If you found The Wrestler a bit of a bummer, this is the antidote. From the Rocky school of improbable underdogs battling impossible odds, Gachi Bôi Wrestling With a Memory is set in the very modest confines of Japanese college student wrestling enthusiasts, and features a protagonist you can’t help but empathize with.

Igarashi had a spectacularly promising future ahead of him when a traffic accident wiped out his short-term memory – and his academic and professional prospects. The upside is that he is now free to pursue his passion for pro wrestling, Japanese-style, instead of law school. The downside is that he forgets everything he learns in any given day by next morning – including the crucial fact that wrestling matches are, as Roland Barthes put it so elegantly, ‘stage-managed’. Robbed of his future and shipwrecked in time, Igarashi fights his battles for real, and earns a sense of continuity and permanence in his bruises - fighting Barthes’ claim that in wrestling, “it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time”. This is at every turn a film that favors heart over skill, an irresistible Battle Royale between Memento and Rocky that, by the time the final showdown comes around, will have you on your feet and cheering.

Sindre Kartvedt