By Frey Kwa Hawking

Early in Summer Vacation 1999 (1988), we see the suicide of a child, Yu, from a cliff, featuring a leap that’s ludicrously wrong: it’s too upwards and outwards, the boy’s legs tucked up behind him. Boys similarly hurl bouquets of flowers in his tribute into the same lake later. It’s all childhood, jubilant and unsettling.

Shusuke Kaneko’s 1988 loose adaptation of Moto Hagio’s early shōnen-ai (boy’s love) manga The Heart of Thomas (トーマの心臓, Tōma no Shinzō) is at first most eye-catching for its casting – with girls playing the part of the boy students – but it’s a more elusive, striking beast for choices like that leap. The actors, working from a script by Rio Kishida (a powerhouse of Japanese theatre), are well-animated in Kaneko’s nimble early style, taking the passions of early adolescence seriously. It’s goofy sometimes, even as the characters deal with their own nebulous, less straightforward sense of loss than that in the manga, because that leap turns out to be a fiction.

While The Heart of Thomas’s plot is charged from the outset by the real suicide of the titular Thomas, Yu (Eri Miyajima), his equivalent in Summer Vacation 1999, reinvents himself as Kaoru in order to punish his crush, Kazuhiko (Tomoko Otakara), for rejecting him. Only the steadier, wiser Naoto (Miyuki Nakano) suspects something; jealous, left out Norio (Eri Fukatsu) sees Yu’s death as on Kazuhiko’s hands.

Against the sound of children shouting and laughing, Kaneko’s camera pans through empty classrooms and corridors as if running out with students, but we only ever see these four actors. These boys are orphans, spending the summer holiday at the school, picturesque and isolated in their Ralph Lauren for Boys uniforms.

Kaneko’s casting choice, together with the smudging of the story’s specific setting in time and place, allow for a suggestiveness in keeping with a more evasive, universal interest in nostalgia and return the film reveals itself to have. The softly sci-fi aspect makes things feel unplaceable. Set eleven years in the future and somewhere in Japan rather than Germany, but with deliberately anachronistic western boarding school production design, the boys slouch, with very eighties hair, as they code their schoolwork one-handedly, or use a machine to crack and beat their breakfast eggs.

Kaneko cut his teeth shooting roman-porno for production company Nikkatsu, and though this film is as chaste as they come (despite its kisses!), there’s an energy and dynamism which carries over. His camera is super agile as the boys brawl or play. While Thomas’ suicide takes place in a German snow, the summer in the film feels dreamlike, everything suffused with warm light and plenty of halation.

Cuts are often comically abrupt, but there’s an especially dreadful, livid kineticism to the repeated sequence of a boy arriving by train, accompanied by an electric whoosh: Kaneko cuts from a shot of the track vanishing before the train, to the camera moving up the aisle of the carriage inside and stumbling upon the boy at the window, as he wakes and looks out, as if he’s just been dumped into a new body.

Motivations in the film are untethered from the melodramatic biographical detail in The Heart of Thomas, leaving characters more mundane and recognisable. Kazuhiko’s reserve isn’t down to an abusive incident with older students or needing to prove his half-Spanish blood against stereotypes; he just detects a weakness in himself, some cowardice, that the brash, forthright Kaoru helps him begin to get over. The boys describe each other in clumsy terms (“Everyone likes Kazuhiko. He’s no good, but everyone likes him. That’s why I hate him.”), as if only just awakening to things about others, themselves, and how the world works.

Kaneko and Kishida do preserve the manga’s complete disinterest in representing the risks of expressing love between the boys. Indeed, Kaneko didn’t see the film as particularly gay: “I wanted the film to deal with ‘love’ in a very pure or even abstract sense. I’ve never thought of it primarily as a homosexual story. (…) Anyhow, I was aiming for something altogether more androgynous.”

Casting girls might heighten the film’s sense of unreality for some, but that androgyny is achieved in a generative, expansive way: there’s a case for a trans reading in any direction you want. I didn’t struggle seeing the actors as simply boys, while a friend noted that all that pining felt very lesbian to them. It’s imperceptible, but Fukatsu (Norio, the youngest) is the only undubbed actor – though only Kazuhiko, the one everyone wants, is dubbed by a male voice actor. Otakara’s repeated sulky running her hand through her hair would still read as campily self-conscious were a boy playing Kazuhiko.

That casting idea was there before Kishida was even brought onto the project: when Kaneko read The Heart of Thomas, he “found [himself] seeing the characters in feminine terms. I mean, the boys in the story were like girls…” Much of the manga’s tortured professions are gone, but are the boys we’re left with, dreamy and scheming, particularly girly, or like lots of early teens? More strongly felt is the confusion and determination of early, sexless love, and a growing awareness of loss and time passing shared by all the characters, in patches of retrospective voiceover, reflecting on the significance of this summer for them. We hear one adult voice, but whose is it?

Both Yu and Kaoru have a frightening preoccupation with time and transcendence absent from the manga. Eri Fukatsu voices only Yu, as Kaoru’s voice is dubbed by Minami Takayama, but we hear both voices simultaneously in a novel threat, inviting Kazuhiko to die and be reincarnated as children again together at the film’s climax. It’s the best time of your life, he says. As Kaoru, he tells a dead phone line that he’s pretending is his mother that he wishes he could turn his clock forwards while stopping hers, so that they could be the same age. Yu quietly quotes Hermann Hesse’s Demian to Norio, telling him he wants to break the egg shell of the world and fly to God, and he literally stops the clock in his room before his “suicide”.

Grounded Naoto takes a more resigned view than Yu, certain that the best anyone can hope for, knocking down walls in life, is “better walls”: not revelation, but more chances, perhaps. In The Heart of Thomas’s more elegiac sequel chapter, a parent notes that “The lost find their own way back in their own time.” Summer Vacation 1999 ends with yet another identical boy finally arriving again at the school. We actually first see this boy at the start of the film, on the train (in a grey blazer); he isn’t Kaoru. He recognises Kazuhiko and is clear that he’s someone new, and this time the boys, delighted, don’t look the gift horse in the mouth. Who cares who he is? For now he’s here, like them, and this time they’re ready to meet him.