The Farewell and What Remains

Earlier this week, my guinea pig crossed the rainbow bridge peacefully after spending seven wonderful years with us. We adopted her initially thinking that guinea pigs would be easier to take care of as pet beginners, never expecting we would build such a loving bond over a long period of time. It was also a life experience for my daughter, who grew up with her, became more responsible, and learned to cope with farewell in ways I hadn't anticipated.

That made me think about loss this week — not the dramatic kind, but the quiet one. The bond that forms without you planning for it. The absence that arrives suddenly and takes up as much space in your heart as the presence did. 

Asian cinema has spent decades thinking about loss as a theme. This issue follows grief through three films that approach it from completely different directions, and then, because grief often needs companions, three albums that hold the weight of loss without collapsing under it. A Japanese photographer who has spent forty years documenting the sacred sites where human beings have always tried to find peace within. And something lighter at the end — because what remains after a farewell isn't only sadness.

— Yubin

Iranian cinema is one of the underlighted spots in world cinema. Working under significant constraints — censorship, limited budgets, political pressure — directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, and Asghar Farhadi have produced work of extraordinary precision and humanity, winning Palme d'Ors, Golden Bears, and Academy Awards while remaining largely unknown to mainstream Western audiences. What distinguishes Iranian cinema at its best is its restraint: an essential trust in the surface of ordinary life to carry enormous emotional weight beneath it. Nobody announces their grief. It surfaces in what they don't say, in the small decisions they make, in who they protect and who they fail.

One of such fine examples is About Elly. A group of old college friends drives north to the Caspian Sea for a long weekend. They're city people — lawyers, doctors, teachers — arriving at a slightly rundown beach house, fixing windows, rekindling old friendships. One of them, Sepideh, has brought along Elly, her daughter's kindergarten teacher, with the quiet plan of pairing her with Ahmad, a recently divorced friend flying in from Germany. Nothing dramatic is supposed to happen.

Then Elly disappears. A moment of absence that the film doesn’t explain cleanly, that instead becomes a slow unraveling of everything the group thought they knew about each other. The lies that were small at the beginning of the weekend become larger and more consequential as the film progresses. Each character's relationship to Elly — how well they actually knew her, what they owed her, what they concealed — reveals itself under pressure. Farhadi, who won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, is working in the tradition of films like L'Avventura — the disappearance of someone not as a mystery to be solved but as a revelation of character.

The film was voted by Iranian critics as the best Iranian film ever made. For Western audiences coming to Iranian cinema for the first time, it is a great entry point: recognizable, devastating and utterly without comfort.

Stream on Amazon Prime, Roku, YouTube Primetime (Trailer)

Secret Sunshine (밀양) — Lee Chang-dong (Korea, 2007)

Shin-ae is a widow who arrives in her late husband's provincial hometown with her young son, hoping for a fresh start. She opens a piano academy, makes cautious friends, and begins to find her footing. Then her son is kidnapped and killed, and the film becomes about what grief does to a person in a most profound way — when faith offers itself as a ray of hope and then fails, when forgiveness becomes an act of violence rather than healing. Jeon Do-yeon won Best Actress at Cannes for her performance, which is one of the finest in Korean cinema history — not because it is technically spectacular but because it is honest in a way that is almost too difficult to watch. Lee Chang-dong, who was once Korea's Minister of Culture before resigning to return to filmmaking, makes films about the specific ways that institutions — religion, community, the state — fail people at their most vulnerable. Secret Sunshine is his most direct statement on the subject. It will stay with you for a long time.

Stream on Amazon Prime, AMC+, Roku (Trailer)

Still Walking (歩いても 歩いても) — Kore-eda Hirokazu (Japan, 2008)

The Japanese title is Aruitemo Aruitemo — meaning ‘even if we keep walking’. A family gathers for a single summer day to mark the anniversary of the eldest son's death fifteen years earlier. Nothing dramatic happens. Ryota, the surviving son, visits with his new wife and stepson; his retired father is quietly disappointed in him; his mother makes corn tempura because it was the dead son's favorite. The film is built entirely from gestures and behaviors — the way a meal is prepared, the way a father and son avoid a conversation, the way a mother keeps a room exactly as it was. Kore-eda based the film on his own memories, his own parents, his own losses. "I'm always a little late," he said of the film's themes. Sight & Sound called it a work that "belongs up there with the masters." It won Best Director at the Asian Film Awards. It is the quietest film about grief you will ever see, and somehow the most complete.

Stream on Amazon Prime, AMC+, Roku (Trailer)

In June 2014, Ryuichi Sakamoto publicly announced he had been diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer. He put his career on hold so he could recover. And then, in April 2016, he began making async — his first solo album in eight years, and what he described as "an imaginary soundtrack to a Tarkovsky film that doesn't exist."

He worked for eight months. Every track except the opening andata was made after the diagnosis. He used an old piano, field recordings, broken instruments, a shamisen (a traditional Japanese instrument), a singing bowl, electronic processing — sounds chosen not for beauty but for their relationship to time and silence. The title refers to asynchronization: the deliberate refusal of different parts to harmonize and come together. 

What Sakamoto made is not a record about dying. It is a record about what it feels like to look at the end of your life and come back to the ordinary world with different ears. The sounds he records — rain, footsteps, a door, a voice speaking from a distance — are the sounds of being alive, of paying attention to things that were always there. "This could be the last time," he said at the beginning of the sessions. That awareness is in every track, not as sadness but as gratitude, especially of someone who almost lost the ability to hear any of the sounds in life.

async was the last album Sakamoto completed before his cancer returned. He passed away in March 2023. The book I have been reading recently — his reflections written in his final years — circles the same territory as this album: what you hear differently when you know your time is finite. Put this on with headphones.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

23 — Hyukoh (혁오, Korea, 2015)

Oh Hyuk named his debut full album after his age when he made it (similar to how Adele always does). 23 is an album about a specific moment in a young life, made by someone paying close attention to what it feels like before it passes. The songs are warm and slightly melancholic, carried by Oh Hyuk's distinctive falsetto and a guitar sound that sits somewhere between indie rock and city pop without fully committing to either. The album made Hyukoh one of the most talked-about acts in Korean indie music almost overnight — not because it announced something new but because it described something familiar with such clarity. Loss here is not the loss of a person but the loss of a time and of a version of yourself. It is the lightest entry in this section and the most immediately accessible. Start here if async feels like too much of a commitment.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Cassa Nova — Sunset Rollercoaster (落日飛車, Taiwan, 2018)

Sunset Rollercoaster make music that sounds like a summer evening. Cassa Nova, their second album and commercial breakthrough, is 80s-influenced synth-pop and city pop filtered through a distinctly Taiwanese sensibility — warm, slow, and slightly bittersweet. The Grammy described their sound as "experimental yet comforting," which is accurate but also not quite enough: there's a quality in Sunset Rollercoaster's work of holding pleasure and loss in the same breath. Shangri-La, the album's centerpiece, sold 500,000 copies and became one of Taiwan's defining indie-pop moments. In 2024, they released AAA — a collaborative album with Hyukoh, the Korean band featured above — which won Best Vocal Recording Album at the Golden Melody Awards and is worth seeking out as a companion piece. But start with Cassa Nova.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Kenro Izu was born in Osaka in 1949, moved to New York in 1970, and spent his early career as a commercial still life photographer. In 1979, he made his first trip to Egypt. Standing before the pyramids at Giza, he experienced something he described as the central paradox of all sacred architecture: that these structures were built to last forever, and yet what he felt most strongly was their impermanence. The massive and the fleeting over time, in the same frame. He has been photographing sacred places ever since.

The Sacred Places series now spans four decades and six continents: the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Borobudur in Indonesia, Varanasi and the Ajanta caves in India, Stonehenge, Easter Island, the pyramids of Teotihuacán in Mexico. Izu photographs all of it with the same custom-built 300-pound Deardorff camera, producing 14x20 inch negatives that he prints himself using platinum and palladium rather than silver — a 19th century process that renders images with a luminosity and tonal range that digital printing cannot replicate. The resulting photographs have a quality of suspended time.

The Sacred Places work is not documentary photography in the conventional sense. Izu is not interested in recording these sites as tourist attractions or cultural artifacts. "The importance of sacred places is not in the architectural objects. It's in the spirituality — in the geographic atmosphere." What he photographs is invisible: the weight of human meaning that accumulates in places where generations of people have come to grapple with mortality, to ask the questions that have no answers, to leave something behind.

In 1985, after several visits to Angkor Wat, Izu did something that photographers do not often do: he acted on what he had seen. The children he encountered in Cambodia — suffering from poverty and the absence of basic medical care — led him to found Friends Without a Border, a nonprofit that has since built and operated free pediatric hospitals in Cambodia and Laos. For him, the photography and the humanitarian work are the same thing: a response to the notion that human life is fragile, brief, and worth protecting.

Izu has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts grant, and has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, the Getty, SF MoMA, and the Smithsonian. His work is clearly one of the most sustained meditations on impermanence in contemporary photography.

Follow his work on IG @izukenro and kenroizu.com

In 2004, Naver (a major Korean web portal) launched a comics section on its website. The format was designed specifically for the screen: single panels stacked vertically, read by scrolling down rather than turning pages, optimized for the mobile phones that were already becoming ubiquitous in Korea. The creators were mostly young, working from home, paid per episode. The stories ranged from romance to horror to fantasy. Nobody outside Korea was paying particular attention.

Twenty years later, that format — the webtoon — is one of the most influential storytelling innovations of the 21st century. The global webtoon market reached $7.44 billion in 2024, growing at nearly 30% annually. WEBTOON Entertainment, the Naver subsidiary that operates the platform, listed on Nasdaq in 2024. By 2025, the company reported approximately $1.4 billion in annual revenue across its global storytelling platforms. The original Chicken Nugget webcomic had over 80 million global views before its Netflix adaptation entered the Global Top 10 Non-English Shows. Solo Leveling — adapted from a Korean webtoon — became Crunchyroll's Anime of the Year 2025, accumulating more user reviews in one year than One Piece earned in twelve.

The numbers are remarkable, but the more interesting story is the format itself. Webtoons are not simply digital comics — the vertical scroll changes the rhythm of reading and storytelling in genuinely new ways. Pacing, suspense, and revelation all work differently when the reader controls the speed of scrolling rather than the turn of a page. Korean creators developed an entire visual grammar for this: the way a long vertical space can build tension, the way a sudden horizontal panel can function as a cinematic cut, the way color can be embedded in the reading experience itself.

What began as a practical solution — how do you read comics on a small screen? — became a distinct art form, and then a global industry. Netflix, Marvel and major Hollywood studios are all now mining the webtoon catalog for intellectual property, the same way they once turned to Japanese manga. The difference is that webtoons were born digital and born in Korea — a country that has now produced, in the space of two decades, one of the most consequential new storytelling formats in the world.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com