By Sonia Chang (26A01A)

One bright November morning, a man passes a woman on a narrow street and instantly recognises, with inexplicable certainty, that she was 100% him. They exchange no words, they walk on. Yet in those shy seconds, she had lain on his looking and longing. On that Harajuku street corner, love passed them by. 

A Girl, She is 100% is a 1983 short film adapted from Haruki Murakami’s On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning. Quite frankly, the central premise is absurdly slight. Two strangers walk past each other uneventfully, as strangers do. After all, this is the metropolitan condition: faces dissolving into crowds, lives briefly brushing against one another. 

So what about this woman? The man concedes that “she wasn’t beautiful, nor dressed particularly well”. She is devoid of singularity and spectacle, but made extraordinary by recognition. A recognition that thwarts all explanation, a recognition that is perhaps more so projection. In those shy seconds, she stepped out of metropolitan obscurity — sun-dappled, almost as though conjured by the light of mind and morning. It’s a miraculous moment: absolute connection amidst the ceaseless procession of urban life. It’s an absurd moment: he knows nothing about this arbitrary girl. 

Unable to bear the uneventfulness of their passing, the man goes deeper into his own head. In his imagined world, the feeling is mutual, and she too recognises him as her “100% perfect boy”. Convinced that true love must be tested, they part deliberately so fate can reunite them. Fourteen years go by with illness and forgetting. On a dark rainy night, they cross paths again and “the dim glow of a lost memory momentarily flickered”. They exchange no words, they walk on. 

The man’s imagination rescues their real encounter from the banality of truth, spinning his hesitation and silence into an epic of cosmic fate and thwarted love, his own private myth that will outlive those shy seconds. Perhaps his imagination also seeks to invent a story – of history and destiny – that can account for inexplicable feeling; we are meaning-making creatures, after all. 

The film ends on this question. Certainly, it is. Though it feels unlike the sadness of most love stories. A Girl, She is 100% is no story of love lost or unrequited. Love, here, trembled at the cusp of possibility. A chrysalis proved barren. 

There is something so merciful about unrealised love though – it escapes the friction and effort that accompanies all real relationships. The girl is 100% him precisely because she never gets the chance to be her own person. She is a stranger, with whom he will never undertake the slow work of getting to know, and the equally arduous labour of love. And in the realm of senses, his mathematical language is absurd. More absurd still is that this 100% certainty had been borne out of mystery. But isn’t that just longing? The strange, unruly thing it is. A longing for another soul to answer our own. A longing to see and be seen in the half-light of this world. 

Perhaps he never stops in his tracks for the purity of feeling. To enshrine that miraculous certainty beyond reason before it flowers into knowledge, or worse yet, disappointment. They exchange no words, they walk on. The encounter leaves no trace in this world, save for its brief ripples in the man’s mind. Somewhere out there, in sunlit hours and the echo of rain, they go an entire life without each other. But for a few shy seconds, a Harajuku street corner was the centre of the universe.