My Dad and Mr. Ito 2016

Thirty-four-year-old Aya Yamanaka Juri Ueno leads a quiet life in a small Tokyo apartment with her partner, Mr. Ito Lily Franky, a man twenty years her senior who is divorced and works in a school cafeteria. They had met years earlier while both working at a convenience store. One day, Aya’s brother Kiyoshi Tomoharu Hasegawa asks her to look after their father for the next six months. Aya declines, explaining that she no longer lives alone—a fact her brother hadn’t realized. When Aya returns home, she finds that her father has already arrived.

Her father, a retired teacher, disapproves of Aya’s relationship with Mr. Ito and also grumbles about her job at a bookshop. The mounting pressures of caring for their father and managing his children’s schooling weigh on him and his wife, Saeko Eri Watanabe. Over difficult months, Aya begins to understand her father a little better, and he grows more attached to Mr. Ito, eventually referring to him as his son-in-law. When Aya’s father disappears, it is Mr. Ito who tracks him to their family’s old home outside Tokyo.

Taking Aya and her brother to the old house, Mr. Ito leaves them there for the night, hoping they will be able to resolve their differences. The plan only partly succeeds; the father wishes to stay, yet a bolt of lightning strikes the old fruit tree standing in the garden, and both the tree and the house burn down.

Aya’s father moves back in with Aya and Mr. Ito, yet soon reveals that he has found a place in a retirement home. When he leaves, Mr. Ito encourages Aya not to let her father go through this alone. He will be waiting. The film closes with Aya running after her father, a quiet, hopeful moment that underscores a fragile family bond tested by time, pride, and circumstance.