His (2020, movie, eng sub)
Hello. Here I am as promised! I don’t even want to tell you how many hours I spent subbing this film, but it’s a lot of hours haha.
How to describe this movie. It’s a healing experience. I went to see it twice and both times everyone was crying. I even cried several times while watching the same scenes over and over again in my subbing program, haha. But they were good tears! It’s a very kind, very quiet, very important movie that I wish plenty of people could see. So I subbed the thing for you!
The plot is as follows: Igawa Shun (played by Miyazawa Hio), a closeted gay man, escapes his life in Tokyo to live as a recluse in rural Gifu when one day his ex-boyfriend and first love Hibino Nagisa (played by Fujiwara Kisetsu) shows up on his doorstep with a six-year-old girl.
some notes:
Japanese law does not recognize joint custody of unmarried or divorced individuals even if those individuals are the child’s biological parents.
Most of the film takes places in the prefecture of Gifu in central Japan. To get there, you have to take the bullet train from Tokyo to Nagoya (around 2 hours) and then a local train from there. The town of Shirakawa is about an hour from Nagoya in the mountains.
I decided to keep the Japanese honorifics because making the character of Misato call Shun anything but Igawa-san weirded me out. Shun & Nagisa don’t use any honorifics with each other because they’re the same age and they go way back.
There are a couple of lines where information may be presented in an order that feels unnatural in English, but Japanese works very differently and I chose to stay true to what’s happening on screen over the English syntax.
This film is a sequel to a lowkey miniseries that aired locally in Nagoya, but you don’t need to have seen the show. I only learned of its existence afterwards. In the show Nagisa & Shun meet as teenagers at a seaside resort. Mutual pining ensues, Nagisa lends Shun a book with gay subtext to test the waters, Shun turns down a girl by saing thank you but I’m sorry.
The film was directed by Imaizumi Rikiya who has established himself as an auteur of lowkey millenial romance in the past few years. The ending song is Mariaroad by Sano Ibuki.
dowload links:
You are free to share my subs with your grandma or use them in your fannish works. Just don’t claim my translation as yours. You may not upload my subs to streaming sites. If I see this happening, I will not translate anything for you ever again. I created the subtitle file from scratch, timed it and translated the whole 2-hour movie by ear, so please respect this one simple wish.
The raw file was kindly provided to me by @ohmygannicus. I have uploaded two mirros for you:
To watch, you must save both files in the same folder and rename them so the file names match. The subtitle is an .ass file that was created on Aegisub, you can use that program to tweak it to your liking if you’d like. VLC and Media Player Classic can play .ass files, other players you’ll have to find out yourself. I will not offer any technical support past this. Please do not contact me to ask me why this or that isn’t working. If the files are down, it means there’s been too much traffic, so just wait and try again later. Or if you’re a mutual or someone else I know, hmu and I’ll send you a secret link.
To support the movie, you can buy it on Yesasia! Everyone working on the film has shown so much love and care for this story and the lgbtq community, it’s really been a beacon of light during these strange times. When a tabloid had a terrible take on a scene in the film, the team even apologised to the lgbtq community for the hurt that was in no way caused by them! Here are the links:
DVD: North America link, Global link
Bluray: North America link, Global link
Anyway, please enjoy!!! I’m always happy to talk about this film and my translation choices! This post probably won’t show up in the tags because of the links, so please spread it around if you’d like.