Vampire movie

With the help of my associates I've been to sneak previews of a couple of the Japanese movies slated for release this summer. This week it was Taiyoh no Uta (A Song to the Sun).

I was a little pessimistic at first when I heard it would be a love story involving a terminally ill young woman. In recent years a plague of soap operas featuring young women dying of leukemia has swept from Korea and Taiwan through the rest of East Asia, and I wasn't looking forward to more of that.

But I became intrigued on learning that this time, the tragic illness is xeroderma pigmentosum, the disorder for whose victims exposure to sunlight is fatal. (In Taiyoh no Uta it's always referred to as XP, rather than its Japanese name of "shokusoteki kampishoh" -- a direct translation of the English name, but without the ambiguity of Greek morphemes.)

An illness where everything's OK as long you only go out at night. Sleep all day. No school. Most teenagers would think it's such a bad deal. But not having experienced the ennui of ordinary daytime life, the heroine Kaoru (played by the 17-year-old singer-songwriter Yui) feels trapped and depressed.

My associates and I had guessed that the film would end with her giving in and walking out into the sunlight Blacula-style. But no, she gets caught by the sun about halfway through, during a Cinderella-esque race back home from her first date ever. The date itself was almost worth the result -- Kaoru's new boyfriend shows her a fabulous time in my own beloved Yokohama, including the particularly dear Minatomirai area.

As many people probably did, I looked for more info about the "XP" disease after seeing the film. It's 10 times more prevalent per capita in Japan than the US, making it a little gimmicky as a plot element here. Some forms of it cause the victim's flesh to rot away after exposure to sunlight. In Taiyo no Uta, though, Yui's character simply starts to lose coordination and then appears in a coffin before we have time to get really worried. The genre demands that -- this is a light movie to entertain teenagers during the brief Japanese summer vacation, and to make them buy Yui's associated album. As such, it's played very safe. Although the boyfriend's favorite pastime is surfing, the logical scene in which he takes Kaoru surfing with him never appears. After all, it would be improper to suggest to the young audience that anyone, even the terminally ill, might do something as Unsafe as surfing at night.