Umi yorimo mada fukaku (After the storm) (比海還深)

Inside a small council housing estate flat in Kiyoshe, a Tokyo suburb, an aging mother, Shinoda Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki) and a middle aged daughter Chinatsu Nakashima (Satomi Kobayashi)  were chatting about the only other man in the family, the mother's recently departed husband. The radio announced that a big typhoon was heading in the direction of Tokyo from Kyushu. The mother said she felt so relieved that her husband was finally gone and that her eldest son Shinoda Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) had just called that he'd be coming. His sister commented wryly that his brother, a prize winning novelist for his first novel which he wrote some 15 years ago, would only come for money. The mother didn't say anything.

Icarus at the Edge of Time (伊卡洛斯在時間的邊緣)

I remember that as a child many many years ago, I read a little story in a children's monthly magazine with beautifully drawn illustrations called "Children's Paradise (兒童樂園). The moment that magazine was out in the middle of the month, I would bite my lips and use up a sizeable portion of my weekly allowance to buy a copy of it from the old lady at her tiny  news vendor stall in front of a Chinese style European restaurant at the end of the street where I used to live. I  would walk home as quickly as I could but before reaching the door of our flat, I could never resist the expectant joy of flipping over its pages rapidly to find out what kind of juicy stories there would be in that month's edition of the magazine. Once home, I would pore over its contents and devour its contents within an hour or so and then spent hours and hours admiring its fascinating drawings and had enormous fun copying some of the most beautiful pictures I found in that issue on to a paper pad (拍紙簿) with crayons or color pencils.