茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS
茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS
[ESSAY] “Things immortal: Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever” by Peixuan Xie
Kohei Igarashi (director). Super Happy Forever (2024), 95 min.
Everybody is doomed to grieve one thing or another at some point, you included.
A man on the beach looks for a red hat that belonged to his late wife. With him, he carries an old photograph of the woman wearing that hat. The summery Atami seaside is windy. Her name was Nagi, the quiet of the wind. The year is 2023, as the world slowly awakens from a collective nightmare.
The man is grieving. Everybody is doomed to grieve one thing or another at some point, you included.
You check into the room where Nagi once stayed at the same hotel, Room 819, across the corridor from your own room back then. She was just a stranger to you. Your friend Miyata is there with you, but you do not speak much, though not because you particularly want to be alone either. In any case, he is here for his own reasons too, attending a seminar run by a group called “Super Happy Forever”, which you find cultish. If only he would stop quoting from Hojoki (or An Account of My Hut) in the face of your unresponsiveness:
The flow of the river never ceases, yet the water never stays the same. On the surface of a pool, bubbles burst and reform, never lingering. Like people in this world and their dwellings.
You keep looking for the red hat. It is not the sole purpose of revisiting this old haunt, but it has nonetheless become the primary one because you do not have much else to do. You think you have seen it in a closed-down restaurant. You break in. It is only a brick-red apron casually tossed beneath the chairs stacked on a table. You think the child on the beach is wearing it. His father shields him behind his body and says no.
You sometimes forget that you are here with Miyata, but at other times his presence howls. When an old man suffers heart failure in the hotel onsen, Miyata, a former emergency-room nurse, goes out of his way to help with the ambulance while you mostly remain still. You have been of no help. Nagi had a heart condition too. She lay there and simply never woke up again. You tell Miyata this as he lies in the same posture. He says that when you have to die, you die.
You meet this with nonchalance and anger. You think of the two women from Miyata’s seminar as dumb bitches who understand nothing about real love, real happiness, real eternity, certainly nothing comparable to Nagi. You kick the back of the taxi driver’s seat hard. What is he doing talking shit about female ghosts near your hotel, as though they were inherently and helplessly malicious beings? You and Miyata are thrown out of the car, but he still gets you water from the convenience store while you are drenched in the aftermath of successive bouts of guzzling, smothering confusion, and other things. He says you should let it go. It is pointless. You are becoming a slave to things and to time.
Eventually, you have a falling-out with Miyata, one episode within a larger episode from which you feel unable to free yourself. You toss away his “Super Happy Forever” ring and tell him that none of those things are real or mean anything. He leaves without a word. You think you must look like nothing other than morbidity itself, more morbid even than death.
You return to the room full of silence and sit on the floor. In a posture at once collected and collapsing, you listen to the crooning of a faint voice from the room across the corridor. It is the same song, “Beyond the Sea”, sung by the same voice that sang it five years ago when you met Nagi. Nagi would hear it too, if she were still there. You realise that you can finally listen again, only then, through that crooning that carries you back into the past, through the solace of Nagi’s thus provable existence.
Nagi liked to take pictures.
She was ditsy, forgetful of time, appointments, and her phone, but never her camera.
She was the woman in the hotel lobby who also watched the teenager nearly drop the phone loosely held in her sleepy hand, and who let out the same sound at the exact moment you did: “Ah.”
She said her family name was also Sano on the ferry, out at sea.
She drank and danced and shared a cup of noodles with you outside a 7-11, saying that little moments like these would make her “super happy forever”.
She wore the red hat you bought her, which seemed to have appeared from nowhere in the street, on the second day after you met.
She lost the hat and dragged her suitcase across the sand looking for it, probably looking for you too.
She told you she had lost the hat when you asked where she had been after failing to show up for your breakfast appointment.
She opened for you a world of pastel tenderness and light.
She made it at last, making a living from her photography and becoming your wife, although she was not always happy, perhaps, you think, because of your cowardice and selfishness. The magazine editor calls your phone to follow up on the commissioned photographs, hoping you can ask her about them. You throw the phone into the sea.
Despite what its title might suggest, Super Happy Forever is not an ordinary story about grief.
With a sequel, the grim state of things after Nagi’s death, told before a prequel, the first encounter between Sano and Nagi unfolding in a dreamlike web of bright and hopeful vitality, Igarashi’s use of poetic moments and interactions between the couple’s past and present seems to raise one question above all: if grieving is a room with a latched door, with the crushing gravity of the past shutting out the existence of the present as well as the possibilities of the future, what lies inside if we open the door?
For those dwelling in grief, the present and the past can have both definitive and malleable spatiotemporal boundaries, becoming, at times, a matter of choice. Past time, theoretically irredeemable once it has passed, serves in Super Happy Forever as a hopeful sequel, an über-reality remade through Sano’s agency in his rejection of the temporal present, the fait accompli of reality.
So too with existence and non-existence. In the film, the material objects through which Sano attempts to re-establish Nagi’s former existence have proved ineffective: the red hat once infinitely close to her hair and skull, all the belongings Sano must still keep at their home, a sand-clad suitcase, an old camera, a photograph she took of herself in the mirror. As proof of a person’s existence, these objects are unreliable and ephemeral, their embodied ties severed by the person’s passing. But does she not exist in Miyata’s recollection of their night out, in the memory of Anh, the Vietnamese member of the hotel staff who once had Nagi as her audience while singing Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea”, in the editor still waiting for her photographs, and in Sano’s ever-frantic rejection of her death? The continuity of her existence in memory creates a similar über-existence within her embodied non-existence.
It is almost as though she were still there, even though nobody would ever see her again. She is still taking her camera everywhere but never remembering her phone, and so remains unreachable. She is still having cup noodles at 2 a.m. outside a 7-11, the one on the next street over, running alongside yours without ever crossing it, like asymptotes. She is still living in the house, yet always away running endless errands whenever you are there, always on the cusp of entering the room but never doing so. A constant yet oblivious parallel non-confluence is one way of looking at death.
This can perhaps be read as Igarashi’s clever play on the symmetry between knowing and oblivion. Viewers would not have expected the film’s prequel section to be bright and breezy after it opened with a head-spinning, grim sequel. Neither Sano nor Nagi could have foreknown her death in her sleep on an ordinary, perhaps glorious, morning. Nor, when Nagi believed the red hat was lost, and therefore the only remaining trace of her encounter with Sano, could she have known that she would bump into him again about twenty minutes later and eventually become his wife, or that Anh would find the hat and keep it safely in her locker for years to come.
In an interview with the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2025, Igarashi pointed to the inevitability of events that bring sadness or pain. If arranged in a linear sequence, Super Happy Forever too is merely another sad story. But if happiness is not rendered as something momentary, and, further, if time is not lived in a spatiotemporally sequential manner, moments of happiness, although definitively in the past, can become timeless.
Can grieving, an act of lingering over agonising but perhaps tender memories of the past, also be about something other than pain?
On the surface, it seems an offhandedly uneventful affair. However hard or long you stare at the same objects of grief with the same eyes, in the same wind, through the same acts, the subject of grief itself never returns. Grief is everything but nothing, a walk through a downpour that does not wet you, yet nothing but everything, a thin gauze across the surface of things, however translucent, still present. But people grieve for things that were once beautiful and to preserve access to cherished sensations and feelings associated with them. Too often, grief is expected to be transitory, with moving on imposed as its proper end. In this light, Super Happy Forever offers a response that calls this resilience narrative into question. If grieving is a solitary journey, one does not always have to choose to move on, much as Paul Auster has said:
Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude…A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver?
At a writing workshop on pain, Hong Kong-based writer Clementine Cheung writes:
If pain is undeniable as a downpour, standing before the torrential rain does not mean you lack an umbrella, an arcade, an overhang, a shelter, or tiles above your head. It does not mean you are without a home, a refuge, or a place to belong, nor that you lack someone to shield you from the wind and rain. And it certainly does not mean you are devoid of the strength to live.
Perhaps, for Igarashi too, the message is that maybe you have the umbrella, arcade, overhang, shelter, or tiles, and perhaps you do not. In any case, you can still choose to walk into the downpour without anything, or remain completely lost, sinking and sinking, without fighting it or having to change a thing.
How to cite: Xie, Peixuan. “Things immortal: Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 5 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/05/super-happy.
Peixuan Xie‘s research focuses on peace and conflict and she occasionally writes about other things. [Read all entries by Peixuan Xie.]