General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Cyborg She (僕の彼女はサイボーグ)

Cyborg She (僕の彼女はサイボーグ, Boku no Kanojo wa Saibōgu) is a 2008 Japanese science-fiction romantic comedy directed and written by the South Korean filmmaker Kwak Jae-yong, in which a lonely university student falls for a woman who turns out to be a cyborg sent from the future by his older self to protect him.¹^•² It was produced as a Korea-Japan co-production with a Japanese cast and crew, opened in Japan on May 31, 2008, and runs 120 minutes.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	僕の彼女はサイボーグ (Boku no Kanojo wa Saibōgu); international title Cyborg, She⁵
Director and writer	Kwak Jae-yong, known for My Sassy Girl (2001) and Windstruck (2004)⁵
Leads	Haruka Ayase as the unnamed "she"; Keisuke Koide as Jiro Kitamura³
Japan release	May 31, 2008, distributed by Gaga Communications; 120 minutes, color, 35 mm³
Box office	$7,172,979 worldwide, all international; Japan gross $6,112,891⁶
Home video	Over 110,000 DVDs sold in Japan⁷
Theme song	"Yakusoku no Tsubasa" by MISIA; score by Naoki Otsubo¹

Spoilers

Story

The film opens on the twentieth birthday of Jiro Kitamura (Keisuke Koide), a student with no friends to celebrate with. Shopping alone for his own present, he meets a cute girl in a scorched, tattered bodysuit, who changes into a dress, walks out of the department store without paying, and then joins him at a restaurant, claiming it is her birthday too.² Her behavior is wild and unpredictable: the two dine and dash, are chased by police, and Jiro spends the most exciting night of his life before she vanishes with a cryptic remark.²

The cyborg. One year later, on his next birthday, she reappears, but something about her is different. When a man opens fire in the restaurant where they are eating, she saves Jiro with impossible strength and reveals her secret: she is a cyborg sent from the future.² The future Jiro, unable to forget the girl he met that first birthday and crippled in the same shooting, built a cyborg in her likeness and sent it back to protect his younger self and change his unlucky life; the cyborg is programmed so that, depending on Jiro's efforts, she can develop emotions.²

The earthquake. Living together, the two grow closer as the cyborg shields Jiro from a series of dangers. The story's second half centers on a massive earthquake that destroys Jiro's hometown; the cyborg arranges a time warp so they can visit it, but this sequence does not explain the odd events of the film's opening.⁷^•⁸ The narrative loops back on itself in a Möbius-strip structure, connecting the pair's fates across a hundred years.² The cyborg's name is never given.⁹

Production and context

Kwak Jae-yong had made his name across Asia with My Sassy Girl (2001) and Windstruck (2004), both hits in Japan as well as Korea.⁵ Cyborg She was his first Japanese film, shot with a Japanese cast and crew as a Korea-Japan co-production, produced by Mataichiro Yamamoto and Ji Young-joon.³^•⁴ The Japan Society described it as a sci-fi romantic comedy paying homage to The Terminator, Back to the Future, and the manga Doraemon.¹⁰

The film screened as the opening work of the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival 2008 and was the closing film of the 2008 Pucheon (Bucheon) International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFan), where Kwak emphasized that it should be seen as science fiction.⁹^•⁷ After release, a manga adaptation based on the film was serialized in Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine.⁹

Reception and box office

In Japan the film spent five weeks in a top box-office position and sold over 110,000 DVDs.⁷ Box Office Mojo records $7,172,979 worldwide, entirely from international markets: $6,112,891 in Japan, $688,510 in Hong Kong, $187,169 in Thailand, $106,124 in South Korea (from May 14, 2009), $62,614 in Singapore, and $15,671 in Taiwan.⁶ Kwak later described the Japanese result as a moderate success rather than a major hit, and said it brought him no further offers to direct in Japan for some time.⁴

Audience scores have stayed favorable: IMDb lists 6.9/10 from about 4,500 voters.¹¹ On Rotten Tomatoes the Tomatometer shows no professional reviews, while the audience Popcornmeter stands at 72 percent from more than 1,000 ratings.¹² Reviewers have praised the earthquake visual effects; the SciFi Japan review called the post-earthquake sequence the element that makes the time-travel plot cohere, while noting a self-causing-object paradox of the kind found in Somewhere in Time as a curiosity rather than a flaw.⁸ The Korea Times was more critical, calling the film an unconvincing pursuit of a self-gratifying fantasy, though it acknowledged the striking visuals and the endearing performances of Ayase and Koide.⁷

Later remakes

Kwak Jae-yong later directed a Chinese remake of the film, one of the remakes of Japanese film properties produced in China covered in a JETRO report on Japanese intellectual property in Chinese cinema.¹³

Runtime discrepancy

Japanese databases, including the Japan Film Database and Eiga.com, list the running time as 120 minutes.³^•¹ Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes list 1 hour 55 minutes.⁶^•¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films of the 2000s › Science fiction films of the 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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