In this blog post, we explore why the film ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’ is regarded as a fantasy movie beyond a simple romance. We’ll take an intriguing look at how miracles and love harmonize within a narrative where reality and fantasy intersect.
Director Doi Nobuhiro’s 2004 film ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’ is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ichikawa Takuji. The image of the male and female leads in a field of bright yellow sunflowers on the movie poster gives the initial impression that this is one of Japan’s uniquely delicate and poignant romantic films. But even after watching the film to the end, can we truly say this work is merely a romantic film about love and separation between a man and a woman? This film evokes fairy-tale-like, fantastical imagination in the audience. Even though the situations unfolding on screen are events unlikely to occur easily in reality, it naturally draws us into the scenes, placing them on an ambiguous boundary between reality and fantasy. It gives us a fresh sense of emotion and makes us want to believe that such things might just happen in real life too.
Rabkin defined fantasy as a literary genre where ‘fantasy’—meaning the central structural element of the text—manifests in the work through the psychoanalytic concept of ‘wish fulfillment,’ encompassing experiential aspects like desire satisfaction or emotional reactions such as hesitation. Here, ‘fantasy’ refers to cases where the text’s structural quality—the arrangement of emotional resonance and effects—is distinctly evident. He also moved beyond a simple dichotomy of reality and fantasy, explaining it through layers: reality, psychic reality, the gaps within reality, and hallucination. Director Doi Nobuhiro’s ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’ is a work that delicately realizes these fantasy characteristics beneath a melodramatic plot.
First, it is necessary to examine what elements of ‘wish fulfillment’—that is, the experiential aspects including emotional responses like desire satisfaction or hesitation—are present in ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’. To do this, we must first examine the characters in ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’.
The film’s heroine, ‘Mio’, is ‘Yuji’s’ mother. In high school, she was a studious and cute student, but she secretly harbored a crush on ‘Takumi’, Yuji’s father, whom her classmates considered strange and eccentric. However, Mio never confessed her feelings to Takumi and graduated. While following Takumi, who had come to her university, she was involved in a traffic accident, foreshadowing her and Takumi’s future. She learned that in their future, she would give birth to Yūji and then die. Despite this, she ultimately chose that fate, leaving her loved ones behind at the young age of 28.
Takumi, the male lead of this film, has also harbored a one-sided love for Mio since high school. Takumi was a track athlete in high school, but after finishing last in a race due to a foul, he subjected himself to such grueling training that his classmates began to see him as strange. As a result, he developed a condition where his brain’s chemicals controlling his body malfunctioned, causing physical symptoms whenever he went to crowded places or rushed. He even left Mio, thinking she wouldn’t be happy with him after they finally reunited and fell in love. Yet, he ultimately accepted Mio when she came back to him, revealing his sincere love for her.
The third character is Yūji, the son born to the couple. Yūji is a young child in first grade. Having lost his mother a year ago, he now lives with his physically impaired father, Takumi. Yūji firmly believes his mother will return during the rainy season, clinging to the fairy tale book she left behind. He believes hanging a doll upside down will make it rain, so he hangs his doll outside the window upside down, which makes his classmates think he’s strange. Yet, despite his mother’s absence, he is a bright and responsible child who diligently cares for his physically disabled father.
All three of these characters live their lives without fully satisfying their deepest desires. Yūji’s mother, Mio, despite achieving her love, faces the fate of leaving her young son and beloved husband behind at the young age of 28. She must part with them without having been able to care for her son and her physically impaired husband for a long time, that is, without having sufficiently fulfilled her desires. In this sense, she can be seen as being in a state of deprivation regarding the fulfillment of her needs.
Takumi, too, carries the pain of having to let go of the woman he loved after realizing his own physical limitations. He constantly feels guilty toward Mio, believing his impaired body prevented him from making her happy and instead only caused her suffering. Takumi constantly feels inadequate in his desire to make Mio happy. Even though he wants to make her happy, he can no longer see her because she is no longer in this world. Therefore, he desperately wants to somehow satisfy his own longing for her.
Their son Yūji, too, lost his mother at a young age. He experiences the reality of longing to see his mother and being unable to fully enjoy festivals due to his physically impaired father. Yūji lacks elements of ‘wish fulfillment’ due to his desire to be cared for by someone and his longing for his mother, and he desperately wishes for this unmet desire to be satisfied. Thus, the lives and inner worlds of these three characters naturally evoke psychoanalytic concepts of ‘wish fulfillment,’ forming the foundation that imbues the film with its fantastical qualities.
This ‘fantasy’ is particularly prominent in the text’s structural qualities, specifically the arrangement of emotional resonance and effects. Let us now examine the arrangement of effects and structural characteristics inherent in the text of ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’.
The film opens with Yūji, now a high school student, receiving a birthday cake delivery. He then heads into the forest and, standing before the ‘Gate of Longing,’ says: “The miracle that came to us that rainy season began in this forest. Six weeks of miracles—perhaps it was just a mirage beyond the mist. But we definitely met Mom.” The next scene immediately cuts to Mio’s funeral. This starkly reminds the audience of the harsh reality that Mio is already dead.
However, the scene quickly shifts to the fairy tale book Mio left for Yūji, and through this book, we can foresee that Mio will return during the rainy season. The film meticulously shows, scene by scene, that Yūji and Takumi genuinely believe this. And when Takumi says, “I want her to feel happy just once that she met me,” even though we know his wish cannot be fulfilled in reality, we emotionally resonate with his hope and dream alongside him.
Finally, the rain begins to fall, and Takumi and Yūji head toward the forest’s ‘Gate of Longing,’ just like in a fairy tale where Mio returns. And unbelievably, they truly meet Mio again there. But this time, Mio has lost all her past memories. This setup serves to make us perceive her not as a returning spirit, but as a person reborn. She listens to Takumi and Yūji recount their past together, and eventually returns to live with them in their home.
This process gives the audience the effect of making it feel like a fantasy closely tied to reality, relatively plausible, rather than a mere fantasy—a futile fantasy with almost no realistic basis or possibility. Later, Takumi recounts his own perspective on his past love story with Mio. The house, which had been in disarray due to his inept housekeeping, is tidied up when Mio—Yūji’s mother—reappears, restoring the image of an utterly happy family.
However, just as we become fully immersed in that happiness, the film returns to the picture book scene, revealing that Mio must leave again once the rainy season ends. Furthermore, Yūji finds Mio’s diary in the secret time capsule box he shared with his mother. After reading it, it becomes clear that Mio knows she must leave this world once the rainy season ends and is preparing for their farewell. Then, in the storybook scene again, the line “The sky cleared, and the girl left” is read aloud. They stand once more before the ‘Gate of Longing’, and Mio is gone. In other words, Yūji and Takumi return to their everyday reality, leaving behind those miraculous six weeks with Mio.
After her departure, Takumi reads Mio’s diary, and the audience learns new truths she never shared or revealed to him. It is revealed that Mio had also harbored a secret crush on Takumi since high school and had foreseen her own future, adding a deeper layer of fantasy to the story. The film quietly concludes by showing Takumi living with Yūji, who has become a high school student again.
In this way, to maximize its fantastical quality, the film interweaves Yūji and Takumi’s present and past, along with the miraculous events that befell them, through cross-cutting with the story from the fairy tale book. This technique makes the audience believe that a scene from the storybook has manifested in the real world. It allows events that seem possible only in a supernatural, fictional realm—or events that couldn’t exist in reality—to be emotionally accepted as natural, thereby maximizing the film’s fantasy effect. Yūji finds a time capsule box in the forest where the ‘Gate of Longing’ exists, and Mio’s diary inside that box becomes the key to unraveling the cause and secrets of the fantastical events unfolding in the film.
Another reason I want to call ‘Now, I’m Going to Meet You’ a fantasy film is because of its device of ‘hesitation’. When someone who only knows the natural law—that the dead cannot return—encounters a supernatural event where a deceased person comes back to live with them, we are constantly made to hesitate. Is Mio, who has lost her past memories, truly Yūji’s mother in human form? Or is she a phantom visible only to them in an illusion? Or perhaps a spirit? Or another woman resembling Mio? And they struggle over whether to accept it as reality or dismiss it as a miracle or illusion. This fulfills one of the key conditions of the fantasy genre: compelling the reader to hesitate between natural and supernatural explanations for an event.
Furthermore, in this film, the ‘Gate of Longing’ in the forest serves as a conduit connecting reality and illusion. First, in the forest, they meet Mio again and then bid her farewell once more. The forest is a space akin to a passageway that carries them into the fantasy world and then returns them to the real world. This setup is a device frequently found in other fantasy films. For example, in ‘The Chronicles of Narnia,’ the wardrobe appears as a medium connecting the real and fantasy worlds, enabling the characters to experience the fantasy. In Spirited Away, the characters also enter the fantasy world by taking a wrong turn through an old tunnel and return to reality via the same tunnel. In Now, I’m Going to Meet You, the forest similarly serves this mediating role, maximizing the film’s fairy-tale and fantasy atmosphere and making the audience feel as if they are empathizing with and experiencing this mediation alongside the characters.
Rather than blatantly revealing fantastical elements, the film strives to rework fantasy into something plausible within reality. The characters appearing in the film are uncommon individuals, possessing certain shortcomings compared to ordinary members of society. While each carries their own flaws, they harbor a more genuine love than others and practice pure affection. Through these flawed characters, who seem somewhat isolated from the real world, the audience comes to believe that the film’s premise—such as that of ‘I’m Going to Meet You Now’—might actually be possible.
Furthermore, the forest, which serves as a bridge between reality and fantasy, is clearly situated apart from the everyday reality space where people live in the film. It is presented on screen like a secret garden. Such a place instills in the audience a sense of foreboding that something mysterious is about to happen. Ancient people imagined and believed forests to be the dwelling place of all gods, and some even believed the universe itself originated within them. Therefore, Mio’s appearance in the forest functions less as a sudden, out-of-place presence and more as a narrative device. It allows us to believe, much like a scene from a childhood fairy tale, that the couple’s sincere love moved the gods, who then temporarily returned Mio with their help.
Furthermore, the ‘Gate of Longing’ installed in the forest serves as another background device that subconsciously persuades the audience of the fantasy element that the living world and the afterlife are connected through this gate. The film also presents several clues supporting the assumption that all these events did not occur solely within a dream, or within an individual’s fantasy. First, Mio, knowing she would return once the rainy season ended, pre-orders and reserves birthday cakes at a bakery near her home until Yuuji turns 18. The scene in the film’s opening where the 18th birthday cake is delivered to Yuuji is a powerful moment suggesting their past experiences were not mere illusions or the tricks of a spirit.
Furthermore, after she departs, when Mio asks Takumi’s female coworker to take good care of her son and husband, the coworker’s astonished reaction—“How can a dead person reappear?”—suggests Mio has returned not merely as an apparition visible only to her family, but as a human being existing in the real world.
Thus, ‘I’m Coming to Meet You’ possesses the outward attributes of a melodrama about familial love. Yet within this narrative of love, it invites us to imagine that fairy-tale and fantastical events can occur in reality. Despite the unfolding situations seeming utterly impossible in reality, the film blurs the line between reality and fantasy, leaving the audience confused and simultaneously hesitant. These fantastical elements not only provide us with fresh emotional resonance but also vicariously fulfill our desire to care for someone and build a happy family. Furthermore, it offers the appeal of a fantasy film that temporarily escapes the real world—where only precise laws exist and rational order reigns supreme—and instead presents a somewhat deviant narrative that subverts the established order.
Therefore, I wish to define ‘Now, I’m Going to Meet You’ not merely as a melodrama with fantasy attributes, but as a fantasy film imbued with melodramatic genre elements. In my view, a fantasy film is a form of ‘dream’ where the psychological states or desires commonly held by those experiencing such fantasy come to us as vividly as the real world, visually re-created before our eyes. The shared longing and guilt the protagonists in ‘Now, I’m Going to Meet You’ feel towards Mio recreates their desires in the real world like a fairy tale. The audience, through the medium of the fantasy film, experiences a vague reunion in an imaginary world with a loved one or someone they miss, whom they can no longer meet in reality. And while experiencing this supernatural phenomenon, the audience is granted the role of temporarily fulfilling their own dreams through this film.
