When I first watched The Graduate as a teenager, it didn’t resonate with me the way generations of respected movie critics promised me it would. As a child, I prided myself on being able to handle more adult movies than my peers. No, I still couldn’t watch anything scarier than the tunnel sequence in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory without weeks of nightmares, but I could watch a modern sci-fi movie and correctly guess the big plot twists to my father’s delight. And I could watch movies made before my parents were born without getting bored, movies like Some Like it Hot, Stalag 17, Singin in the Rain, and even 12 Angry Men, while I was still in elementary school. 

My parents recorded the 2007 broadcast of the “AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies” TV special on DVD listing the 100 best American movies as chosen by the American Film Institute (The Graduate is number 17 on that list btw), and I remembered obsessively rewatching it. Though the special was mostly a compilation of clips and brief interviews that provided next to no insight about the films themselves, it was still an alluring first taste of what movies lie outside of the family-friendly fare I was trying desperately to wean myself off of. And what was less family-friendly than The Graduate? But when I finally watched the film itself, I really didn’t like it; the moral ambiguity was too tough to parse and the plot, being centered around a nebbish looking asshole in a love triangle with two of the hottest women I’d ever seen, felt like somebody else’s wish fulfillment. By the time I finally found my own understanding of and respect for The Graduate as a story it wasn’t even because of the film itself, it was because I read Haru’s Curse by Asuka Konishi.

The Graduate is about Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a disaffected 21-year-old college graduate who is roped into an affair with the wife of his father’s business partner, Mrs. Robinson, and eventually falls in love with her daughter, Elaine. Benjamin is a passive, awkward guy: over accomplished, overstimulated, and overwhelmed with the prospect of life after college. The opening scenes show him standing on a moving sidewalk at the airport, pulled forward by inertia not desire, and then being shuffled from person to person at his “welcome home” party, unable to escape his parents’ prying friends and unable to find anything he wants to do more than to be left alone. Even the affair he enters into with Mrs. Robinson follows the same passive logic as everything else he does post-grad. A mid-movie montage follows Ben as he blankly and seamlessly moves between his parents’ swimming pool, his lonely room, and the hotel room he reserves as “Mr. Gladstone” for his affairs with Mrs. Robinson. To Ben, the affair is just some more time to waste, more nothing to do, more potential to wash down the drain. 

When he meets Elaine for a date set up by Mr. Robinson, he suddenly begins to take charge of his life. Their instant kinship after a horrific first date finally gives Ben something to strive for. And strive he does: love turns Ben into an absolute freak. He admits his affair with her mother to her, runs away to Berkeley to stalk her after she rejects him, hounds her after their fraught reconnection to marry him, and, in the ending of the film, crashes her wedding to steal her away before she marries an all-American frat boy. After fighting off her and her bridegroom’s family, Elaine and Ben run laughing, hand in hand, straight into a waiting bus. But the instant he finally has Elaine, after the dramatic escape is over, his face falls back into blank acceptance as their bus pulls away from the church, “Hello Darkness My Old Friend” playing over the credits. This is the film that was supposed to rock my world, but, instead, I found myself disappointed. 

By the time I watched The Graduate, I had been pretty burnt out on all of these “important movies” I used to be excited to experience. I still loved a lot of older movies, but, as I grew up, it became harder and harder to deny their flaws; the behind-the-scenes horror shows of early Hollywood, the explicit racism and misogyny baked into their scripts, they became distracting features of films I used to blow through when I was younger. After years of being let down by the American film canon, I was tired of trying to find value in “important” movies that I felt so strongly weren’t made for me. And, to my teenage self, The Graduate was the ultimate “not-made-for-me” movie; a movie I didn’t care to follow about a dude I didn’t care about and his feelings. I couldn’t connect with it and I didn’t want to give it any of my mental energy out of spite, so I gave up on trying to understand it. 

When I picked up Haru’s Curse by Asuka Konishi on a whim a few years ago, I did not expect to come away from it with a lot of strong feelings about The Graduate. The book’s story read to me initially as a pretty standard josei drama; a young woman enters into a relationship with her dead sister’s fiance and struggles to reconcile her guilt with her growing feelings for him. But as I began to recognize the story’s overt references to The Graduate (including a silly ersatz movie poster in the background for a film called “The Graduation”), process the character and plot parallels, and eventually reach my own understanding of its ending, the more it began to change how I felt about the film. 

In Haru’s Curse, our main character is Natsumi Tachibana: a hard-working girl grieving the loss of her perfect younger sister, Haru. As the children of their father’s first and least liked wife, Natsumi was incredibly close to Haru; so close not even Natsumi is sure she wasn’t in love with her sister. Her dream since childhood was to get her and Haru as far away from their father and his new family as possible. That dream gets complicated when Haru gets engaged to handsome, stoic Togo Hiragi in an arrangement between their families. That dream dies when Haru passes away from cancer shortly after. 

After Haru’s funeral, Togo approaches Natsumi saying that his parents have told them to date in order to take Haru’s place as his fiance. Grieving and near suicidal, Natsumi agrees on the condition that Togo only take her on dates to places he went to with Haru. What Natsumi doesn’t know is that Togo’s parents have made no such arrangement between him and Natsumi, and that Togo’s real purpose in dating Natsumi is to get closer to the Tachibana sister he really loved. As Natsumi and Togo continue to meet up, both of them are, in a twisted way, getting exactly what they want: Natsumi gets to have just a little bit more insight into Haru’s life before she died and Togo gets to be with Natsumi, all the while their collective grief and guilt are slowly destroying them from the inside. 

Though Togo and Natsumi couldn’t be more different personality-wise, it’s clear they’re, like Ben and Elaine, otherwise kindred spirits. Both of them are inwardly gloomy people: Natsumi presents outwardly ditzy and optimistic but has been obsessed with joining Haru in death since her passing, and Togo, though he seems to be a logical, cold-hearted office worker, feels deeply trapped by his family expectations and the life his mother has planned out for him. They’re both competent and intelligent people but they’re so consumed by their dysfunctional families and internal struggles that they can’t see a way to escape their worlds; much like Benjamin Braddock who, despite his education and endless opportunities, can’t find a way out of his parents’ swimming pool. 

After Togo and Natsumi have gone to all of the places that he and Haru went on dates to, and after Togo reveals his feelings for Natsumi, they break up. Devastated and depressed, Natsumi spirals and ends up accidentally discovering her sister’s secret online diary. In it, Haru cheerfully details doctor’s visits, dates with Togo, her love for him, and her growing despair when she begins to recognize Natsumi and Togo’s compatibility. Her unconditional love for her sister begins to sour, turning to jealousy, and in her last post, she writes that she would rather drag her sister to hell with her just so she couldn’t be with Togo after Haru’s passing. The confession shocks Natsumi who spirals even harder into guilt over her feelings for Togo and her responsibility towards Haru’s memory. This is the true nature of “Haru’s curse”; the guilt and despair that ties Natsumi down and keeps her from moving on after Haru’s death. 

Despite their differences in character traits (Haru is young, sweet, and bubbly, Mrs. Robinson is older, mysterious, and darkly seductive) Haru is ultimately this story’s “Mrs. Robinson”; the point of the central toxic love triangle keeping the more compatible couple apart. But while Mrs. Robinson is alive and a much more active character than Haru, her inner life is much less explored in comparison. Anne Bancroft’s magnetic performance, and what little pieces of backstory we do get for her fill in many of the gaps: she’s intense and alluring, with unclear motives for instigating her affair with Ben but she’s also protective of her daughter, regretful of the choices that led her to motherhood, and deeply determined to secure a future for Elaine without Ben in it. She’s someone who exerts so much control over Ben and Elaine, but she is clearly missing control over her own life: a victim of the regressive time she was born into, and the opportunities she lost after being forced into a loveless marriage.

I don’t mind that the film doesn’t spell out everything about Mrs. Robinson’s life story or motivations, but what’s missing the most from the film is her relationship with her daughter. Though they talk about each other with Ben, Elaine and her mother are only present in the same scene together a total of four times: once when Ben picks Elaine up for her date, then when Ben reveals the affair to Elaine and she sees her mother through the door, then when Elaine goes back to Berkeley, and lastly in one of the final scenes in the movie after Ben crashes Elaine’s wedding, which is also the only time they speak to one another. As Elaine struggles to run after Ben, her mother grabs her arm and screams “It’s too late!” Elaine screams back “Not for me!” and her mother slaps her in the face twice. What we get of the two is interesting, and clearly complicated, but there’s just not enough time devoted to their relationship to make it a strong part of the story. 

The ambiguity of Elaine and her mother’s relationship is, again, not a total knock against the movie for me, but it’s another proof of the priority of Benjamin’s and, by extension, the male audience’s perspective. We are watching the world through his eyes and his eyes alone; we are focusing on his experiences, his relationships, his complexities and eccentricities, and all other characters are simply parts of his world. The movie works well because of it, the version of The Graduate that features all the changes I’d want from it would probably be way longer and worse, but it’s definitely part of why I couldn’t connect with the material as a teen. 

In Haru’s Curse, the relationship between the Tachibana sisters is prioritized as much as their relationships with Togo and, in turn, his inner desires and complex family dynamics. In part, this is because the medium of serialized fiction provides more legroom for story development than a 106-minute movie, but it’s also because Asuka Konishi cares about making room for these relationships. Learning how close Haru and Natsumi were, what family dynamics they grew into, and what complexes each has developed about the other enriches not just their characters but the story; because we know how much Natsumi loves Haru, Haru’s secret admission of jealousy and spite towards her sister feels genuinely disorientating. It’s this care towards both the development of these characters and their relationship that makes the complications that arise feel more meaningful. 

Natsumi and Togo eventually reconnect after Togo is in a minor accident. Unable to deny their love for each other, they, like Elaine and Ben 50 years before them, decide to run away together. The final chapter shows them tying up loose ends before their escape. We see Natsumi sharing a goodbye with her stepmother, and Togo speaking frankly to his mother. In a sunny room, she tells him, firmly, that he will regret throwing away his life like this. Togo replies “That may be true…and maybe I will regret this. The only thing I can say for sure is…I won’t come back here.” They then meet up and, hand-in-hand, walk towards their future together.

The final scene of Haru’s Curse isn’t nearly as dramatic as The Graduate’s wedding crash, but it parallels the ending perfectly: two people, uncertain of the strength of their connection, but certain that they cannot go back to where they came from, uneasily making their way in the world. And, though it is the less dramatic ending, it’s the ending that made me realize the point of both stories: that adulthood is not about getting older, but about making decisions that take you away from the person your family wanted you to be. It’s about making messy, uncertain choices that may change your life for the better, but it doesn’t stop those decisions from being painful or coming with the risk that they will completely destroy you in the end. Ben and Elaine choose to run away together, and on some level, it’s a better choice than being burdened by the expectations of their families, but it’s not a choice that’s going to solve either of their real problems. Natsumi and Togo also choose to start a new life together, but it’s difficult to say if their connection is strong enough to withstand their crushing guilt or their differences in lifestyles. The point is not that the choices they’ve made are good, but that they’ve had to make them to escape the lives they hate. 

What made Haru’s Curse the piece that brought me to this conclusion has everything to do with its perspective, character motivations, and genre. The Graduate is a dramedy film, while Haru’s Curse is a josei romantic drama manga; all of the things I felt the film was missing, deeper emotional relationships between female characters, and more time devoted to exploring the characters’ inner lives, are all things that Haru’s Curse could provide. That’s basically the whole thing with josei manga, exploring women’s stories and emotional struggles is prioritized in a way that few other genres and mediums can. Simply put, Haru’s Curse was made for me in the same way that The Graduate was not. Because of these changes, Haru’s Curse made the message of its inspiration more accessible to me, and, since then, I’ve been able to enjoy both pieces for all they have to offer. 

Certainly my own experiences with post-grad life have colored my understanding of these stories. Since I first watched The Graduate, I’ve graduated college myself during the start of a pandemic, spent a year and a half unemployed rotting in my bed at my parent’s house, lost friends I thought I’d keep forever, and have juggled quite a few crap jobs in my day. I’ve since lived Ben Braddock’s life of drifting between bedrooms and my parent’s backyard post-undergrad and Natsumi Tachibana’s life of drifting between part-time jobs, smiling while dying inside for a life I’ll never have. Though time hasn’t been exactly kind to me, I’m much more stable and happy now than I was four years ago. Change is destabilizing, scary, and comes with its own possibilities for disappointment, but change we must for a chance to discover who we are when we finally get to live on our own terms.