, she asks for nothing.

The film does not keep the phrase for women, either. Nakahara is the convenient man, and the director has pointed out that what he does reverses the usual arrangement between the sexes. Yoko, who uses him, is the one who saw the usual arrangement up close at home and wants no part of it. The film does not blame her for that. It only shows what it costs the man at the other end.

Nor does it let its three women harden into types. Teruko is not the doormat she is supposed to be, Yoko is not an ice queen, and Sumire, who has every structural reason to be the rival, turns out to be the woman Teruko cannot manage to hate. On the morning at the villa, the screenplay had Teruko watching Mamoru’s sleeping face alone. On set, the director has said, he put Sumire beside her, and the two women watch him sleep together. It is one of the kindest decisions in the film. The fight between women that the story seems to be setting up never arrives.

This is also where Teruko parts company with another heroine this Library has read. “Acts of Desperation and the Self You Shrink to Keep Someone’s Attention”, reading Megan Nolan’s novel, argued that a woman who remakes herself to be wanted may be getting something from the shrinking, relief from the work of being a self, so that the shrinking is the product rather than the price. Teruko is a different case, and the difference is the point of this essay. She does not make herself smaller in front of Mamoru. She is too much in front of him, and it is her too-muchness he backs away from. What she shrinks is her claim on him. Her appetite, her temper, her jokes and her stubbornness stay full size to the last scene.

Kakuta Mitsuyo, who wrote the novel, also wrote the novel behind Pale Moon, and this Library’s essay on that film, “Pale Moon, and the First Money She Ever Spent as Herself”, drew a line between having access to money and having the standing to spend it. Teruko’s story may be the same line seen from the other side. She keeps the access: she is within his reach, and he is within hers. She gives up every standing: to be called his girlfriend, to ask for anything, to be loved back.

In Japan the film found its audience by word of mouth, and that audience was mostly women in their late teens to their thirties. What they wrote about it at the time is instructive. Some said they understood Teruko completely and recognised every scene. Others found her a little frightening, and a few admitted to being frightened by how much they sympathised. The reactions quoted at the time seldom read her as a warning. The film seems to have been received less as a cautionary tale than as a mirror, and the cinema that held an evening of talk with no film in it understood what people had come for: not a verdict but a conversation.

It would be easy to make Teruko into a national type, the Japanese woman who loves in silence, and the director declines to. Asked whether this sense of distance was peculiar to Japan, where feelings are said to go unspoken, he said that the country has little to do with it and the gap exists everywhere. He told a story about a festival in Canada where he suggested that almost no couple, dating or married, loves exactly fifty-fifty, and a couple in the front row glared at him. He allowed that people in Japan may state such things less. That seems the right weight to give it. Teruko’s rule of never saying it is not a Japanese trait. It is a rule that fits a world in which saying it changes things, and a confession, once made, has to be answered.

For readers outside Japan the film is a useful correction to a familiar story. When it opened, one English-language review began with news of a study estimating how many young adults in Japan had never had heterosexual sex, and named the stereotype such reports feed: a listless generation, allergic to sex and relationships. Nobody in Just Only Love is allergic to anything. They are over-invested, in all the wrong directions at once. What interests the film is not that people have stopped wanting one another, but how rarely the wanting points both ways.

And for a woman living in Japan who grew up somewhere else, the film may be familiar in a particular way. Dating across two sets of habits means not always knowing which script the other person is following: whether a first night is a beginning, whether a relationship needs a confession before it exists, whether a silence means no. Doing all of that in a second language adds a layer of doubt to every sentence. Teruko’s situation is not hers. But anyone who has spent months not knowing what she and someone else are to each other, and has been afraid to ask in case asking ends it, will know exactly the room Teruko lives in.

There are several ways this essay could be wrong, and at least two of them should unsettle anyone who has agreed with it so far.

The first concerns the man on the other side. This essay has honoured Teruko’s reasons, and his are real too. He never asked to be loved like this. The washing on his balcony and the socks folded her way were not invited, and his retreat, however cowardly it looks, was also a line he had every right to draw. Then there is the final lie. His agreement to go on as friends rests on an untrue account of what she feels, and an agreement given on a false picture is not agreement to what is actually happening. The film does not treat this as a crime, and it is not one. But a reading that admires Teruko’s discipline has to admit that the discipline works by managing what he knows.

The same care belongs with the sex between them. Nothing in the film suggests that either of them did not want it. What they never had was any agreement about what it meant, and wanting the same night is not the same as agreeing on the same story about it.

The second is the film’s gentleness. Nobody in it is a villain, and that is its charm and its risk. A way of loving that costs a woman her job can come to look adorable, and a film that treats a firing as freedom never has to show the rent. Some viewers found Teruko frightening rather than touching, and they were not wrong to. A devotion does not become harmless because the person carrying it is funny.

The third is that the distinction at the centre of this essay may be too neat. Perhaps there is no clean line between giving up a claim and giving up a self, and a life arranged around one man’s phone calls is already a self given up, however healthy her appetite. The argument about Megan Nolan’s narrator, that the surrender may itself be what she is getting, could be right about Teruko too. This essay prefers its own reading. It cannot prove it.

The fourth is that the ending belongs to nobody. The director says he does not know whether it is real, and everything said here about the elephant is a reading, offered as one.

And last, the address this is written from. This house sells private companionship: bounded, scheduled, paid for. It has an interest in any essay that finds dignity in nearness without a claim attached, and a reader is entitled to discount this one for that. What Teruko has is not that, and could not be bought. Nobody is paid, nothing ends on time, and what she wants is one particular man, which nothing on sale anywhere could supply.

Here is where this Library stands. A love that asks for nothing is not automatically noble, and it is not automatically a sickness. The questions worth asking of it are whether the person paying chose the price with her eyes open, and whether it is hers to pay. Teruko did, and it is. The film respects that, and so does this essay. It will not tell her to leave him. The film shows a man who left, and does not crown him either.

What it will say is this. There is a line worth watching between the claim to be loved, which anyone may give up, and the claim to be treated with ordinary care, which nobody should have to. Giving up the first can leave a person whole. Giving up the second, usually without noticing, is where a devotion starts to cost more than the one carrying it ever agreed to pay. Where Teruko stands on that line, the film leaves to whoever is watching.

And one thing the film says better than any essay can. Her discipline was not a lack of self-respect. It was self-respect, invested in something most people would not have chosen. You can argue with the investment. You cannot say she had nothing to invest.

Is there someone you have made yourself small in front of, and was it yourself you made small, or only your claim on them? Is there a rule you keep so that your love will never look its real size, and who taught it to you? Who in your life is nearby and accessible but not attentive, and what would you do if the attention came? If the person you loved told you they loved someone else, would you tell the truth, or keep the door open? And when you tell a friend to stop, whose comfort are you speaking for?

If you have ever said you were still out when you were already home, you know the rest of this story already. Nobody who has loved like that needs to be told what it cost; you did the sums yourself, every night. The film does not call you a fool, and neither will this essay. It asks only that you know which thing you gave up. A claim can be given up. Nobody ever required you to give up yourself.