Started watching on Friday night but I got involved doing other things and I had to postpone for viewing today instead.
So far, it looks like it is kind of a time travel story. When the movie opens it shows you the Namiya General Store and you meet Mr. Namiya during the time when children are on their way home from school (I believe, I don't remember) There is a bulletin board with some notes on them and you see Mr. Namiya take one down, go into his store where he writes back and then he puts his reply on the board.
In the next scene, it is 2017 and you see 3 older teens running away and one of them tells the others he found an abandoned place where they could hide and it happens to be Mr. Namiya's store. While they are in the store, someone places a letter in the slot from the front of the store. The boys go out and look around to see who is there but there is nobody. They get scared and decide to leave and go elsewhere in case they had been followed. They run around the area and come to a spot on the street where they see a bus/trolley coming right at them. The trolly runs over them as you see them so through the trolly with people sitting inside. The trolly keeps going through them and disappears. When the boys look around, they are right back in front of Mr. Namiya's store. The boys go back in, read the letter and decide to answer it. They place the reply in the side mailbox where someone comes and retrieves it.
At this point it seems like it was 2017 inside the store with events outside being 1981. The letter they reply to is from a fishmonger/musician who was questioning his choice of having quit university to become a musician. The boys reply back trying to guide him away from being a musician until the man writes back that music is not a hobby to him and he asks Mr. Namiya to listen to his song. He places his letter in the slot but doesn't let it drop down. He sits against the front gate, pulls out a harmonica and begins to play. The boys inside recognize the song. One of the boys says "Isn't that Suri's song?", and 2 of them run outside to see who is playing but there is nobody there. When they go back inside, the song is still playing.
Cutting back to 1981 and the musician's life, his dying father advises him to keep doing what he loves after the musician says maybe he should join the family business and become a fishmonger. His father tells him it would be one thing if he liked being a fishmonger but he knows he doesn't. His father believed in him so he continued on his path. Eight years later, his father has already passed, he is scheduled to play for some children in an orphanage. At this orphanage there is a little girl and her young brother who were victims of abuse. The little boy is so traumatized, he refuses to speak to anyone except his sister. The musician ends up debuting a song he wrote. There are no lyrics so he's just singing along with the melody. The little girl asks him later what the name of the song he was singing was. He reveals to her that it's his own song and he titled it Reborn.
The next day, he hears the little girl, whose name is Suri, humming his song. They go for a walk together and he is impressed that she remembered the whole song after having heard it only once.
What happens next ties Suri, her brother and the musician, to one of the boys in the abandoned store. In true Japanese fashion, there were tears. I mean, I cried. Japanese dramas and movies never fail to leave me crying at least once while watching. I won't go any further with what happened; go watch the movie yourself. It is totally worth it.
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