License To Live | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1998
A classic Kurosawa ending. A postcard found among the belongings of Yutaka Yoshii, a 24 year old whose decade spent in a coma following a car accident has cast him adrift from his past life. His parents are no longer together, his sister lives overseas, and the family business has long since shut down. Yutaka, a teenage boy thrust suddenly into adulthood, is no longer a priority for his family, and his only guidance as he re-enters society is Fujimori, an old friend of his father’s who runs a small fish farm on the land of what used to be Yutaka’s home. A grubby, world-weary man who drives a flat-back truck piled high with old refrigerators, Fujimori has no obligation to look after Yutaka but takes him in anyway, and gives him the time and the space to build a new life for himself.
On the front of the postcard, a view of the New York City skyline; and on the back, a blank space for writing. There’s a whole world out there for Yutaka to find, a world away from this plot of land on the edge of Tokyo. But this postcard is as close as he’ll get to any of it. His world has become very small, and any idea of a future life, of hopes and dreams and things left to come, has been discarded and forgotten between the pages of a book. Instead, he tries in vain to rebuild an idea of childhood that remains broken beyond repair. This postcard is everything that Yutaka has had taken from him by his accident, and everything he has given away in trying to bring his past back to life. An untravelled world, and stories that won’t ever be written.