Profile

• Movie: Closed Note
• Japanese: クローズド・ノート
• Director: Isao Yukisada
• Writer: Shusuke Shizukui (novel), Chihiro Ito
• Producer: Kei Haruna
• Cinematographer Koichi Nakayama
• Release Date: September 9, 2007
• Runtime: 138 min
• Studio: Cine Bazar
• Distributor: Toho
• Language: Japanese
• Country: Japan
• Available Online:

Plot

Kae (Erika Sawajiri), a college student training to be a school teacher, discovers a notebook tucked away in her newly rented apartment. It is the handwritten diary of former tenant, Ibuki Mano (Yuko Takeuchi), a elementary school teacher. She starts to follow Ibuki’s floridly written entries like a Harlequin addict. Ibuki who has more patience for her nauseatingly cherubic pupils than Mother Teresa for the sick, becomes the diffident Kae’s role model. As Kae serializes Ibuki’s love life in her mind, she casts her TV idol in the role of Ibuki’s boyfriend Takashi.

When not strumming her mandolin like a Vermeer portrait, Kae works part-time in a shop specializing in rare fountain pens. And who could have walked in but the most classically chiseled face in Japanese cinema — Yusuke Iseya (“Sukiyaki Western Django”) playing a man named Ryu Ishitobi. He is looking for the right pen for his exhibition though it’s not ink but corny dialogue that flows. It turns out that Ryu has been loitering in Kae’s neighborhood, and she is driven to distraction by expectations of a full-blown romance with his mildly suggestive overtures. Kae eventually summons the courage to confess her love to Ryu, but overhears a crushing truth.