This is not the usual school drama or movie we see these days. Usual school issues actually play little part in it (apart from one. instance touching on bullying). It starts as a realistic film of confused adolescent emotions in mainly school setting into which we are gradually introduced to a dark side of gender identity, sexual violence (Aihara, a female student transferred after being raped) and repression but especially the struggle for identity of a gay teenager, Ito, worked around his feelings for a classmate(Yoshida) in a still non-accepting society in the 1990s (though unhappily not so much changed 30 years later) an object of scorn by other students and his father( who still thinks he can be medically "cured" ), the movie climaxes (no pun intended) in a surreal meeting of the three on a beach in which the conventional boundaries are crossed this is a nuanced movie where the dark erotic instincts, feelings, motivations swirling in the protagonists are brought to the surface slowly but finally only in the dark isolation of a nocturnal seashore (the grains of sand) and yet still remain unresolved as they return to their habitual lives very good exploration of these difficult issues and must have been ground-breaking in 1990s Japan 〜