Review of the film “Two Seasons, Two Strangers”: Shu Miyake, one of the most precise contemporary Japanese filmmakers

Winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, this delicate diptych from writer-director Sho Miyake is intelligently adapted from two stories by Yoshiharu Tsuge, the legendary and iconic manga artist

By Josh Slater-Williams

Editor’s note: This review was first published during the 2025 Locarno Film Festival. “A Few Futures” will release “Two Strangers, Two Seasons” at New York’s Metrograph on April 24, 2026, followed by a limited rollout in other cities.

According to the CinemaDrame news agency, the film—winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno—is a delicate work by its writer-director, intelligently adapting two stories by Yoshiharu Tsuge, the renowned manga artist.

Sho Miyake is considered one of the most humane and precise filmmakers of his generation in Japan. His recent works, all slow-paced dramas focused on situational relationships, pay close attention to silence—not necessarily calmness. Nearly all of his protagonists are either visibly depressed or grappling with serious anxiety in their lives.

In fact, he is drawn to characters who struggle with loneliness and are, due to specific circumstances, distanced from human connection—conditions that make communication difficult. In “Long Nights Will End,” two office workers with different struggles form a supportive bond to ease their pain. In his understated yet beautifully poetic take on the sports genre in “Small, Slow but Steady,” the young boxer’s silence stems from a real hearing impairment; he lip-reads to understand others while withholding many of his own thoughts.

In Miyake’s latest delicate and finely crafted work (which recently won Locarno’s top prize, the Golden Leopard), “Two Seasons, Two Strangers,” the protagonist’s tendency toward silence is rooted in a period of creative stagnation intertwined with cultural isolation. Lee (Shim Eun-kyung, known for “Train to Busan”) is a Korean screenwriter for film and television suffering from writer’s block, while also trying to maintain her connection to her surroundings in Japan, where she has lived for years.

During a Q&A session, she even becomes anxious when answering the first question, admitting that her interpretation of her own work leads her to believe she may not have any particular talent at all.

Yet in her mind, she is far more articulate and lucid. Japanese is the only language that comes out of Lee’s mouth, but her internal monologues sometimes unfold in her native language—a detail that clearly reflects her deep struggle with the very act of writing itself.

“Some things happen in life that cannot be put into words,” she thinks to herself. “Amazement and awe carry me far away. I want to just stand there, away from words. But words, without fail, always trap me. Everyday life means naming the things and feelings around us and becoming one with them. When I first came to Japan, everything around me was full of mystery and fear. Those things and emotions that were once new are now under the control of words. I am trapped in a cage of words. Perhaps travel is an attempt to escape words.”

Travel, as a way of distancing oneself from the noise of urban life in the hope of finding clarity or meaning, is what drives both of the female protagonists in Miake’s two-part film. In contrast to “Lee,” whose journey takes place in winter, stands “Nagisa” (Yumi Kawai, Namib Desert), a young Japanese woman wandering through a coastal town in summer. By staying away from tourist attractions, she awkwardly forms a connection with “Natsuo” (Mansaku Takada), a man just as lonely, who has come to the area to visit relatives.

Miake’s previous film, The Long Nights End, was an adaptation of a novel by Maiko Seo, and Small, Slow but Steady was loosely based on the biography of boxer Keiko Ogasawara. In Two Seasons, Two Strangers, the writer-director once again draws inspiration from previously published material. While his shift toward adapting manga may at first seem unexpected, the chosen source material aligns perfectly with Miake’s ability to transform mythical narratives into an intimate, human experience.

Yoshiharu Tsuge, a highly influential cartoonist and essayist, is known as the first mangaka to use his personal life as a narrative source, and also one of the earliest to place characters’ inner conflicts at the center of his storytelling—a approach that was uncommon in manga until the late 1960s, even within the gekiga style aimed at adult audiences. His introspective works range from everyday life stories to more overt forms of surrealism, often infused with dreamlike atmospheres, eroticism, and mysterious tension.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers is loosely adapted from two specific short stories by Tsuge. By placing these two unrelated narratives side by side, Miake does not strictly follow the structure of works such as Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District, which interwove three separate short stories by Adrian Tomine. Instead, Miake initially presents “Lee” as the screenwriter adapting Tsuge’s 1967 story “Scenes from a Coast.”

The film opens with an image of “Lee,” seated at her desk, silently trying to figure out how to begin the first scene of her screenplay. Aside from a few brief cuts showing her writing again, roughly the first 35 minutes of Two Seasons, Two Strangers are devoted to a reimagining of the story “Scenes from a Coast,” featuring the same two characters, “Nagisa” and “Natsuo.”

The fleeting encounter between these two lonely young people carries the mood of a chance romantic meeting, and there is a subtle sense of romance in how their relationship takes shape. After their first encounter on a deserted beach, they spend the rest of the day walking and talking, agreeing to meet again at the same spot the next day. As a storm approaches the city, neither of them abandons the plan. Natsuo waits beneath a small shelter while torrential rain surrounds him. When Nagisa arrives, they sit together with the desserts he has brought, both dressed in clothes they would have worn even in sunshine. Nagisa has even prepared her swimsuit under her shirt so she can swim with Natsuo in the rain-soaked sea.

Despite the relatively gentle ending of this segment (and a final line that seems hopeful on the surface), there is an underlying tension in Nagisa and Natsuo’s story that can be read both as happiness and as an unsettling premonition—a mysterious feeling consistent with the inner world of the original creator. For instance, their swimming takes place in the midst of a storm, with the camera itself in the water alongside the actors, visibly shaken by waves and heavy rain. In another moment, their intimacy is partly built on a painful childhood memory Natsuo shares, recalling his experience of seeing the bodies of drowning victims.

Within the world of Two Seasons, Two Strangers, this dark layer of the film-within-a-film reflects the troubled and exhausted psyche of “Lee.” The rest of Miake’s film shows that years after writing her adaptation of Tsuge, Lee remains mentally entangled in the idea of traveling through the story of Nagisa and Natsuo, while also struggling with a creative deadlock on another project—apparently about ninjas. An interesting structural twist introduced by Miake is that Lee herself is, in fact, the protagonist of another Tsuge story: an adaptation of “Mr. Ben and His Igloo.”

In Tsuge’s version, the story follows a male mangaka who travels to a remote village in search of inspiration and stays in a strange, nearly abandoned inn run in a minimal way by a man named Benzo. In Miake’s film, Lee similarly leaves the city to escape mental exhaustion and the aftermath of an unexpected tragedy, taking refuge in a nearly empty mountain inn in a snowy town, also run by Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi). Their initially cold and formal exchanges gradually warm, echoing the dynamics of the earlier story’s characters, including their shared experience of deep loneliness.

The path toward the film’s calm and poetic ending is made more compelling through the subtle performance of Shim Eun-kyung, an actor who, by moving between two languages, is able to express more layered and unspoken emotions without relying heavily on dialogue. In a sense, the character—and the actor herself—steps outside the “cage of words.”

Ultimately, the film suggests that in building the next chapter of life, it may be better to dwell less in one’s thoughts and instead pay attention to the real possibilities around us—rather than blocking forward movement through overthinking and constant articulation of doubt. And, with a subtle reference to a well-known musical piece that, like Miake’s cinema, emphasizes the value of silence, it reminds us that sometimes words are truly unnecessary.

Rating: B+

Two Seasons, Two Strangers premiered at the 2025 Locarno International Film Festival.