❍ This article was originally published in Chinese on Funscreen, Issue 793, 2025.

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"I'm in a cage of words. Maybe travel is about trying to get away from words."

So says Lee, a screenwriter played by Shim Eun-kyung, in Miyake Sho's latest feature Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025). I believe the film itself is Miyake's attempt to escape and distance himself from language and text.

Using a classic 3:4 aspect ratio, Two Seasons, Two Strangers opens with Lee writing in a notebook: "Summer, seaside. A car at a dead end." As she finishes writing, off-screen sound precedes the image; we hear the crashing of waves before the visual shifts from Lee's writing to the scene she has penned. From the start, Miyake clearly establishes his framework—a narrative structure of writing and nested layers, a restricted square-like aspect ratio, and pre-determined temporal and spatial settings.

We then see Nagisa (played by Kawai Yuumi) visiting a museum in a seaside village, looking at archival images of the local fishing community. She follows a quiet path to the shore, as if walking into the story of those archival photos. From the settings in Lee's notebook to the historical images Nagisa observes, the characters seem to follow a "frame" or a pre-set blueprint. As viewers reading the story Lee has constructed, we wait for the narrative, for fictional encounters to happen, and for the plot to unfold. For Miyake, this is a film about filmmaking; for the audience, it is a viewing experience about the act of viewing.

The Japanese title, Tabi to Hibi ( 旅與日子 ; Travel and Days), juxtaposes "travel" and "daily life." It reminds me of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a mentor and friend to Miyake. In Hamaguchi's film, "coincidence" and "imagination" are juxtaposed; "coincidence" represents the scripted "incidental" moments characters experience, while "imagination" is the true "coincidence" of cinematic magic—moments where the viewer, projecting emotion onto characters within a scripted plot, is touched by a magical, unspoken subtext.

In Miyake's story, "travel" and "daily life" function similarly. "Travel" is the driving force of the film's two segments: it is the catalyst for Lee's journey in the second half, and the motif she explores in the "film-within-a-film" she is writing. Travel provides the kinetic energy that moves the story forward and serves as the audience's preconceived framework. The "randomness" of travel actually occurs within accurately constructed fictional arrangements. It is precisely during such a journey that characters naturally encounter "daily life" outside the frame.

"Daily life" is inherently a concept of "fixity." How does it occur within a scripted, narrative "travel" to become organic flowing "motion"?

Reflecting on Miyake's body of work, the interplay between "motion" and "fixity," and the act of leaving a narrative framework only to return to it, is at the core of his storytelling. His debut feature Good for Nothing (2010) follows a group of teenagers working for a security company after graduation, wandering through the snowy Hokkaido countryside and seaside. The characters are almost idle, and the plot seems useless, yet many trivial things happen. Handheld long takes shake as the boys move forward, occasionally overexposed or out of focus. The pure white snow becomes a still and "fixed" background, making the characters' movements seem to happen in a white stage set within a realistic environment. Their constant "motion" becomes the narrative frame, while the stillness of the snowy landscape occasionally makes one feel the characters have left reality and the stifling narrative of useless youth.

This is also evident in Miyake's documentary series Diary Without Words (2014-2019), which can be seen as a personal documentary version of Two Seasons, Two Strangers from a decade ago. With a shaky phone camera and a non-linear timeline, Miyake alternates between fixed observations—busy streets, crowds, shimmering lakes, sunrises—and making his body the camera, brushing through tall grass or snowy streets. The "motion" of travel is both the recording method and the visual language; the destination is daily life. Through the accumulation of boredom and the abruptness of jump cuts, he creates a rhythm like a fast walker's breath—both moving and fixed. Miyake attempts to present a dynamic balance between "travel" (旅) and "daily life" (日子).

As Lee realizes, "travel is about trying to get away from words." How does a film that balances "motion" and "fixity" escape words? Miyake is skilled at processing texts. In Two Seasons, Two Strangers, the two layers of text include his adaptation of two manga works by Yoshiharu Tsuge and the screenplay Lee is writing. The first half of the film is an adaptation of the manga A View of the Seaside (海辺の叙景), which Lee has fictionalized.

Tsuge's manga is inherently cinematic. He doesn't spend much time introducing characters; the first frame of A View of the Seaside is a giant wave crashing on the shore with black silhouettes of people playing, followed by mid-range shots of a boy. When the boy and girl meet, Tsuge alternates between close-ups and wide shots, often depicting them as black silhouettes when viewed from behind. Miyake's adaptation captures the randomness and slightly eerie, spiritual nature of their encounter by placing these mysterious characters into a fiction-within-a-fiction.

The manga oscillates between establishing wide shots and close-ups, making characters appear as distinct individuals one moment and blurred symbols or shadows the next. This mirrors our feeling when watching Nagisa's encounter in the film: an alienated reality, another layer of reality existing under a fictional premise. We try to enter the characters' emotional flow, yet we also pull back to wonder: What is the screenwriter Lee trying to express?

If reading Tsuge's manga involves imagining what isn't drawn within the limited panels, then in Two Seasons, Two Strangers, the continuous moving images of those scenes and dialogues actually create a sense of fragmentation. Whether it is the characters' mundane language or their shared feeling of being "trapped," when the segmented text is transformed into continuous moving images, the emotional disconnect is highlighted. Miyake places the audience in scenes as abrupt as giant waves, translating the "void" in trivial conversations and the gap between character and creator. In the first half of the film, as we follow the characters through their continuous environment, we paradoxically experience Lee's creative struggle and emotional stagnation.

Miyake is a master of adaptation (of text), specifically finding harmony between continuous and fragmented emotions. Small, Slow But Steady (2022) was adapted from Keiko Ogasawara's autobiography. The first-person narrative was transformed into Keiko's diary in the film. Life, segmented by days, forms Keiko's character growth curve. Interestingly, within this "motion," there is much "stillness" and "fixity." Shots of Keiko standing under bridges at night or day, silent but surrounded by ambient sound, perfectly illustrate the coexistence of motion and stillness.

At the end of Small, Slow But Steady, Keiko—who is non-verbal in the story—provides an off-screen narration that turns her short, fragmented diary entries into a long prose. The dynamic montage allows the audience to re-experience Keiko's "fixed" daily life, finally feeling its kinetic energy through the layers of translation across text, language, sound, and camera. In the end, we, the "post-pandemic" audience, see our own bodies—trapped and fragmented yet trying to keep moving—in the wide shots of the flowing city.

Similarly, And Your Bird Can Sing (2018) adapts a novel by Yasushi Sato. While the film retains the "I" (Boku) character (played by Tasuku Emoto), the first-person perspective shifts between "I" and his roommate Shizuo. The viewer oscillates between resonating with the protagonist and feeling detached from a third-person character. This diffusion of the "I" allows us to feel the elongation of time. For example, we see different first-person "I" experiencing different things in the same night—playing billiards all night, first dates where no one wants to go home—where countless narrative flickers within a fixed time frame.

Understanding Two Seasons, Two Strangers through this lens, Lee's words and Tsuge's manga are the "fixed frames." By turning them into a "film-within-a-film," Miyake translates text and images into motion and shifts language from Lee's native Korean to the characters' Japanese. These settings throw the audience into Lee's state of "entrapment" and "fragmentation" at the edge of language. Nagisa and the boy she meets seem connected yet remain like shadows in the landscape.

The travels of Nagisa and Lee are mostly shown through fixed close-ups or establishing shots of snowy landscapes and empty beaches, creating an illusion that the characters are vacuum-sealed against the background, like figures on a stage. The distance between the realistic environment and the fictional characters is perhaps where the creative struggle lies.

Before the film shifts to the seaside, we hear the sound of waves—a transparent ambient sound. This reminds me of Miyake's penchant for placing fixed-camera cityscapes at the end of his films, where the still shot captures a space marked by the flow of time. These endings point to a "post-" state (post-pandemic, post-trauma) where the body has not yet arrived.

In Two Seasons, Two Strangers, Miyake uses travel to present a "post-creative" or "post-text" state. The characters' bodies are like silhouettes or symbols, carrying the author's imagination while remaining alienated from the realistic environment. When the "film-within-a-film" reaches its climax, it abruptly ends with a black screen and credits, playfully challenging the audience's cognition. This "blackness" represents the exit from the theater for the audience, but for Lee, it is a reminder that she must leave—and so she travels.

This darkness evokes the darkness in All the Long Nights or the sense of nighttime in And Your Bird Can Sing. These "blacks" serve as the boundary between the "present" and the "post." In Two Seasons, Two Strangers, the "post" state is more direct: the black screen after the film-within-a-film is followed by a Q&A session. The post-screening session becomes a bridge between two journeys, linking fiction and reality. In a Q&A, creators use language to explain images. The "post-image" phase brings back text and symbols. Miyake questions this linguistic framework: if we must eventually explain images with words, how can we avoid falling back into the "cage of words?"

For Lee, language and text are insufficient to solve her "entrapment." She picks up an unfamiliar medium—a film camera—passes through a dark tunnel, and arrives in a vast white world to start over. The scene of the train passing through the tunnel strikingly resembles a segment from Diary Without Words, where Miyake himself holds the camera. The pitch-black tunnel reflects the filmer and the interior of the carriage until a small white square of light at the exit grows to occupy the entire frame, leading to a world of light.

The two "blacks" in Two Seasons, Two Strangers—the end of Lee's film and the train tunnel—act like black glass, reflecting the creator during moments of extreme stillness and transition. Lee's journey is full of scripted "coincidences," yet her realistic experience eventually echoes her fictional screenplay. We come to realize that seeking balance between "motion" and "stillness" through travel is about seeing one's own role within a fictional narrative and finding the light of one's existence at the end of a medium's darkness. While such a meta-story isn't new, the film is touching because the translation of "texts" brings about a dynamic balance between "travel" and "daily life," much like the rhythm of a train entering and exiting a tunnel. The purpose of travel is to escape one medium—the light before the tunnel—and head toward another light, another medium.

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