Yuya Ishii’s The Great Passage is Japan’s Oscar entry

(Thanks to glimmer for the tip)

(NipponCinema) The seven-member Japan Movie Producers Association has nominated Yuya Ishii’s The Great Passage to represent Japan in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 86th Academy Awards. The selection makes 30-year-old Ishii the youngest director ever to represent Japan in the category.

The film is based on Shion Miura’s novel Fune wo Amu which won the 2012 Honya Taishō (literally bookstore award) grand prize. Ryuhei Matsuda plays a salesman at Black Tortoise Bookstore who lands a job editing a massive 240,000-word dictionary due to his instinctive knack for lexicography. After falling for his landlady’s daughter Kaguya (Aoi Miyazaki), he’s tasked with coming up with a suitable definition for the word “love”.

Additional co-stars include Joe Odagiri, Haru Kuroki, Chizuru Ikewaki, Kaoru Kobayashi, and Naoki Matayoshi.

The film was released in Japan on April 13, 2013. It had a fairly brief, but respectable run at the box office for a live-action domestic film ($7M gross according to Box Office Mojo) and consistently gets 4 and 5 star ratings on Japanese sites with user and critic-submitted movie reviews.

The last Japanese entry to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film was Yojiro Takita’s Departures (2008). Since then, nominees have included Ryoichi Kimizuka’s Nobody to Watch Over Me, Tetsuya Nakashima’s Confessions, Kaneto Shindo’s Postcard, and Yong-hi Yang’s Our Homeland.