What Kirishima Left Behind
One thing I genuinely missed growing up: after-school clubs. Not the German approximation of extracurriculars—loitering in the park with the neighborhood alcoholics, getting roughed up at the youth center, being cast as a tree in a school play nobody wanted to see. I mean proper clubs. The kind that function as a second family, a social ranking system, a reason to stay past the bell. The kind that run every American teen film and every piece of Japanese high school anime. Germany never quite managed that culture, and I never quite stopped feeling the absence.
The Kirishima Thing—the 2012 film by Daihachi Yoshida—knows exactly how that world works and how fragile it is. Kirishima is the school’s star athlete: volleyball captain, the person whose gravity everyone orbits. Then one day he simply doesn’t show up. No explanation. The social architecture doesn’t collapse immediately, but it starts to wobble. The athletes are confused. Their girlfriends are confused. The film club kids at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy—nerdy, earnest, perpetually overlooked—find that in Kirishima’s absence, something is quietly shifting.
Yoshida builds the film with genuine formal nerve. He keeps looping back to the same stretch of time, the same physical spaces—the roof, the hallway, the gym—but each time through the eyes of someone different. The same afternoon gets three or four passes, each one revealing a detail the previous angle missed. It’s disorienting at first, especially since Yoshida drops you in without a title card or any kind of introduction. But once you’ve mapped who these people are and what they want from each other, the structure starts to pay off in a way that feels almost inevitable.
What the film is really about—beneath the formal cleverness—is the moment you understand that the hierarchies you accepted without question are not laws of physics. They’re just arrangements that happened to hold. Kirishima’s disappearance is the loose thread. Once it’s pulled, the whole thing starts to unravel. The film club kids, who have spent years at the bottom, find the ground shifting in ways they didn’t expect and aren’t sure they wanted.
The cast is uniformly good, all of them young and unguarded in the way that either comes naturally or costs a lot of money to fake. The tonal range is extraordinary—first love, bitter jealousy, obsessive fanaticism, the specific humiliation of being perpetually overlooked by people who didn’t even register they were doing it. There is also, at some point, a zombie subplot, which I will not explain but which earns its place completely.
I watched it in one sitting and felt something at the end I couldn’t quite name. Something about effort and memory and the version of yourself you were at sixteen that you never fully leave behind. The Kirishima Thing won more or less every major prize Japan had to offer the year it came out. That feels about right.