Film Review: Tongue-tied linguist's lexicon of love in The Great Passage
Yvonne Teh
Starring: Ryuhei Matsuda, Aoi Miyazaki, Joe Odagiri
Director: Yuya Ishii
Category: I (Japanese)
The winner of last year's Japan Booksellers' Prize, Shion Miura's charming Assemble the Boats centres on a socially awkward linguistics graduate who finds his calling as a lexicographer assigned to work on a modern living dictionary with 240,000 word entries.
Adapted to film by Yuya Ishii (with a script by Kensaku Watanabe) and retitled The Great Passage, the story begins in 1995, when mobile phones were still a novelty and many homes were without computers - but dictionaries and dictionary work were already losing popularity.
Bespectacled, soft-spoken Mitsuya Majime (Ryuhei Matsuda) is recruited to join the dictionary department of a publishing house after one of its three editors, Araki (Kaoru Kobayashi), retires. While he is as earnest and industrious as his name ( majime means "diligent"), he initially comes across as being out of his comfort zone when tasked with working on a new dictionary, named The Great Passage because it is designed to help users navigate the endless sea of words.
As his more laid-back colleague Nishioka (Joe Odagiri) reports to his girlfriend Remi (Chizuru Ikewaki), "He seems young, out of touch - a virgin."
It's only after a dinner conversation with supportive Take (Misako Watanabe), his elderly landlady of more than 10 years, that Majime realises that, in addition to liking words, his new job as a lexicographer also requires him to use them - by regularly talking to others, including Nishioka and Take's granddaughter, Kaguya Hayashi (Aoi Miyazaki), whom he falls in love with.