Marriage Vows Exchanged over Letters- ‘The Japanese Wife'

The vast possibilities of the world of men and women come together and tie a knot in this story of a hopeless and pure bond between two strangers, living countries apart. They wrote to each other accidentally, then a chord was struck, and a few letters later they pronounced themselves man and wife. This is a beautifully poetic yet strange tale of pure love between an Indian man and a Japanese woman.

The agony of being in love but with countries apart, Source: Pinterest

Love is the fuel of every soul. Even the most emotionally inert people look for a friendly face or companionship when life goes south. Some find the same satisfaction and love by being spiritual in their own way. But love in the sense of romantic relationships, is truly allocated to the blessed ones. To be in love is to become one soul. One life, two bodies, one love. Then again, true love is a complex phenomenon that requires both experience and endurance to comprehend its meaning and often a whole life drifts by and yet questions remained unanswered.

True love must withstand the test of time and distance. Often time mingles with distance and creates a challenge for the lovers. The contemporary concept of ‘long distance relationships’ is the result of the cross-culture and cross-situational paradigms. Then again the question comes, how does love fare when distance and differences kill the thrill?

The subject of this story explores the similar challenges of long-distance yet pure love. In 2010, Aparna Sen, gem of a director in Indian cinema crafted a breathtaking story of a long-distance epistolary marriage between an Indian Bengali man called Snehmoy and a Japanese woman called Miyage. As peculiar and impossible as it might sound, Snehmoy and Miyage did fall in love and remained faithfully in marital love with each other for 18 years, until the husband dies of a tragedy.

There must be a rarity of wild coincidence when two people come together against the odds of their situation. The protagonists of this movie managed to brave the challenges of distance and culture as their mutual admiration blossomed from their letter exchanging into the sacred bond of marriage.

Sen masterfully  portrays the chasm of the cultures of the protagonists. A coincidence or a stroke of love allows Snehmoy, a Bengali rural teacher and Miyage, a Japanese national woman to become pen pals and after exchanging a dozen or so letters they exchange marriage vows, getting married over words and a promise to be faithful to each other ‘until doing them part’.

The Japanese Wife, Source: Google Images

As the audience progresses into the movie they indulge in its impossibility. Long distance relationships are in trend and now quite an accepted practice. Yet, the act of never meeting each other and marrying over letters, at the same time being faithful to each other despite their geographical and cultural differences, is something else. The knowledge of the English language became the bane of their relationship. Well, that and their instant attraction.

There is something surreal and sacred in this particular tale of true love. The couple while writing their marriage vows letter dress up and attest to each other in their photographs. Due to the void of international courier service, the flowers that Snehmoy sent Miyage withered in the box, yet Miyage looks at the flowers with pure love and wonder and tucks them into her hair. Sen portrays how one embraces the other’s diversity and differences when one is in love, always ready to accept, and fall in love with whatever the other believes in.

The film is a pleasure to savor while heartwrenching to grasp the actual message. It is a tale of love and how it tries to survive in the most turbulent and distanced reality. Snehmoy and Miyage were married and that was that. No matter what society thought of them, they were two adults determined to make the most of their difficult situation and they knew they must make it work as their love deserved to survive, by custom, by stubbornness, or by hunch.