Startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the
portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future.
Twelve years have passed since Kei's husband, Rei, disappeared and she
was left alone with her three-year-old daughter. Her new relationship
with a married man--the antithesis of Rei--has brought her life to a
numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have
spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to
the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment
in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water
encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find
something.
Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet
tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation
on memory--a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the
relationships between lovers and family members.