When I was playing Little League baseball in Barberton, Ohio, I would often pass by a run-down red-brick building on the way home from practice. Once, I peered inside an open door and saw workers making risque rubber goods, including water bottles with the face and naked figure of Marilyn Monroe (or rather a woman I imagined to be her). Noticing me gazing wide-eyed at the scene, the workers grinned conspiratorially and I scampered away.

Watching Yuki Tanada's "Romance Doll," which unfolds in a similar sex toy workshop, albeit one more technically advanced, I flashed back on this childhood glimpse of a hidden world. Based on Tanada's own novel, the film gets laughs from its setting, while keeping its comedy sympathetic and droll rather than jokey and strident.

Also, when the story takes a serious turn, the transition is grounded in real-life observation, not lazy stereotype. And when it enters the fraught territory of medical catastrophe, it never jerks tears, though it earns them. Finally, in turning its hero into a Henry Higgins figure laboring over an inanimate Eliza Doolittle the film could have descended to the ridiculous, but instead becomes moving, haunting and inspiring. I won't say why.