I have no idea how this film ended up in our to-watch list. Ordinarily this means that my wife added it to the list but she can’t recall where it came from either. Since she almost always adds romantic or animated films to the list and since this isn’t a cartoon despite its poster, I assumed that this was a romantic film.

Indeed, the opening scenes seem to bear this out. Takeshi Miyata is a lonely salaryman who is nearing middle-age. One night, his best friend Yusuke Kanda, who happens to be a private detective, invites him out and tells him about how he’d just met Miyata’s ex-girlfriend. He also relates the news that the girl is about to get married and seems intent on helping his friend get over her. On a whim, he invites another girl, Maki Kuwata, who has been sitting alone at another table in the restaurant, to join them. It just so happens that Maki has just left her fiancé and is now homeless. Yusuke shrewdly contrives to leave the two alone.

So far, so ordinary. It seems like a staid setup for a romance, exacerbated by the naivete and earnestness of Takeshi. When the ex-girlfriend shows up at Takeshi’s home to claim her old belongings just when he has invited Kuwata to temporarily stay at his house, you almost want to groan at how clichéd this coincidence is. But then an odd thing happens. The film switches focus to Yusuke, skipping back a bit in time to show the audience his encounter with the ex-girlfriend Ayumi Kurata. We see that he’s not being entirely honest with his friend, that quite a few different things are going on underneath the surface and that there are no coincidences anyway in this movie.

Indeed, it turns out that there is no single protagonist in A Stranger of Mine since each of the five main characters is the star of his or her own part of the story. The overarching plot unfolds to the audience in reverse chronological order in a manner not dissimilar to what made Memento so famous, yet director and writer Kenji Uchida is so deft that you’re never confused about what is happening and why. Rather than being dark or edgy despite the inclusion of a Yakuza boss and his flunkies, its played for maximum humor value as an intricate comedy of errors. I love how part of the joke is that each character is hiding a secret from everyone else apart from poor, clueless Takeshi.

Not only is this film incredibly funny, it’s a delight to work out how everything connects to everything else. The writing even holds up to the tightest scrutiny. There are no short-cuts, no improbable leaps of logic, no implausible behaviors on the part of any of the characters. As such, it’s a wonderful gem of a movie that as far as I can tell is woefully underrated and under-watched.