Trailer for Bare Essence of Life, which screened at the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival.
The 25-year-old Yojin (Matsuyama Kenichi) lives with his grandma in a village in Aomori Prefecture. He’s training himself to grow vegetables with the help of audio tapes left by his late grandpa and tries to organize his days systematically... but Yojin’s head is wired differently. “Not broken,” he says, “just different.” Yojin’s life changes the day he meets Machiko, the primary-school teacher newly arrived from Tokyo. It’s love at first sight. But Machiko is still traumatized by the decapitation of her boyfriend in a car-smash, not to mention the fact that he was with another woman at the time. Yojin, though, is nothing if not persistent, and decides that exposure to pesticide will make him stronger and more desirable. He goes on persisting even after the local doctor has pronounced him clinically dead, and the kids start calling him “Zombie”…