"Deep in the Valley," which was made in downtown Tokyo and appears to have had a budget of ¥5 plus, probably, a box of persimmons for all involved (random gifts are very downtown), is an accident. And I mean that in a good, romantic way.
There's the romance of street punk Hisaki (a stand-out performance from Yuki Nomura) and Kaori (Mayu Sato), but also the romance surrounding the famous five-story pagoda at Yanaka Cemetery, originally built in 1644 and destroyed by fire in 1957.
The film might have been an accident (more later), but it was no accident that the beacon of all things traditional in this shitamachi (old downtown) neighborhood was burned down; a laundryman and his mistress committed double suicide by setting themselves on fire inside the pagoda.
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