The Mourning Children: Nagiko and the Girls Wearing Tsurubami Black

Don't let the moonlit gardens, poetry competitions, and silk robes fool you — Heian-period Kyoto looks beautiful from the outside, but underneath all that elegance, people are dying from epidemics, and the court is a pressure cooker of political maneuvering. Tsurubamiiro no Nagiko-tachi drops you into this world through the eyes of Sei Shonagon, a real historical figure who served as lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi in 10th-century Japan. She's the woman who wrote The Pillow Book, one of the most celebrated works in Japanese literature, and this movie explores the life behind those writings — the grief, the resilience, and the small moments of beauty she clung to while everything around her was falling apart. This is directed by Sunao Katabuchi, the same person behind In This Corner of the World, and you can feel that same obsessive attention to historical detail here. He spent years researching this period, and it shows. The result is a movie that doesn't just depict the Heian era but makes you feel like you're actually living in it. If you loved the quiet emotional weight of In This Corner of the World or the painterly beauty of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, this is absolutely in that lineage. It's contemplative and melancholy without being slow — there's a warmth to how it portrays these women navigating impossible circumstances. The kind of movie that sits with you for days after you watch it.