In Two Seasons, Two Strangers, a Korean expatriate, Lee (Shim Eun kyung), lives in Japan as a screenwriter. Her handwritten script, laid down on a blank page, carries a voice at once calm and weighted with inescapable unease. Through her diary-like confessions in Korean, spoken in voiceover, we enter a rainy seaside town, where two young strangers drift into a fleeting summer romance. Miyake Sho adapts Tsuge Yoshiharu’s manga Scenes from the Seaside, crafting a film-within-a-film that recalls a teenage, island-town variation of his earlier work And Your Bird Can Sing. Even after completing this portrait of summer youth, with its vitality shaped from melancholy and wandering, Lee’s inner turmoil remains unresolved. Confronted with the sudden death of her mentor, she sets out with a camera in hand to a snow-covered rural village—embarking on a second journey that mirrors the fictional one she has written. This segment reinterprets Tsuge Yoshiharu’s Mister Ben of the Igloo, where Benzo (Tsutsumi Shinichi), a gruff but warm-hearted innkeeper, becomes an unlikely companion to the young writer. Since his breakout film Small, Slow but Steady, which chronicled the everyday life of a deaf boxer, Miyake has pursued cinema that, as Lee herself puts it, retrieves “those things that words too easily drive away.” Here, in Two Seasons, Two Strangers, he blends Tsuge’s source material with a distinctly personal sensibility, staging the border between a story being written and the story of the writer herself. Across summer and winter, beach and snowfield, the acts of writing and watching, Miyake maps out the slow return of sensory fullness to a mind once stifled by language. Sometimes they are so simple, they verge on the sublime. On an aesthetic level, Miyake reaches a new peak of his talent for dissolving inner states into cinematic space. The boxy Academy ratio frames landscapes that hold both everyday tremors and hushed mysteries in equal measure. The director here unveils his most poetic and contemplative shots yet—not as displays of ambition, but as images born of sincerity, forged through a filmography of steadfast dedication. The result is a cinema that radiates the vitality of stillness, a rare and meticulous warmth in contemporary Asian film. The rumble of trains, the crash of waves, the breath of winter, the dazzling snowscapes that enfold us beyond the tunnel—all these awaken time itself, along with Shim Eun-kyung’s face, touching the soul.