Is it really Mio coming back from heaven to fulfil a promise? Is it a woman who happens to look like Mio but has a story of her own? Or is everything just the imagination of the father and son? The revelation came, not in the form of a super twist dropped like a like a bomb, but through the last twenty minutes' gentle unfolding of past events that provide answers not only to the mystery of Mio's appearance, but also to many things we have noticed throughout the movie that register subconsciously (only subconsciously) as questions. All the time while watching the movie, alongside with emotionally becoming more and more identified with these three people whom I came to care for, I found a rational part of me that kept assessing how the story would go. As we share the joy of the family reunited as well as the love story of young Taku and Mio through the flash back, the six-week rainy season is mercilessly coming closer and closer to the end.

Through that process, they fall in love a second time (I am assuming at this point that she is indeed Mio). Although in a way she is still a stranger, she seems to accept that she is Mio, and asks Taku to tell her the story of how they first met and fell in love.

The father and son naturally have no problem believing that it is Mio coming back from heaven, and bring her home. When the rain starts, Taku and Yuji find in the woods a woman looking exactly like Mio, who has apparently lost her memory completely. Before her death, however, Mio promised her husband and son that she would come back after a year and stay with them during the rainy season. We are then taken back to the time when Yuji is six, a year after he has lost his mother Mio through illness and is living a life of mutual support and love with his father Taku. The movie starts with a quaint little house nestled in the most idyllically beautiful, lush green countryside, where a shopkeeper of a cake shop delivers a birthday cake to a young man Yuji, who is making breakfast. It is Ima, ai ni yukimasu, however, that is the best romance coming out of Japan and Korea in the last ten years. 'Poetic' director Shunji Iwai brought a breath of fresh air with Hana and Alice (2004). In the meantime, Japanese romances are making a come back. His still widely acclaimed Classic (2003) had in fact faded somewhat, and not even bringing back Jun Ji-hyun from MSG could save Windstruck (2004). The onslaught however soon ran out of steam, even for works by MSG's director Kwak Jae-young. While at least half a dozen made it big in the Pacific region, the most successful worldwide has to be My Sassy Girl (2001). A few years ago, Korean romances took over the market for the romance genre which had been held uncontested by Japan.

Ima ai ni yukimasu osteomyelitis