Close-Knit and the Quiet Radicalism of Care
- Unidelics !
- Mar 25
- 2 min read
On the surface, Close-Knit (Original title: Karera ga honki de amu toki wa, 2017)
looks like a cozy Japanese film about cherry blossoms and knitting.
Muted colors. Quiet rooms. The gentle clink of needles. You expect an ode to domesticity, maybe a quirky coming-of-age.
Instead, what you get is a low-lit surgical incision into what makes a family — and who gets to mother whom.
Tomo is 11. Her actual mother is the kind who disappears with a shrug and a store-bought rice ball. Tomo, unfazed, walks out and finds something better: her uncle, and his partner Rinko — a transgender woman who cooks, listens, keeps a peaceful home, and somehow manages to survive in a world determined to other her.
There’s softness everywhere in this film — but it’s not the naive kind. It’s the softness you develop after being stepped on. It’s radical, precisely because it doesn’t need to yell.
What’s wild is how the film treats gender:
Not as spectacle.
Not as tragedy.
Not even as a statement.
It’s background.
Knitting is foreground.
Bento boxes are foreground.
Love, quietly executed, is foreground.
Meanwhile, the cis women in the film — the birth mother, the pearl-clutching school moms — are brittle, loud, cruel, or just plain tired. The traditional keepers of the maternal flame seem unable to carry it. And Rinko, with her wool and her warmth, does.
And here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about:
They literally knit 109 woolen penises.
For a ritual. To let go of desire. To mark Rinko’s “manhood funeral.”
Buddhism. It’s iconic.
And what’s with the knitting per se? Why does doing something small and repetitive with your hands become the only way to survive something so large and chaotic?
The movie doesn’t offer neat answers. It offers quiet, disarming questions that settle into you like a warm drink with a weird aftertaste:
🧵 Who gets to decide what a family looks like?
🧵 Is motherhood a job? A role? A feeling? A muscle?
🧵 Can the tenderest person in the room also be the strongest?
Close-Knit won’t answer these for you. But it’ll charm you into asking them.
Anyway.
I cried.
I laughed.
I briefly considered taking up knitting.
Your turn:
Who in your life fed you and saw you?
If you had to burn 109 symbols of your old self… what would you knit?
🧶
It’s strange how often transformation begins not with grand gestures, but with something small, repeated, and quiet. Like knitting. Or sipping tea. Or microdosing mushrooms.