The existence of so-called black companies that exploit their employees is hardly news here. But the December 2015 suicide of a young female employee of Dentsu — Japan's largest ad agency — focused renewed attention on the work practices that led to her death and are still all too common.
Based on a prize-winning novel by Emi Kitagawa, Izuru Narushima's "To Each His Own" ("Chotto Ima Kara Shigoto Yamete Kuru") is a serious treatment of this theme that flirts with fantasy in its first half but shades to heart-warming melodrama in its second. Save for the scenes of the beleaguered salesman hero (Asuka Kudo) being chewed out by his short-fused boss (Kotaro Yoshida), the story teeters on the edge of impossibility before finally descending into just-so fiction whose solution for karōshi (death by overwork) is the real-life equivalent of winning the lottery — that is, hardly attainable for the majority who have to earn a living in this country rather than the film's idea of paradise.
The salesman is Takashi Aoyama, a new hire who recruits and services clients for a printing company. His boss is a door-slamming, wastebasket-booting terror who not only rips into Aoyama for the smallest error, but also forces him to do long hours of "voluntary" (unpaid) overtime. Finally deciding that life is not worth living, Aoyama is about to fall into the path of a speeding train when he is rescued by a tall, lanky guy in a Hawaiian shirt. Calling himself Yamamoto (Sota Fukushi), he claims to be Aoyama's long-lost classmate.