But the richness extends beyond the main characters. Every character, no matter how peripheral, feels real: a bartender at a karaoke bar who imparts his worries about his poor business to NJ; an affable neighbor who finds Yang-Yang taking pictures of mosquitoes and assures him that she has talked with his mother and knows the noisy fighting across the hall (courtesy of Lili’s mom) does not come from his apartment; a brash army youth who irritates Lili upon his noisy return to his friends at a café; and the demure waiter at a Japanese restaurant who asks Ota and NJ with some trepidation, “You are not gambling, are you?” then immediately follows with, “Who won?” All of them appear in the movie for less than a minute, but their presence as fully-developed entities is indelible. At any point, one could wander off to entire other stories going on concurrently, all of which could be just as interesting.