Look Back: Enough Said
Look Back chronicles two aspiring manga (Japanese graphic novel) artists, the boisterous Fujino and recluse Kyomoto, who fall into a serendipitous meeting that blossoms into a tight bond. Their personalities first sharing nothing in common akin to a blank manga canvas, yet soon their mutual passion for drawing art brings to life the canvas of their relationship with colour, beauty, laughter and stories of days gone by in bliss.
As they become breakout commercial manga artists in their teens, Fujino and Kyomoto eventually drift apart to set sail for different horizons in adulthood: Fujino forges ahead as full-time manga artist while Kyomoto furthers her craft in art school.
For many of us, that’s how certain chapters in our lives end – swept away by life’s pursuits, forsaking the people once familiar to become faint echoes of a past life.
But sometimes, profound tragedy brings detached relationships back into the fray, like a violent jolt of lightning striking the chords of nostalgia back into your consciousness. It’s what befalls Fujino and Kyomoto after all their years apart and brings their relationship into soul-wrenching rumination.
Their mutual passion for drawing art brings to life the canvas of their relationship with colour, beauty, laughter and stories of days gone by in bliss.
How do we put the pieces back together, when someone that used to be our other half has now been forcefully torn out from a life you already left behind? Can we reconcile with our newfound guilt of leaving the ones we held dear long ago, and not being there when disaster befell them?
When fleeting moments in a long-forgotten time are instantly brought to memory through the tears streaming down our faces,
how we wish time could be travelled,
how we yearn that reality bends to our will,
how we long for a stop to everything,
how we fight those that whisper “move on”,
how we caress the despair that follows us,
how we desire our own end.
Oh how we would suffer for just one more second. But none of that will bring us the future we want, nor the past we had.
All we can do is.. look back.