I recently discovered that the Japanese have turned one of my favorite Robert Heinlein stories into a movie.
The Door Into Summer, if you haven’t read it, is a classic hard-scifi story with robots, time travel, cold sleep, romance, betrayal… and a cat. The hero, Daniel Boone Davis (in the movie he’s Soichiro Takakura), is an engineer who constantly dreams up new and better ways to make your life easier. His flagship robot, Hired Girl, does housework, but he’s dreaming up a better robot that can do other things, too. That’s when the betrayal happens. His partner and supposed best friend teams up with his fiancé and tricks him into signing various legal documents that eventually allow them to boot him out of his own company–and they steal the robot model, too. DB, crushed by the blow, decides to sign up for cryosleep for 30 years, long enough that his former fiancé will be old enough so he’ll feel vindicated. He’s going to take his cat, Pete, too.
The cold sleep company refuses to allow him to enter the cryochamber while he’s drunk and send him home to dry out. During the process, he decides it’s a coward’s way out and that he’ll confront his former best friend and get some answers. Unfortunately, it turns out that DB’s former fiancé is now his best friend’s wife as well as his criminal partner. They drug DB and are debating what to do with him when Pete escapes from his carrier bag and wreaks havoc with the two people who have done something to his human. Pete gets through the unlatched screen door just in time to avoid his own murder and the bloody humans decide to make sure DB follows through with his cryosleep plans. They check him into a different facility however, one owned by a company who owes the former fiancé a big favor for her creative tax accounts.
DB wakes up 30 years later, without Pete. The rest of the story details how he copes with life in 2000, finds a job, meets new friends, and eventually hears about the possibility of time travel. Not only could he go back and assure that his ex-partner and wife won’t benefit from stealing his ideas and models, but he could make sure that the ex-partner’s stepdaughter, “Ricky” (Riko in the movie), will be properly cared for instead of shipped off to various boarding schools. And he can rescue Pete. He returns to the past, where he proceeds to undermine everything his previous company has (or will) create. With the help of a new friend, who’s a lawyer, DB manages to meet every one of his goals and he arranges to meet “Ricky” (Frederica) in the year 2000, after he returns to the future he’s grown to love via his original cryosleep agreement.
The movie takes a couple of liberties, mostly involving the robots, one of whom helps Soichiro with his plans in the past. It’s also set in the 1990s rather than the 1970s so the future becomes 2024 instead of 2000. They do a good job of sticking close to the rest of the story, though, and their Pete the Cat is a good little actor. The movie stars Kento Yamazaki, who I think looks way too young to be an engineer and Kaya Kayohara, with Naohito Fujiki as the robot (PETE-13). It’s in Japanese with English subtitles on Netflix if you’d like to check it out. I recommend it, especially if you’re a Heinlein fan.
