Japan’s remaining-life romances, the genre behind Crying Out Love in the Center of the World and Let Me Eat Your Pancreas, have trained audiences to brace for a farewell. One Year to Live, Buy a Man, Hiroki Kazama’s Netflix adaptation of Toriko Yoshikawa’s novel, closes three years past the deadline in its title instead. Yui Katakura (Ko Shibasaki) is alive, still married to the host she paid for, and the deal that bound them has become something neither of them wants to cancel.

Money was always the engine. Yui is an office worker in her forties who has organised her life around saving; told she has cervical cancer, she decides not to be treated. When a pink-haired host who calls himself Ryuma, real name Yoshitaka Sena (Eiji Akaso), asks her to lend him the money for his father’s hospital bill, she buys his time instead. By Christmas she is proposing marriage at his club, offering her entire estate if he stays with her until she dies, as the recaps by Japan’s ciatr and Moviedelic set out.

Why does Yui choose to live?

The 720,000-yen arrangement cracks when families enter it. Yui hides her diagnosis from her father and from the stepmother who once threw away a quilt left by her late mother. Sena’s sister Nachi (Yui Narumi) tells her she is disgusting for using money to control people. When Sena discovers Yui is refusing treatment, she tells him it would suit him better if she died sooner, and he walks out.

Days later she collapses with abdominal pain. Her coworker Maruyama (Naomi Nishida), sent by Yui’s ex-boss Ikuyama, tells Sena she has stopped coming to work, and he finds her at home. Her confession is the real turn: having spent months preparing to die, she is now afraid of wanting to live, and afraid that surviving would cheat Sena of the inheritance. “It’s a problem for you too, isn’t it?” she asks, in ciatr’s transcription. His answer drops the contract altogether: “I don’t want you to die. I want you to live.”

What the last scene means

A brief narration covers what follows: a total hysterectomy, then chemotherapy. Three years later Yui is in remission and still goes for regular checkups. She has made peace with Nachi, who runs a food truck with Sena; the French site Ayther notes it serves omurice, their father’s signature dish. Yui, who once avoided people, has a wider circle than before she fell ill, and has taken up patchwork again, a craft Ayther ties to her late mother.

The detail that carries the ending is on the wall. The signed divorce papers from their arrangement stay stuck up in the couple’s now brighter home, kept, Moviedelic and Ayther explain, as a way out should either of them ever need one. Neither has used it. In Yoshikawa’s novel, which won the Shimase Romance Literature Prize, the form is simply put away; Yoshikazu Okada’s screenplay keeps it in plain sight.

Netflix released the film worldwide on November 5.

For a woman who planned her old age down to the last yen, the final contract in the house is one she could tear up any day and doesn’t. The film never cures Yui of being careful; it gives her something worth spending on.

Tags: Netflix, Japanese cinema, ending explained, Eiji Akaso, Ko Shibasaki, One Year to Live, Buy a Man