November 24, 2022

My dearest,

Last night we finally watched the conclusion to one of our favourite pandemic-era series, 30-sai made Dotei Da to Mahotsukai ni Nareru rashii.

If that is a mouthful in its original Japanese, the title is equally unwieldy translated to English: Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!

Perhaps mouthful isn’t quite the right word, given the 30-year-old virgin/wizard’s predicament in the film sequel, not quite being able to consummate his love affair. But we love bashful, clumsy Adachi and his adoring, benevolent Kurosawa all the same.

This time round, the proceedings are more sombre: first, Adachi is transferred to Nagasaki for eight months – a more realistic portrayal of a long distance relationship than the Sathorn-Ladphrao divide in Still 2gether (another pandemic guilty pleasure), we wryly note – and then the couple, reunited after an incident, comes out to their families.

I think of how blessed we are with our most cherished ones: our family and our friends who love and support us. And I think of how crushed you were when I came down with dengue fever a few months ago.

For better or for worse, my dearest, for better or for worse.

I am reminded of these lines from the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez:

“It was the time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”

We are on the shore but there are journeys we shall undertake, more tales we have to tell. More years of delicate cherry blossoms and more beautiful magic between us.

Yours, ever and always.