Silence Has No Wings

A boy on the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan catches a butterfly from Nagasaki, at the southern end of the archipelago. His teachers think he bought the insect in a department store and lecture him on his fraud. Meanwhile, a larva of that same butterfly embarks on an often comic and always improbable journey from South to North. On that journey the larva appears (on the screen and, it seems, in the person of model/actress Kaga Mariko) juxtaposed with a series of failed love affairs, traumatic war memories, disrupted smuggling operations, and corrupt political plots. The film ends where it begins, in Hokkaido with another butterfly caught in the boy’s net. —japansociety.org