A review by batrock
Strangers by Taichi Yamada

slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes

3.5

Stay away from this review if you don’t want to know anything about the movie All Of Us Strangers

The Japanese book that became the quite different but excellent All Of Us Strangers is a cheerful ghost story. A recently divorced screenwriter sees two people who look exactly like his parents, who died when he was a child. He can’t help himself; he keeps visiting them. By night, he starts a relationship with the only other woman who lives in his building, which is mainly used as offices.

Strangers isn’t a uniquely Japanese story, but Andrew Haigh took a fairly different tact when he adapted it. It’s the same basic shape, but the emotional pull is completely different, and the narrator of Strangers definitely knows himself. He actually sees and interacts with a plethora of characters and has an active work life, which gets in the way of his desire to dally with ghosts. One thing that Yamada definitely tackles effectively is the nature of the red ribbons of fate that intertwine people, living and dead, and how dynamics change as life progresses. 

Can you remain friends on a personal and professional level with a man who intends to marry your ex-wife? If that man sees you out with ghosts, is he duty bound to intervene lest some darker entity claim you? These social niceties are what drive Strangers as much as Harada’s desire to connect with a facsimile of his parents, to test them to see if they know things they could not know if they were the real deal. It is the interpersonal details that give Strangers its internal glow.

The controversial “twist” to the movie is rendered completely inert by Yamada’s text and its cultural context. The possibility is floated immediately in the book and in Japanese culture it’s not an unreasonable assumption. Strangers is a dreamy sort of book, almost a reverie of revenants, but it never feels like a rug pull is going on. The matter of factness of its approach to the subject material is a great source of its charm. Straight acceptance that you’re involved in a ghost story should be a more common factor in the genre. 

With its literal title, “Summer of the Strange People”, Strangers suggests that all things in this life are transient, that we can derive pleasure and meaning from even the shortest acquaintance. It is a far less lonely book than the movie that it became, yet both of them are well worth your time. Sometimes the concert of two different versions of something is in their dissonance rather than their harmony; try one, then the other, and see if they balance each other out.