General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Let Me Eat Your Pancreas (君の膵臓をたべたい)

Let Me Eat Your Pancreas (君の膵臓をたべたい, Kimi no Suizō o Tabetai) is a 2017 Japanese live-action drama film directed by Tsukikawa Shō (月川翔), adapted from Yoru Sumino's (住野よる) bestselling novel of the same title, starring Minami Hamabe as the terminally ill high schooler Sakura Yamauchi and Takumi Kitamura as her unnamed classmate, and distributed by Toho.¹^•² The International Standard Audiovisual Number registry records it as a 115-minute feature film with reference year 2017, directed by Shô Tsukikawa, under the English title "Let Me Eat Your Pancreas."³ It is a separate work from the animated film adaptation of the same novel, which premiered a year later, on September 1, 2018.⁴^•⁵

Key fact	Detail
Japanese release	July 28, 2017; 115 minutes; rated G; distributed by Toho¹^•²
Director and screenwriter	Tsukikawa Shō (director); Yoshida Tomoko (吉田智子, screenplay), from Yoru Sumino's novel¹^•²
Leads	Minami Hamabe as Yamauchi Sakura (山内桜良); Takumi Kitamura as "Boku" (僕), the unnamed student protagonist¹
Frame cast	Oguri Shun as the protagonist 12 years later, now a teacher; Kitagawa Keiko as Kyoko in the present-day timeline¹^•²
Structural change from the novel	Adds a "12 years later" present timeline, with past and present interweaving; the novel has no such frame¹
Awards	41st Japan Academy Prize (2018) Excellence Awards for Picture, Screenplay (Yoshida Tomoko), and New Actor for both Hamabe and Kitamura²
Source novel	Serialized on Shōsetsuka ni Narō in 2014; print edition by Futabasha, June 2015; over 2 million copies in print by January 2018⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story is told in the first person by a bookish high school boy who avoids deep involvement with other people.⁸ At a hospital he finds a diary titled Kyōbyō bunko (共病文庫, roughly "co-illness library"), which belongs to his popular classmate Sakura Yamauchi; reading it, he learns her secret: she has a pancreatic illness with little time left to live, a fact she has told no one outside her family.⁸^•⁷ Sakura is described as bright, cheerful, and curious, and she draws the detached boy into spending her remaining months with her.⁸

The title is a metaphor drawn from the story rather than a literal statement: the Japan Media Arts Festival synopsis describes a protagonist who reads the diary and learns that Sakura has only months to live from a pancreatic illness, and the publisher's synopsis frames the story as a first-person account of a boy who discovers his classmate is dying.⁹^•⁷

Origins and source material

Yoru Sumino began serializing the story on the Shōsetsuka ni Narō ("Let's Become Novelists") website in 2014, and Futabasha published the novel in print in June 2015, with cover art by the illustrator loundraw.⁶ The novel and related books had over 2 million copies in print as of January 2018.⁶ A manga adaptation by Idumi Kirihara ran in Futabasha's Monthly Action magazine from August 2016 to May 25, 2018, and was collected in two volumes published on June 20, 2018.⁶ Seven Seas Entertainment released the English-language light novel on November 20, 2018 at $14.99 (ISBN 978-1-64275-033-1), listing "Let Me Eat Your Pancreas" as an alternate title.⁷

Cast and production

The film was directed by Tsukikawa Shō from a screenplay by Yoshida Tomoko, based on Sumino's novel.¹^•² Minami Hamabe plays Sakura Yamauchi and Takumi Kitamura plays the student-era "Boku."¹ The film's most visible departure from the novel is a dual-timeline structure: it adds a "present" set 12 years after the events of the book, in which Oguri Shun plays the protagonist as an adult teacher and Kitagawa Keiko plays Kyoko, with the past and present timelines interweaving.¹^•² Toho distributed the film theatrically.²

Release and box office

The film opened in Japan on July 28, 2017, with a runtime of 115 minutes and a G rating.¹^•² It screened internationally under the English title Let Me Eat Your Pancreas at the 2017 Busan International Film Festival in South Korea and in Malaysia.¹^•⁶ The documented box-office figure in this franchise belongs to the 2018 anime film, which grossed US$33,669,646 worldwide, including US$277,019 in the United States and Canada.⁵

Reception and awards

At the 41st Japan Academy Prize (2018), the film received Excellence Awards (優秀賞) in three categories: Excellent Picture, Excellent Screenplay for Yoshida Tomoko, and New Actor for both Minami Hamabe and Takumi Kitamura.² Its Busan festival selection gave it an international festival platform in the year of release.¹

The anime adaptation supplies the comparative reception data for the property. The Japan Media Arts Festival recognized the anime film, produced by a team led by Ushijima Shin'ichirō, in the theater animation division, and its citation notes that the live-action film version had also been popular.⁹ Anime News Network users rated the anime film a weighted mean of 7.889 ("Very good"), and MyAnimeList users gave it 8.551 from more than 584,000 users.⁴^•¹⁰

By the numbers

The two adaptations form a sequence rather than a competition. The live-action film came first, opening July 28, 2017, and the anime followed on September 1, 2018, with a festival rollout that reached Australia (September 16, 2018), the United States (October 21, 2018), Italy (January 21, 2019), Spain (April 12, 2019), and France (August 21, 2019).¹^•⁴ The anime's documented worldwide gross of US$33,669,646 is a box-office figure for the anime film, not the live-action film.⁵ On the audience-score comparison, the anime holds 7.889 on ANN and 8.551 on MyAnimeList.⁴^•¹⁰ The publishing side shows the franchise's scale: over 2 million copies in print by January 2018, before either film's full international life.⁶

References

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