By James Zhang, The Roar
Disclaimer: The following article contains spoilers for I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
“I want to eat your pancreas.” Not only the title of a beautiful movie, but also the simple, powerful words Sakura spoke to her best friend, Haruki. Its meaning is simple: in the past if you had a liver disease, you would eat a liver; if you had a stomach disease, you would eat a stomach. Sakura has a pancreatic disease that no human has ever survived, and since Haruki is the only person outside of her family that knows about this disease, she jokes about the situation.
“I want to eat your pancreas.” From this line, you can already understand the female protagonist’s personality. She is a very cheerful and social person. Even though she knows that she has a life threatening disease, she decides to live the rest of her life being as cheerful as she can doing things that she’s never done before and wants to experience one final time. However, since she doesn’t want anyone to worry, she never tells anyone about her disease, not even her closest friends. Completely opposite of Sakura, Haruki spends his entire day reading, finding the world of fiction more interesting than that of the real world. Since he is never social, everyone thinks very lowly of him, especially Sakura’s friends.
The movie starts with a narration by Haruki describing Sakura’s funeral. It was a gloomy scene, the opposite of what Sakura would have wanted her funeral to be. Haruki, however, never attended the funeral. That day, he just lay in bed in sorrow wondering if Sakura ever got his last text message to her. From this beginning, the audience has many expectations of what will happen during the movie. In their mind, they already visualize the plot. Little do they know, everything that they thought or expected would turn out to be wrong.
Sakura writes everything, from things she wants to do to things that she has already done, in a journal called “Living with Dying.” This journal is also how Haruki learned about Sakura’s condition. In a true anime fashion, she accidently dropped her journal in the hospital and Haruki, being the book loving person he is, picked it up and accidentally read it. Suddenly, real life became more interesting than fiction. He couldn’t understand how something so devastating could be treated with such an optimistic mindset. Later, when Sakura searches for her journal, they meet each other. Sakura, seeing that Haruki already knows her secret and doesn’t have any friends, decides to make him travel with her.
The next hour of the film portrays the two of them going on many adventures together, culminating in a beautiful scene depicting Sakura and Haruki hugging each other while fireworks explode in the background, swelling with music. At this point in the movie, the audience’s happiness level is extremely high; but the worst drop always starts at the peak. Planning to go on another adventure, Haruki waits in a cafe for Sakura. While waiting, he writes many drafts of messages to her, all of which he deletes. Finally, he types the line:
“I want to eat your pancreas.”
This line holds a new meaning now coming from Haruki rather than Sakura. It expresses his admiration of Sakura, her social skills, and her will to not fall into despair despite an unsurvivable disease. It expresses that he wants to be more like her.
Haruki keeps waiting all the way until the sun sets, but Sakura never comes. Finally, in one of the greatest emotional twists in animation, Haruki learns when going home that Sakura has been murdered. At first, this twist did not affect me that much, but after the third viewing of the movie, I finally realized why Sakura dying this way is even worse than dying from pancreatic disease. Haruki never got to see Sakura’s face again from their last adventure. If she died from a pancreatic disease, not only would Sakura have more time to live and enjoy herself, but Haruki would also be able to at least see her for one last goodbye and be there when she died.
In the end, as stated in Sakura’s will, Haruki is given Sakura’s journal. In the future, it is heavily implied that he forms a close bond with Sakura’s friends. At any rate, I barely scratched the surface of what I Want to Eat Your Pancreas is about. Yet, despite all the sadness and grief packed throughout this movie, moments of joy and exhilaration weaved between Sakura and Haruki brightening the conflict and making it seem more humane and more approachable. In the end, Sakura’s approach and attitude towards life is not just a temporary characterization; it is an influence that teaches us about the importance of optimism in impossible situations. It influenced Haruki, whose change throughout the story we see to be a symbol of open-mindedness to new experiences.
“I want to eat your pancreas.” It seems like a cute romance anime, but its themes and perspectives to life prove to be more than that.
The Roar 