君の膵臓をたべたい / I Want to Eat Your Pancreas

(Spoiler alert for people who want to watch the movie!)
[Blog 2]

“君の膵臓をたべたい (Kimi no Suizou wo Tabetai)” or “I Want to Eat Your Pancreas” is an animated film that premiered in Japan September 1, 2018. The story is about a cheerful and popular girl named Yamauchi Sakura, who is diagnosed with a terminal illness in her pancreas. One day, her diary, titled “Living With Dying”, is discovered by her classmate, Shiga Haruki. Haruki is very aloof, and really only cares about reading, and because of his personality, Sakura says that she wants to befriend him. The reason being is because even if he knows her secret, he’ll be able to maintain his composure, and spend time with her like she isn’t dying. The friendship deepens, and soon, Haruki starts to understand human emotions and nature, while Sakura gets the friendship that she wanted and needed before she died. The title of the movie come from a little fact that Sakura tells Haruki; in ancient times, people would eat the diseased body part of someone else so that the diseased person could live. Haruki tells Sakura that he wants to eat Sakura’s pancreas, which is the last thing Sakura sees from Haruki before she’s murdered by a serial killer.

The part of the movie that definitely makes this a melodrama, in my opinion, is towards the end; Sakura’s murder. She was just released from the hospital after a scare, and Haruki had told her that he wants her to live; that he wants to eat her pancreas. He’s waiting for her at the cafe they always meet at, but as hours pass by after his last text to her, there’s no answer. He waits for her until the cafe closes, and then makes his way home, where he sees on the news that Sakura was murdered in the middle of the sidewalk on her way to the cafe. Though the serial killer was briefly mentioned during the first part of the movie, me, as well as other watchers, thought that it was a passing part of the story; it wouldn’t have any outcome in the end. But once we all had hope that Sakura would beat her illness, that Haruki is learning to treasure life with Sakura, she’s suddenly killed. This sort of story, with this exaggerated end, to a character’s life, definitely made it a melodrama to me. When Sakura died, I didn’t want to believe it; it was just so sudden, so emotional.