Despite possessing the typical tropes of a classic ghost story, like poltergeist activity, ritual purification, and a long, black-haired woman in white, A Girl in My Room firmly establishes itself in rom-com territory. This 2022 Japanese film begins with a heartbreak preceding a haunting: after his girlfriend dumps him and moves out, Yohei discovers his apartment is haunted by a ghost girl who can’t move on.
Friction and comedy arise as the pair are forced to live together without driving each other crazy. Yohei and Aisuke gradually come to understand one another and learn about themselves in the process. Over time, a tender, tentative love blossoms.
Not Your Typical Meet-Cute
When Aisuke first manifests herself to him, she and Yohei immediately don’t get along. While most future couples in other rom-coms follow the same pattern of initial tension/attraction, A Girl in My Room playfully subverts the classic rom-com motif of the meet-cute. Even though Yohei has never seen her before their first “meeting,” Aisuke has been watching him and his ex-girlfriend all this while. Yohei is creeped out to learn that she knows more intimate details about him than any young man would like a strange girl to know. Ironically, Aisuke doesn’t know anything about her own life.
Still, although Aisuke suffers from amnesia, her memory loss isn’t experienced as a debilitating loss of self. Instead, the film offers a refreshing take by using amnesia as a form of tabula rasa. Aisuke essentially gets a blank slate to explore and discover her own past, her personality, as well as her preferences and perspectives on life and the afterlife.
Aisuke charmingly approaches everything she encounters with the innocence of a newborn. As Yohei is the one constant in her new “life,” everything about him intrigues Aisuke, from his opinions on dating, to his Adam’s apple, which she longs to touch.
Sensing that she’s never dated anyone during her lifetime, Aisuke finds herself curious about love and relationships. She uses Yohei as a field subject to voyeuristically observe how men and women behave together romantically. This obviously presents Yohei with extreme discomfort when he brings a lady friend home.
Just Two Lost Souls Looking for Love
Aisuke’s condition raises an interesting philosophical question about ghosts. How can someone experience growing up when she can no longer grow old? Can a ghost have “some other time,” and all its implications of a future? This conundrum ties to the core emotional currents of loneliness and longing flowing through A Girl in My Room.
Both Yohei and Aisuke are lost souls who find comfort in one another. But coming from two different worlds, their love may well be impossible to bridge. The fate of the star-crossed lovers is foreshadowed by some pretty obvious Romeo and Juliet imagery. Each day, when Yohei leaves for work, he walks beneath his apartment balcony from where Aisuke waves at him.
One thing I found unexpectedly moving about A Girl in My Room is Aisuke’s relationship with the apartment she haunts. Unlike Western horror, where the physical location is experienced as entrapment, Aisuke does not suffer any psychological decline from the loneliness and isolation of being stuck in the same place.
Instead, the apartment is a cosy home for her, a place she haunts because of sentimental, rather than spiritual, attachment. After she manages to leave the apartment for the first time to go on a date with Yohei, she touchingly announces, “I’m home,” when they return.
The Ghost in You
For all that, I can’t say that A Girl in My Room is particularly original. While it doesn’t rehash any tired horror tropes (the exorcism scene is mildly comical), the film doesn’t examine the issues it raised with as much depth as I’d have liked.
There were missed opportunities to fully explore the tensions between men and women having to share limited space as housemates. Everything was also very chaste, and Aisuke stays firmly in the apartment’s main public areas. I wonder how Yohei would react if she invaded his privacy in the bathroom liked the ghost from Marry My Dead Body.
Still, A Girl in My Room manages to be sweet without being saccharine as it offers a slice-of-(after)life picture into a tender relationship. There is a beautiful narrative symmetry as the film draws to a close by paralleling how it began. And the ending is just ambiguous enough to keep you wondering for days after.
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