It’s not too late to learn and create and express yourself and connect with others. That is the hope that this story posits, at least, and I appreciate it.

This was so great, and such an unconventional or, at least for me, unexpected storyline, an odd couple friendship and late-in-life realistic adventure. Umiko is a 65-year-old recently widowed woman who decides one day to go to the cinema for the first time in years and watch a random movie called Die Max¹, where she meets an intense and mysterious nonbinary 20-year-old art school kid who points out that she is watching the reactions of the other theatergoers to the film rather than watching the film itself, and challenges her to become a filmmaker and become the creator of the audience’s reactions. This challenge crashes over her like a wave, and through other serendipitous choices soon enough she finds herself enrolled in film school and in an ambiguous friendship/collaboration with this kid who coincidentally(?) shares her name.

I really liked this. Not sure it would hold interest for many teens, and so I’m not likely to add it to our Sora collection, but that’s okay, I kind of already knew that. It holds interest for me, and I’ve already put the second volume on hold. I don’t have to pretend I only read manga for collection development research, I can just read it if I like it, too, and in cases like this I definitely like it.

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1. I wish Die Max was a real movie I could see; I don’t think it is, though. ↩︎