Rewrite

She’s in her final year at high school. He’s the new boy, a little distant and mysterious. After he surprises her by appearing out of nowhere in the school library, he asks if she can keep a secret. He’s from the future – the year 2311, to be precise. He’s visiting this time after reading about it in a book, one copy of which somehow survived the ages. Naturally, she falls in love with him. After all, this is Japan.

The first third of Daigo Matsui’s latest work, which screened as part of Fantasia 2025, sticks perfectly to form. Miyuki (Elaiza Ikeda) is sweet and kind, eagerly taking on the task of showing Yasuhiko (Kei Adachi) around her home town. She laughs affectionately as he struggles with primitive technologies like the school water fountain. She watches wistfully when his thoughts drift off as if he’s troubled by something in the future that he won’t disclose. She buys him a blue windchime, choosing a red one for herself. He gives her a pill which, he says, will allow her to jump ten years through time herself, just for a few minutes, so she can see what it’s like. In an urgent situation, she gives it a try, meeting her future self. Then the time comes to say goodbye and, convinced that she’ll never see him again, she discloses her plan to write the book that will bring him to her, creating a time loop.

The person she does expect to see again is herself. Ten years later, now a successful author and happily married to a man named Sho (Atsushi Shinohara), she makes sure that she’s in the right place at the right time, setting everything up just as she remembers it. But her younger self doesn’t show up.

This is the first sign that something is seriously askew in a story so packed full of twists that you will need to be paying close attention from the start to catch them all. A high school reunion from which one classmate is tragically missing gives Miyuki the chance to start exploring possibilities, but each discovery she makes leads to further questions as it gradually becomes clear how much her love of fiction may have addled her thinking and restricted her understanding of how the real world works. Old friends contribute unexpected perspectives and the sweet-natured Sho, to whom she has told very little, begins to worry as her high school affair once again becomes the centre of her emotional life.

Not just a clever puzzle, Rewrite challenges the cosy nostalgia of much popular Japanese romantic fiction, along with the relationship that many adults have with their own memories of high school, asking how much they have been coloured in retrospect by genre tropes. Miyuki must examine her own illusions and acknowledge the scale of her assumptions. There is comedy in the film’s observation of how easily grown adults are drawn back into petty childhood obsessions. It becomes, in a way, a coming of age tale, as Miyuki re-evaluates her present and what matters to her about the future.

We don’t need time travel to get caught in loops. A rewrite can provide a chance to escape from a stale narrative. Haruka Hôjô and Makoto Ueda’s clever script presents an opportunity for a whole genre to move forwards.

Reviewed on: 19 Jul 2025