Impressions of "Only Yesterday"

Happy Tuesday, friends! I hope you're all doing well. Right now, I'm on a roll watching all the Studio Ghibli movies. Although I've known about some of them for a while, I hadn't had the opportunity to enjoy more of their productions. And I really like them because in each one you discover beautiful and very special things about life, many of them with a magical world. The one I'm bringing you today is one of the best, but it has the particularity of being quite adapted to reality, that is, more to real life. It's a world where magic doesn't exist.

The film I'm talking about is called “Only Yesterday,” released back in 1991. It's a story that makes important references to memories of the past, nostalgia for childhood experiences, and how difficult it can be for a middle-aged woman to feel pressured by society and what is supposed to be normal or should be at her age. Taeko is a bright and sweet little girl with many dreams of new experiences. She loves the countryside and trying new things, but suddenly her life becomes more thoughtful, and she begins to remember her childhood with her family, the details that seem simple but for her marked a before and after. Sometimes many of them were about longing and the things she couldn't have. But for a little girl, they were very important, and it seems incredible that they are things that can make a difference in our psyche.

My impression of this film is that it shows us something very real, unfiltered, and how hard it can be to try to live a life according to standards, which can undoubtedly always be present in adulthood, whether it be in your childhood or what you experience. Taeko is somehow a little stuck in the past, in those memories, both good and not so good, but over time she learns to appreciate all of that with maturity and takes the good with the bad. She is a little girl who always longed to go to the countryside or go on vacation, but her parents couldn't afford such things. She had many dreams, and sometimes she felt very scattered with her adult self and whether she was really where she wanted to be.

At the end of it all, she finds herself at a turning point where the countryside becomes her life at the age of 27. She falls in love, but that's not the most remarkable thing about this story. It's about making peace with her childhood, with her past, with what she couldn't do or experience, and using all of that as something positive for her life, keeping the best and what was not so good made her the good girl she is now, doing what fulfills you and valuing the little things, no matter how simple they may seem. Life is not linear; it is different for each of us, and we can simply live and do things at different times.