18×2 Beyond Youthful Days: A journey begins to trace the memories of a first love, crossing time and boundaries between Japan and Taiwan over the course of 18 years.
18×2 Beyond Youthful Days is the best travel deal of the year since it offers viewers a magnificent vacation through Taiwan and Japan for the price of a single ticket.
Based on Jimmy Lai’s genuine viral travels blog (which he has also novelised to coincide with the film’s release), 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days is an ambitious Japan-Taiwan co-production that effectively avoids all of the problems of cross-cultural co-productions. The end effect is unquestionably one of the best commercial romances from Asia this year.
Co-written and directed by Fujii Michihito, who has become one of Japan’s most sought-after filmmakers following the critical success of The Journalist (2019), 18×2 is a travelogue and a memory piece.
When the film begins in the present, we see Jimmy (Hsu Kuang-han) returning home to Tainan after being dismissed from the game firm he cofounded. When Jimmy discovers an old postcard from a Japanese woman named Ami in his old room, he decides to travel across Japan on local trains (though not explicitly stated in the film, the original blog involved the Seishun 18 kippu, a budget five-day train pass for unlimited travel on commuter trains).
