Yumeji's Theme - Theme from 'in the Mood for Love'

Yumeji’s Theme is a short instrumental waltz for strings and solo violin by the Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi. He wrote it for Seijun Suzuki’s 1991 film Yumeji, and nine years later Wong Kar-wai used it again and again in In the Mood for Love, as his two leads grow close without acting on their feelings; it is the piece for which Umebayashi is perhaps best known in the West.

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Key facts

Composer
Shigeru Umebayashi (梅林茂)
Written for
Yumeji (1991), directed by Seijun Suzuki
Made famous by
In the Mood for Love (2000), directed by Wong Kar-wai
Form
Instrumental waltz for strings with solo violin
Uses in the film
Eight or nine times, by different counts

Written for Yumeji

Yumeji (夢二) is a 1991 Japanese film directed by Seijun Suzuki, a semi-faithful account of the life of the poet and painter Takehisa Yumeji, played by Kenji Sawada. It is the last part of Suzuki’s Taishō Roman trilogy, after Zigeunerweisen (1980) and Kagero-za (1981), and it was shown in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 1991.

Umebayashi wrote the theme for that film. Deep Focus Review describes it as a valse triste, a sad waltz, and Take One magazine as a short, hypnotic string arrangement with an isolated violin melody at its core.

In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, which premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2000, follows a man and a woman, played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, in Hong Kong in 1962 who discover that their spouses are having an affair. Michael Galasso’s soundtrack mixes his own score with Nat King Cole’s Spanish-language songs and, above all, Yumeji’s Theme.

The theme is not background music. Take One counts nine appearances, each lasting several minutes and often slowing the film into slow motion as the pair pass in a narrow corridor, comfort each other or hold back their feelings; the critic Clive James counted eight full-length playings. Deep Focus Review notes that Wong pairs the theme with slow-motion movement to heighten the film’s mood, and Clive James wrote that it holds the film’s drifting elements together. Take One reads its relentless repetition as mirroring the relationship between the two leads, and Clive James compares the melody to a love affair that cannot get started.

About Shigeru Umebayashi

Shigeru Umebayashi was born on 19 February 1951 in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka. He led and played bass in the Japanese new wave band EX, and turned to film scoring in 1985 when the band split up. He has written more than 30 scores for Japanese and Chinese films, including most of the music for Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004) as well as House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), and in 2023 he received a lifetime achievement award at the Rome Film Festival.

The theme lives on outside the cinema too: Wise Music Classical publishes it as a work for soloist and string orchestra. In Emblem World, Yumeji’s Theme sits in the Japan music collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.

Sources

Checked by Emblem editorial on 17 October 2026.

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