Director – Yoshitaka Mori, Screenplay – Lion Hitoshizuku, Based on the Novel Parallel World Love Story (1995) by Keigo Higashino, Producers – Nobuyuki Iinuma & Satoko Ishida, Photography – Takahiro Haibara, Music – Goro Yasukawa, Production Design – Norifumi Ataka. Production Company – Shochiku/Nippon TV Movies.
Each day Takashi Tsuruga catches the train to Shimabashi where he has becomes obsessed with a beautiful girl he sees on the passing train. He is then startled when his best friend Miwa introduces that same mystery girl as his girlfriend Mayuko Tsuno. Takashi avoids the two of them as he tries to supress the feelings he has for Mayuko. As he and Mayuko spend some time together, he allows these feelings to come out. At the same time as this occurs, Takashi has settled into a successful career in the sciences and Mayuko is his live-in girlfriend. Takashi is confused at having two conflicting sets of memories about this. In the latter life, he asks the question of what has happened to Miwa who appears to have vanished altogether.
Parallel World Love Story was the fourth film from Japanese director Yoshitaka Mori. Mori has made worked in film and tv since the early 2000s, including directing the films 108 (2008), Space Brothers (2012) where two brothers try to fulfil a dream of going into space, and Satoshi: A Move for Tomorrow (2016).
The title Parallel World Love Story is a misnomer. The term ‘Parallel World’ suggests some type of alternate reality such as an Alternate Timeline or Alternate History-type story. For a time, this is what Parallel World Love Story allows you to think it is going to be. The scenes with Yuta Tamamori on the subway longing for the mystery girl he sees in passing recall something of Sliding Doors (1998), which is a genuine parallel world story in that it tells two different outcomes of Gwyneth Paltrow’s life dependent on whether she catches a train or not.
Yuta Tamamori (r) and his parallel world love Riho Yoshioka (l)
However, there is no such here, just Yuta Tamamori leading two separate lives, one where he is envious of his best friend Shota Sometani having found a girlfriend who happens to be his dream girl Riho Yoshioka and a parallel story where he and Riho are in a relationship and living together. What this does remind is of another film very adjacent to Sliding Doors and the spate of films that came out around the same time, namely Passion of Mind (2000) in which two Demi Moores live on opposite sides of the world both dreaming that they are the other and neither sure which is the real one. There is the same sense of two dreamers dreaming an alternate life of the other going on here.
However, Parallel World Love Story reaches an ending that reveals none of the above is true – there are no parallel worlds, no dual lives – and that there is a purely mundane, if far-fetched scheme involving Altered Memory. It fits together as an okay, even tragic story about love triangles with an improbable SF twist in terms of explanation. Everything comes together with some affect towards the end and there are times where Yoshitaka Mori lets you feel Yuta’s longing, and yet the rest of the film drags.
