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Two Seasons, Two Strangers, the latest film by Sho Miyake, opens on Li (Shim Eun-kyung), a South-Korean screenwriter living in Tokyo. Li is currently penning a script for a short film centered on Nagisa (Yuumi Kawai), a restless young woman on a brief vacation in a seaside town who befriends Natsuo (Mansaku Takada), a local, young, and socially withdrawn man. The narrative of Two Seasons, Two Strangers takes place across three particular stories: the first is that of Li’s fictional film; the second involves the death of a film professor whose passing ultimately drives Li to travel; and finally, the third, which comprises the bulk of the film, Li’s arrival to the snowbound Yamagata.
In Yamagta, having failed to secure accommodation in advance, Li wanders into every hotel only to be turned away due to a lack of vacancy. That is, until she’s finally advised to travel to the city’s outskirts. It’s there that Li encounters Ben-zō (Shinichi Tsutsumi), an elder grouch running an inn that’s fallen into dilapidation. But, Ben-zō’s gruff attitude nor the dog-eared quality of the room are enough to turn Li away. Similarly, Li as an unannounced and cosmopolitan stranger raises no suspicion for Ben-zō who, eager for business and companionship, welcomes Li and quickly gets to work, cutting wood, catching fish, and fixing the entryway.
Forced to stay inside by the raging weather, Li and Ben-zō begin conversing, Ben-zō curious to know Li’s approach to writing. Eventually Ben-zō asks if Li would stage her next script at the inn as a means to attract business. She agrees on one account: Ben-zō must reveal more of his private life. Li has taken notice that despite being a family inn, Ben-zō lives and works alone and yet suffused into the space of the building are hints of another life—a child’s art adorns an empty rabbit hutch, and the shoji feature hand-painted trees. Ben-zō balks at Li’s intrusiveness but the conversation nevertheless forms a bond between the two that ultimately pushes Ben-zō towards a drastic act in an attempt to revive his inn and one that will unknowingly inspire Li.
Together, the three stories form a triptych that inform of not only Li’s creative process—the construction of her inner-world—but also of Li’s own subjectivity—her awkwardness, her wanderlust, and her position on the social margins. When an earlier inn proprietor who has turned away Li gives her a map of where she can find a vacant room in Yamagata, she points to a space beyond the page.
During the post-screening Q&A held at the Metrograph theater, Miyake touched upon the inspiration and influence of Yoshiharu Tsuge—the film is an adaptation of two of Tsuge’s works, A View of the Seaside (海辺の叙景) and Mr. Ben and his Igloo (ほんやら洞のぺんさん). Miyake commented on Tsuge’s cinematic compositions and the challenges of capturing Tsuge’s style. Surprisingly absent was any mention of how Tsuge’s work intersects with postwar Japan’s own political-social history and how this may bleed—if at all—into Miyake’s own interpretation.