1 Litre of Tears

This is a Japanese television drama about a young girl who has an incurable degenerative disease, and the boy who falls in love with her. It's based on a true story, the illness part. The actual girl Aya published a book for other with her disease, to give them hope.

The main character is a 15-year-old high school girl named Aya Ikeuchi. She's the ideal girl in many respects, she is very kind, hard-working, and optimistic. She's on the basketball team, has many friends at school, and has also caught the eye of one of her upper-classmen, so potential romance there. Just your typical Japanese high school girl.

Then one day as she is leaving for school, she takes a pretty bad spill and splits her chin on the concrete. The doctor takes her mother aside and tells her that the fall was not ordinary, and that Aya had a rare disease that would slowly make it harder and harder for her body to function on its own. Stealing away the power she had over her own body. The mother tries to keep this from her as long as is possible, but starts to notice that Aya is having difficulties with everyday activities, like misjudging the space between objects, or being unable to use chopsticks.

At the beginning of the first term of high school we are also introduced to a young man, Haruto Asō , who is in the same class as Aya. He wasn't even going to take the entrance exam to the school, but fate would have it that the day he met Aya, he was sort of forced into taking them. Haruto isn't exactly a delinquent, but at the beginning of the story he seems to have a sort of disregard for everything happening in his life. One day he happens to see a web page Aya was on and discovers her illness. He starts to pay more attention to her and slowly begins to fall in love.

The title of this drama sounds really cheesy, and I almost didn't watch it the first time I heard of it, but the show is oddly true to its name, and not cheesy at all! One of the things that gets me every time I watch one of these is how good the Japanese are at these emotional roller coasters. It doesn't matter if it's romance or action or tragedy, you'll be enthralled, maybe even to a heart-wrenching degree. This one in specific, the tragedy/ romance genre. You don't get too many of these in modern Western film, the only two that come to my head immediately are Butterfield 8 and A Walk To Remember. It's not as scarce in Japanese television, which is alright I guess because they do it justice. I cried the first time I watch this, maybe for 3/5th's of the series, and that's a big deal for me. There are is one, maybe two movies that make me cry, I take pride in the fact that I don't cry easily when it comes to film, but this one had me balling. Sometimes when watching tv shows or movies from other cultures, you'll have to be understanding with some of the content. The culture's different and you might not understand all of the references, but the emotions are universal. You'll have to watch this online if you want to see it, and you'll have to put up with fan subs, fan made subtitles, but it'll be worth it.

Here is a trailer made by a fan of the show with some scenes