Two Seasons, Two Strangers

Two Seasons, Two Strangers is not only about two seasons – summer and winter – and two strangers in each part, but also about two languages, two generations, two landscapes, two colour palettes, two kinds of fish, and two levels of virtuality.

A writer, Lee, diligently sketches her story with a pencil in a notebook – writing in Korean. This is followed by the image of Nagisa, a girl from the city, asleep in the back seat of a car before waking up and wandering alone along the Japanese coastline. It is only later that we realise Nagisa, along with Natsuo, the boy she encounters by the sea, is a character in the screenplay emerging from that very notebook.

Here begins the film’s magic: the written word conjures life and images, in turn, imbue words with flesh and blood. Sho Miyake is a master of intricately intertwining narrative possibilities, of anticipating audience expectations only to artfully subvert them. As we follow Nagisa and Natsuo – both visiting relatives, both listless in the countryside – they venture into the sea on a typhoon day, rain pouring down in torrents. We feel a creeping dread. «Fish went that way – further out», the girl says, and the boy waves goodbye before diving deeper.

At this very moment, the film pulls us out – abruptly, teasingly – and into a screening room. Lee now stands beside an audience watching the film she has scripted. Seconds later, we are returned to the sea: the girl, soaked and alone, stares out at the waves where the boy has vanished, and murmurs: «You look great». Then, once again, we are drawn back – this time into a Q&A with the film’s director and writer.

Our moment of anxiety – first intensified, then released – is gently mocked, and with that, Two Seasons, Two Strangers enters its second season, at the exact midpoint, with surgical precision. The professor who organised the Q&A passes away unexpectedly, and Lee inherits a camera from his collection. With this camera in hand, she begins to document the world around her – unaware that it will later serve as evidence of her playful complicity in a small act of transgression. At last, she steps into a narrative of her own: in a snow-covered village, she stumbles upon a desolate guesthouse, run by Benzo, an eccentric middle-aged man who harbours a lingering resentment toward his ex-wife for taking away their daughter.

In a delicately palpable way, the film’s two-part structure functions not only contrapuntally – as a contrast between arcs of seasons and life, between coming-of-age and midlife reckoning – but also as a mirror, forming a cyclical continuum of time and space: porous, fluid, and interwoven, where lives seep into one another. As in all natural cycles – summer yielding to winter, life burgeoning and death arriving without warning – new, fresh relationships begin, while older ones linger with unresolved wounds; a new story rises just as another becomes a film on screen. This sense of cyclicality is deeply rooted in the island’s history, evoked through black-and-white still images of fishermen and their families: carrying nets on their heads, washing fish, gutting them at the shoreline, bringing seaweed home – generation after generation.

While hormonal energy animates the youthful connection between Nagisa and Natsuo – epitomised by their reckless swim – something more fitting to middle-age emerges in winter, between Lee and Benzo: also hot-headed, yet platonic in their complicity. Their bond, devoid of romance, is expressed instead through a small act of rebellion – stealing a carp from Benzo’s ex-wife on a whim. The morphing, re-embodiment, and reincarnation of characters, through pursuits of fish, becomes both a gesture of resistance to change and an embrace of it – an extension, an aftermath, and an eternal return that transcends binary logic.

This cyclical texture is bound together by Hi’Spec’s understated score – minimalist, austere, yet quietly sweet and tender. Stripped of vibrato, embellishment, or pronounced phrasing, its meditative quality unfolds in simple legato notes, sparse piano textures, and child-like melodic fragments. Only in the film’s closing credits are we treated to beats and bass – rhythmic loops that gently ease us out of the reverie.

In such an anti-sentimental gesture, the film is refreshingly sober, serenely wise – much like Yoshiharu Tsuge’s manga Mr. Ben and his Igloo, A View of the Seaside, upon which it is based. Grounded in realism, yet frequently veering into surreal moments of hyperreality, Miyake’s cinema continues his quiet exploration of people who do not quite fit into mainstream Japanese society – as seen in And Your Bird Can Sing (2018), Small, Slow But Steady (2022), and All the Long Nights (2024). He summons a world that acknowledges human oddity with tenderness, granting it space and voice.

Like the voiceover of the off-screen video installation in the museum visited by Nagisa at the beginning, we learn of the fishing village women who lost husbands and fathers to the sea – how they would mourn for three years, place a stone Buddha on a seaside hill, and offer it water and flowers daily. Just as the light colours of youth – a pale blue dress, a bright red Hawaiian shirt – eventually give way to a black suit, and just as words give way to images, so too do youth and mourning possess their own distinct and inevitable durations, in these two seasons and beyond.