In keeping with my Yui-fest this month I finally got around to watching her feature film debut, Taiyo no Uta, which I picked up on DVD in Malaysia over the summer.

The story is about Kaoru, a teenage girl with the rare xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) disease. Since UV light would kill her (or at least accelerate her nervous system’s breakdown) she sleeps in the day and lives at night, writing songs and playing her guitar. In between sunset and sundown she watches a young boy she’s interested in from her hill-top home, wishing she could one day meet him.

Of course, she gets the chance and that’s when things change, for better and for worse. And yes she does sing live and record a CD and all the other cliches you would expect from this sort of movie, especially a Japanese one. But cliched as it is, it is really sweet and done in good form. There were few moments I found really cringe-worthily melodramatic, which is more than can be said for some Japanese movies I’ve seen, and overall I thought the story was portrayed really sensitively and well. It helps that it’s all reasonably slow moving and good natured with decent, if not really outstanding, performances from the cast.

What you really want to know is if Yui can act. IMHO, despite the potentially melodramatic plot, she doesn’t really have to stretch any acting muscles that hard in this and is her usual semi-reserved self (some would call it bland. Not me — I love Yui!). It’s sweet for the right moments and of course she really comes into her own in the singing parts. Look out for the Yokohama street live with Skyline, and you’re guaranteed to have Goodbye Days (the signature track) playing on repeat for days after seeing this.