Franz Wiegand

Tokyo Blues: Shikata Ga Nai! (It Can't Be Helped!) Franz Wiegand

Karl has been living a loveless existence with his drug-addicted wife and has reached the point where he needs to get away if he is to retain his mental balance. But his sense of responsibility to his wife and children has kept him chained to his situation creating a seemingly insoluble impasse. On a business trip to Japan he unexpectedly falls in love with a woman, Michiko, who has unresolved problems of her own, being bound to an unloving fiancé as a result of an arrangement between their parents. Two victims of circumstances, they desperately seek happiness and find it in this romantic, bittersweet tale of love set in modern Japan. In the knowledge that they cannot abdicate their responsibilities and must return to their previous ways of life, they attempt to make the most of their brief time together. Ephemeral as the flash of a firefly their intense passion flares brightly igniting a passionate affair that almost destroys one of them.