Lost Paradise, and a Love More Afraid of Time Than of the World

For a while in 1997, the title of a film was also a verb. To shitsurakuen, in the Japanese of that year, was to have an affair. The organisers of the annual prize for the year’s new words and buzzwords gave the word their top award, and wrote that people had begun to use it in place of the ordinary word for an affair, until affairs themselves had come to look almost like a fashion.

The word came from a novel by Watanabe Jun’ichi, serialised in the Nikkei, Japan’s business daily, and from the film Morita Yoshimitsu made of it. The title itself is far older. Shitsurakuen is the name under which Japanese readers have long known Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poem in which the first man and woman lose their garden and walk out of it together, into the world.

The lovers of this Lost Paradise are Kuki Shoichiro, an editor of fifty who has been moved sideways at his publishing house, and Matsubara Rinko, thirty-eight, who teaches calligraphy. Each is married to someone else. Neither marriage is unhappy. Both have gone quiet.

This essay reads the film as a story about time. The film sees clearly what its lovers are leaving: not cruelty, not violence, but two marriages in which nothing is wrong and nothing is said. And it is afraid, more afraid than of any scandal, that the love it gives them will go the same way. Nearly everything the film does follows from that fear, including the one answer it can find to it. The fear is real, and this essay takes it seriously. The answer is the film’s own, and this essay does not share it.

It can also be read as the story of a woman whose life had been written for her, in a correct hand, by other people, and who begins to write in her own. What the film then lets her write is the question this essay keeps returning to.

Lost Paradise opened in Japan on 10 May 1997, distributed by Toei. It runs 119 minutes. Morita directed it from a screenplay by Tsutsui Tomomi. Yakusho Kōji plays Kuki and Kuroki Hitomi plays Rinko; Hoshino Tomoko plays Kuki’s wife, Fumie, Shiba Toshio plays Rinko’s husband, Haruhiko, Terao Akira plays Kinugawa, the friend who introduces them, and Kimura Yoshino plays Kuki’s married daughter, Chika. In the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan’s record of the year’s distribution income it stands second among Japanese films of 1997, after Princess Mononoke, and Kuroki won the Japan Academy Film Prize for best actress for the part.

The novel had begun appearing in the Nikkei in 1995 and came out as a book, in two volumes, from Kodansha in February 1997, three months before the film. Shogakukan’s dictionary Daijisen records that it caught on above all among middle-aged men, the paper’s core readers. The buzzword prize’s organisers wrote that it had been talked about while it was still being serialised, and that the film made it the talk of the whole country; their award for the word went to Watanabe and to Kuroki. A television version, with a different cast, followed that summer. This essay is about the film.

Two notes before going further. The film was not screened for this essay. Its scenes are described as published synopses and the makers’ own later accounts describe them, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. The film is frank about sex; this essay describes none of it. And the essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends, because the ending is where the film makes its argument and where this essay parts company with it. A reader who would rather meet the ending on screen first may want to stop here, and come back.

Begin with the marriages, because everything in the story grows out of them, and because they are the part of the film most worth staying with.

Kuki and Fumie have been married long enough to have a daughter who has married and left home. Fumie has work of her own, designing tiles at home, and a grievance of her own: she has long resented the way her husband gave himself to his job. Their marriage is not bad. Something in it simply no longer fits. What the story gives as the trouble between them is not an injury but a mismatch: a wife who has built a life around an absence, and a husband who has been, for years, somewhere else.

Rinko’s marriage is quieter still. At twenty-five she married Haruhiko, a medical researcher, through an arranged introduction: an upright man, stiff, and jealous. They have no children, and they hardly ever sleep together. From outside it would look like a marriage in good order. It is in good order. That is its trouble.

It is worth being exact about what the film has set up. A story can make its lovers easy to forgive by giving one of them a marriage that deserves to be left: a husband who drinks, or strikes, or strays first. Lost Paradise does not do that. What it names as the trouble in each house is an absence rather than a wrong: a marriage that has gone silent, and in Rinko’s case sexless.

This is where the film is most truthful, and where it may speak to anyone who has lived in such a marriage. A marriage like this gives you nothing to leave for and nothing to stay for. There is no event to point to, no night on which it went wrong. There is the evening, and the next evening, and the slow sense that the conversation you once had has been replaced by arrangements. Nobody is to blame, which is part of why it is so hard to talk about, and part of why an affair, when it comes, can feel to the people in it less like a betrayal than like a window opening. That is how it can feel. It is not the whole of what it is.

Kuki had been an editor-in-chief, and a respected one, until he clashed with the sales department, which wanted his magazine to sell more, over his refusal to bend on what he published. He has been moved to the research office, a post with little to do. His task there is to help compile a history of the Shōwa era, and he is looking into the Sada Abe case.

The film does not need to add much for the shape to be plain. A man who spent his working life deciding what would be printed next has been handed the past to put in order. His present has been closed from outside, by a decision he did not make, at an age when there is less time to open another. It is common to call this a crisis, as if something in him had broken. The story is more exact than the word. What it shows is a narrowing, and a man of fifty standing inside it.

Notice, too, how he lost the work he cared about. He did not fail at it. He refused to bend. The film gives its hero a small integrity and makes him pay for it, and the payment is time: the years in which he would have gone on making new things, exchanged for the compiling of an era that is already over. A man in that position who meets something that makes him feel his life is not finished will not hold it lightly.

It is into this narrowing that Rinko comes. Kinugawa, a friend who works at a culture centre, introduces them. It would be easy, and not wrong, to say that she is the one new thing in Kuki’s life. What the story adds is the timing. She arrives at the moment when everything else has been decided over his head.

Rinko teaches calligraphy at the culture centre. Regular script is the hand in which every stroke is set down exactly and nothing runs into anything else; it is the most standard of the styles, as against the running and cursive hands. Hers is so correct that people call her the Lady of Regular Script. It is a small detail, and hard not to read as more than one. It describes a life as well as a hand: married at twenty-five, by arrangement, to a suitable man, in a marriage kept in good order, every stroke in its place.

Kuki pursues her with an earnest insistence. She holds him off. He keeps on. Later, she says yes. The story tells all of this as a courtship, and a good part of its romance rests there.

This essay will call it what the story shows: a man who kept on after she had held him off. Holding off is an answer for as long as it is given, and an answer does not turn into an opening because someone keeps asking. When Rinko does say yes, the yes is hers; she was free to change her answer, and nothing here takes her yes away from her. But it does not reach back and make the pressure before it into romance. A woman who says yes to a man who would not stop has said yes to him. She has not agreed, by saying it, that the not stopping was love.

Once she has said it, the story is hers as much as his, and in some ways more. She is drawn further and further in, and the film gives her wanting a weight of its own: she is not a prize at the end of his pursuit. Tsutsui, who wrote the screenplay, has said that she would not write the kind of heroine who marvels at what a man has made of her body, and that she made it clear she would change Rinko’s character rather than write one. What she wanted, she said, was a woman who, through knowing sex as it truly is, comes to have what she called eyes that see the truth.

That is a remarkable ambition for a film that became a byword for adultery, and it is the part of the film most worth defending. On the screenwriter’s account, at least, Rinko is written not as an object of the story’s desire but as the subject of her own: a woman of thirty-eight who discovers, with her whole life at stake, that she wants, and that her wanting can see.

The affair is lived in hotel rooms and on nights away, with everyone told that they are working. Then Rinko’s stepfather, a man she loved, dies. On the night of his wake, Kuki telephones to say that he wants to see her. She slips away from her husband and her mother and goes to him, still in her mourning clothes.

This essay will not judge her for going. Grief does not always want the company it is supposed to want, and a woman who needs to be held on the night her stepfather has died is not a scandal. What deserves attention is what the story does with the night. In its telling, the guilt does not cool them. It sets them alight.

On this essay’s reading, that is where the film’s logic first shows itself. A love that measures itself by its heat needs fuel, and the readiest fuel is a line crossed: a lie told at home, a night taken from work, and then a night taken from a death. Each crossing burns bright and fades, and the next must go further. A love kept at that temperature cannot also be kept for long, and the film seems to know it. The knowledge sits under the rest of the story like a clock ticking in another room.

There is another woman at that wake: Rinko’s mother, from whom she slips away. She is the first of several people the story leaves behind without a word, and this essay will come back to them.

The world arrives first in writing, and at work. An anonymous letter reaches Kuki’s company, claiming that he pursued Rinko and pressured her into the affair. A director calls him in to answer it, and Kuki resigns.

It is easy to hear the letter as malice, sent without a name to a man’s employer. But it is worth noticing what the accusation says. Pursued and pressured is not far from what the story itself showed, a man who kept on after she had held him off. That is not a verdict on Kuki, and it does not make the letter kind. It is a reason to keep apart two things the story lets run together: a love that began, and the pressure that came before it.

Rinko’s husband learns of the affair through a detective agency. When she asks him for a divorce, he refuses, and by the story’s own account he refuses in order to make her suffer. She breaks with him, and with her mother, and goes to Kuki.

Kuki’s wife asks him for a divorce. Tsutsui, looking back, has singled out that scene. As she remembered it, Fumie has understood everything, and Kuki has not noticed that she knows; when she proposes that they separate, he is thrown, and protests that being told so suddenly puts him in a difficult position, and she hands his own word back to him as a question. Tsutsui supposed that a great many women watching were with the wife at that moment. Kuki hesitates, then agrees, and leaves home. Chika, married and living elsewhere, watches her parents’ marriage change and cannot make sense of it.

Stop here and notice where this leaves the two of them, because everything after depends on it. The obstacles that keep lovers apart in older stories have, by now, mostly been walked through. His wife has let him go. Rinko has left her husband’s house and her mother. His job is gone; her husband will not release her; the people who loved them are hurt and bewildered. It is a hard place to stand. But they are together, and nobody is keeping them apart. The world has made their life difficult. It has not made it impossible.

From here, this essay describes how the film ends.

It is Rinko who first wishes it: to die at the height of their love, before it can grow old. Kuki comes to share the wish. They decide together, tell no one, and end their lives together.

That is all this essay will say about what happens. What matters for the argument is how the film frames it, and the frame is plain. The ending is offered as a keeping: a love taken out of time at its height, before age and habit and ordinary days can reach it, and the two deaths presented as its completion.

Tsutsui, in a conversation published in 2023 with Misawa Kazuko, Morita’s wife and herself a producer of many of his films, recalled something the director once said with both of them present: that once a woman reached thirty-nine, she would surely want to die while she was still beautiful. Misawa remembered their answer. Both women said, at the same moment, that she would not.

It is a small exchange, and the whole problem is in it. The frame says that what a woman wants, near forty, is to be kept: kept beautiful, kept at the height, kept from whatever comes next. The two women in the room said no, and laughed as they remembered saying it. The film gives Rinko the wish anyway, and gives it to her first. This essay will not pretend to know what to make of that: whether, inside the fiction, the wish is simply hers, or whether it is the frame speaking through her. What it can say is that the woman who wrote her, and the woman beside her, had their answer ready.

This essay does not accept the frame. Dying does not keep a love. It ends the love, it ends the two people who were in it, and it hands everything that was between them to the people who were not asked. Whatever else the film is, its last word on this love is an ending, and an ending is not a completion.

The frame is old. In the puppet and kabuki theatre of around 1700 there was a whole genre of plays about lovers who die together, and Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, first staged in 1703, set off a vogue for them. One encyclopaedia describes their usual shape: the lovers are driven to their deaths by being caught between obligation and feeling, between what the world requires of them and what they want. Another suggests that audiences of the time sympathised with lovers who broke through the world’s constraints, by dying, to hold on to their love. The shogunate, noting the vogue, banned such plays in 1722 and again in 1723.

Set Lost Paradise beside those plays and one difference stands out. In them, the world closes every door, and the lovers die because there is nowhere left to live. In this film, by the time the choice is made, the doors have mostly been walked through. The wish the story gives is not to escape a world that forbids them. It is to stop at the height, before time can do to their love what it did to their marriages. The film has moved the enemy. It is no longer the world. It is time.

The title points the other way, for anyone who follows it back. Milton’s poem ends with Adam and Eve leaving the garden, not dying in it. They shed some natural tears and wipe them soon; then, in the poem’s words, “The World was all before them”, and hand in hand, with slow steps, they set out on their way. Paradise Lost ends where the long, mortal, ordinary part of life begins, and it sends its couple into that part together. The novel shares its title with the Japanese name of Milton’s poem. The story it tells borrows the name and refuses the walk.

Why would a love be so afraid of time? The first half of the film has already answered: because both lovers have seen, at home, what time can do. A distinction this Library has drawn before helps to say exactly what they saw.

The essay “Feeling Safe With Someone Is Not the Same as Having Finished Discovering Them” argued that a long relationship runs on at least two axes, not one. The first is safety: whether you can predict what the other person will do with what they know about you. The second is discovery: whether anything is still being found out. A long marriage can stand at the top of the first and at the bottom of the second, because the habits that make a person safe to live with are the same habits that close the file on them. That essay’s word for the result was not dead but asleep.

It went on to name the answer the culture offers a life that has fallen asleep, a new person, and to say why the answer works: a new person holds no file on you, and so supplies discovery at full strength and safety at none. It feels, that essay said, like being restored to yourself. But it is a condition that expires, because a new person becomes a known person.

Lost Paradise reads like a picture of that argument, carried to its end. Its two marriages are all safety and no discovery. Its affair is all discovery and no safety: hotel rooms, lies at home, a night taken from a wake. Kuki and Rinko are each other’s new person, and each has been restored, for a while, to a self they had thought was finished. What the story cannot face, on this essay’s reading, is the expiry: the moment when the new person would become a known one, the hotel room a home, the stolen night an ordinary night. That moment was coming. She had gone to him; he had left home. The wish the film gives them is that it must never arrive, because what they believe lies beyond the height is the silence they both left.

The fear is not foolish. They had both lived inside that silence. But it rests on a claim the story never lets them test: that asleep means dead, and that a love which grows quiet has only one direction left. The same essay said the opposite, and said it without sentiment. The feeling of a first year cannot be brought back, and its intensity was partly fear; what can be had instead is a file opened again, which gives something quieter and more durable than the thing remembered.

This Library argued, in “The Course of Love Begins Where Most Love Stories End”, that most love stories are shy about Tuesday. They know how to stage recognition, obstacle and union, and they go quiet once two people have to buy detergent, disappoint each other and decide who notices the empty refrigerator. The course of love, that essay said, is not a decline from enchantment into administration; familiarity is not the enemy, unattended familiarity is. Lost Paradise is shy about Tuesday to the point of refusing it. Its lovers would rather end than find out what their Tuesdays would have been.

Two essays in this Library have already sat with a quiet marriage and with an affair, and it is worth saying what they found, because this film asks something neither of them had to.

“Hope Springs, and the Night She Was No Longer the Only One Asking” read a long marriage gone silent and argued that it turns only when the second person consents to be refusable: when the husband, for once, is the one who walks down the hall to his wife’s door. The quiet in that film is answered at home, by a question someone finally asks. In Lost Paradise, the requests the story gives the two marriages are requests to end them.

“Second Virgin, and Falling in Love With Your Eyes Open” honoured a woman’s desire at forty-five as desire, counted what it cost the wife who was never asked, and noticed that when the young man dies, his death ends the love without anyone having to end it: a mercy the series grants its lovers, and a convenience it grants itself. Lost Paradise makes the opposite move. Nothing here ends by accident. The ending is chosen, and the film presents the choice as love’s completion: the frame this essay has declined.

What neither essay had to face is a love that fears its own future: a story in which the danger is not the silence at home and not the cost to others, though both are present, but the passage of time through the love itself.

They told no one. It is worth staying with that, because the frame depends on our not staying with it.

A secret that began in hotel rooms ends as something other people must carry. Fumie, who asked for the divorce and let him go. Haruhiko, who would not let his wife go. Chika, who could not understand what was happening to her parents. Rinko’s mother, with whom she had broken. Each of them loses someone, and none of them was asked, or told.

The film barely looks at them. A frame that calls this ending a keeping has to leave these people out of the picture, because they are what the keeping costs. This essay can at least name them.

One more thing must be said plainly, because a reader may be carrying a real loss rather than a fictional one. This is a reading of a film’s frame. It is not a judgement on anyone who has died, in a story or in life, and it is not a judgement on anyone left behind. Someone left after such a death may carry the question of why they were not told, and whether they should have seen. It is a human question. It is not evidence of a failure.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first comes from the woman who wrote the screenplay.

First, the enemy may be the world after all. Tsutsui has described the Rinko she wanted to write as a woman who, having gained eyes that see the truth, is convenient neither for men nor for society, and who is therefore put, as she said, on a kind of witch trial. On that reading the story is not afraid of time. It is afraid for a woman who has begun to see, in a world that cannot bear it, and the material is all there: the anonymous letter, the detective, the husband’s refusal, the mother lost, the job gone. This essay’s answer is narrow. The world’s pressure is real and it runs through the film. But the wish the story gives Rinko is phrased as a wish about the height of a love, not about a verdict. And Tsutsui herself has said that the director understood the direction she meant and, on that basis, finished the film as a sweet one. A witch trial and a sweet film sit uneasily together; perhaps that unease is the film. A reader who finds the screenwriter’s reading truer than this one may be right.

Second, a tragedy is not a recommendation. Stories have shown lovers dying together for centuries, and to read a film’s ending as its advice is to mistake what stories do. An essay that refuses to describe an ending may look like a censor. There is truth in this. But this essay has not objected to the film showing what it shows. It has objected to one frame, the one that calls an ending a keeping, and declining a frame is not banning a story. The shogunate tried banning. This essay has no wish to.

Third, the audience of 1997 may have been wiser than the frame. When the title became a verb, it meant having an affair, not dying, and the buzzword prize’s organisers summed up the general reaction to the story as, in effect, a wish to try an affair too. On their account, readers and audiences took the middle of the story and left its end. That is a real comfort, and also a warning: what people took from it was the heat, and the heat is exactly what the film says cannot last.

Fourth, ordinary days are not a promise. An essay that commends Tuesday to two people who have lost a job, a mother, a daughter’s understanding and the lives they had built may be offering a comfortable reader’s moral. Their Tuesdays would have been hard. This essay concedes it. It does not claim that what lay ahead of them was happy. It claims only that it lay ahead, and that hard is not the same as over.

Fifth, and aimed at this essay. By setting the director’s remark beside the women’s answer, the essay may seem to take Rinko’s wish away from her, to say that it was never really hers but a man’s idea put into her mouth. That would be its own disrespect. The film gives her the wish, and gives it to her first, and a reading that assumes whatever a woman wishes aloud must be a man’s idea has decided in advance what women can want. So, plainly: inside the story, the wish is Rinko’s. What this essay declines is not her wanting it, but the frame the film builds round it, which calls what the wish leads to a completion.

The need the film begins from is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. A marriage can go quiet without anyone failing in it. A person of fifty, or of thirty-eight, can feel the room of a life narrowing. Wanting to be woken is not a crime, and not a joke.

Rinko’s desire is hers, and the film does well to give it weight. The insistence that came before her yes was insistence, and her yes does not turn it into romance.

The frame is where this essay parts from the film. A love is not kept by being ended. The height of a love is a real part of it, perhaps the part people remember longest, but it is not the whole of it, and it is not the truest part merely because it is the brightest. What comes after the height is not only decline. It is also where two people find out what they are to each other when nothing has to be stolen: asleep sometimes, awake sometimes, and still, if they choose, discovering.

And those who are left count. A decision made by two, and told to no one, is carried by many. A story that asks us to see its ending as a completion has first to ask us to stop counting them.

If you have lived in a quiet marriage, what did the quiet feel like: an ending, or a question nobody had asked yet?

What do you fear time will do to the things you love? Is the fear about them, or about you?

Is there a moment you have wished could last for ever, so that nothing could spoil it? What would it mean to keep it by remembering it, and to go on?

Who knows what you are carrying? Who would you want to know?

If you recognised one of those two marriages, the quiet in it, the evenings, the sense that something has closed without anyone closing it, here is what this essay would want you to hear. The quiet is not proof that anything is over. It may be sleep rather than death. What you do about it is yours to decide, and nothing here tells you what that should be. But the story you were shown, in which the only way to keep a love from going quiet is to end it, is one story, and it is the film’s. The poem its title comes from ends differently: two people who have lost their paradise, the world all before them, setting out slowly, hand in hand.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about any marriage or any affair.

If this story, or anything in it, has brought thoughts of dying closer than you would like, your own or someone else’s, please say so to a person rather than to an essay. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page “Mamorouyo Kokoro” lists places where you can talk, by telephone or in writing.