Angel Guts: Red Porno (天使のはらわた 赤い淫画, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1981)

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“Lots of perverts around these days”, Nami (Jun Izumi) sighs to herself on becoming convinced that someone’s stalking her. She isn’t wrong, but her increasing paranoia bears out the sense of threat in the contemporary city. Perhaps something has happened to her before, or maybe it’s because she’s a young woman living alone who has been receiving dirty calls from anonymous heavy breather, but she can’t escape the sense of being watched even when she’s at home on her own.

Nami isn’t a well-known person, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that some strange man has followed her home from the department store where she works after taking a liking to her. She sees herself clearly as not that kind of woman, and ostensibly leads a very proper life with a decent job and her own apartment. The fact that she masturbates under her kotatsu might be both an expression of her loneliness and an attempt to own her sexuality, but also hints at its illicitness in the fact that it is hidden and out of view. When her friend asks her to fill in at her part-time gig, Nami agrees out of politeness but far from the simple modelling job she was expecting, she’s forced into a shoot for a bondage magazine and becomes an unexpected pinup star.

The reason she’s so popular may indeed be because of the real shock and confusion obvious in her almost comical expression. Though the team from the magazine want her to come back promising a sizeable paycheque, Nami refuses and is unable to accept the image of herself as a pornographic model. When a man, Muraki (Masahiko Abe), chases her into a ladies’ bathroom at the train station, she keeps telling him that she’s not that sort of woman, but there’s uncertainty in her voice and what she most seems to want is vindication. Meanwhile, she’s basically harassed into an affair with her married floor manager who gets her drunk and takes her to a hotel room explaining that she was regarded as the “hardest girl to get” among the department store staff. He becomes increasingly forceful as Nami resists before finally giving in and thereafter continuing an affair with him. 

Even before she became an accidental magazine star, Nami was indeed the focus of unwanted attention and felt herself threatened by simply by existing in a male society. Muraki peeps on the teenage girl who lives in the posh house next to his rundown apartment building as she, ironically, masturbates by shoving an egg into her vagina and cracking it open with a set of pencils. Later it seems as if the girl knew Muraki was watching her, but evidently continued to do it anyway. In any case, Muraki’s peeping is also a kind of class transgression as is his fantasy of raping his landlady after she enters his apartment without permission in the belief that he’s been stealing women’s underwear. Unable to get a job, his existence is fairly dismal and he’s viewed with suspicion by his neighbours due to his slovenly appearance and uncouth manner. He too becomes fixated on Nami’s photo, fantasising about her as a possible source of salvation based only on her image in the magazine.

When he eventually encounters Nami, he too like her boss first seems as if he means to force himself on her, but then pulls back, explains that his feelings are genuine, and he’d rather meet her in a more normal way in a public place to go on a conventional date, making clear that he’s interested in Nami, not just the image of her from the magazine onto which he’s projected his own fantasies. But conversely, as much as it might inspire a sense of hope in the readers, the photo is also a liability and when her floor manager discovers it, he attempts to blackmail her into shifting the dynamics of their relationship so that he’d no longer have to pay for hotel rooms or expend any extra funds on Nami. Despite the fact her friend has been a nude model for ages, Nami is dismissed from the department store. The boss describes her as “just a slut”, though lamenting it’s a shame seeing as she was so pretty as he instructs her floor manager to fire her, bearing out the double standard that men are free to view these images but scorn the women who are in them.

Nevertheless, the encounter with Muraki and being let go from the department store provoke a kind of liberation in which Nami flips the kotatsu over and masturbates with the chair leg bathed in the red glow of the heater. She has perhaps fully embraced her sexuality, indulging in rope play and no longer hidden beneath the curtain of the blanket but orgiastically pleasuring herself out in the open. Muraki, meanwhile, pays another sort of price in being the prime suspect in a rape and murder just because the neighbours think he’s a bit weird and assume it must be him. He continues to cling to the idea of Nami as a kind of salvation, while she too seems drawn to him and is about to throw away the magazine and say goodbye to this sorry episode in her life until a potential happy ending is abruptly cut short. Filled with urban melancholy, the film paints both Muraki and Nami as prisoners of their society, unable to find self-acceptance or security save in the frustrated bond they unexpectedly discover in their shared desire for escape.

Angel Guts: Red Porno is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Angel Guts: Nami (天使のはらわた　名美, Noboru Tanaka, 1979)

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Aspiring journalist Nami Tsuchiya (Eri Kanuma) works for a magazine called “The Woman,” but it soon becomes clear she’s their only female reporter and one of a handful of women in an office otherwise staffed by men. Her editor has her writing a series titled “Rape and its Consequences” in which she attempts to interview women who’ve experienced sexual assault in an attempt to root out the effect it’s had on their lives. At times Nami seems a little conflicted, puffing away on a cigarette with a pensive look on her face, but there’s no denying that she’s sold out other women for a chance to make it in a man’s world by exploiting a suffering she does not herself share.

Muraki (Takeo Chii), formerly a top magazine editor, reminds her that not everyone who reads her magazine is a woman, but there is something perverse about the idea of her article which is otherwise conceived from a perspective that seems very male. The female readership of this magazine would not need to be educated about the prevalence of rape nor its consequences. Nami’s article doesn’t seem to want to find success stories, but to revel in misery. She accosts one of the women she’s hoping to interview and tries to badger her into talking on the record. Yoshiko appears fed up and tells her that recounting what happened would be like being raped all over again, but still Nami doesn’t relent. She tries to guilt her into speaking by suggesting that her testimony would stop other women being assaulted, which is backwards logic seeing as it isn’t the women who are responsible and even if she were advancing a victim blaming narrative that it’s on women to protect themselves, Yoshiko had not done anything that could be seen to be “wrong” nor is there any way she could have prevented what happened to her.

Through her articles, Nami has become complicit in this culture and is effectively an agent of rape herself in her desire to tear into the lives these women have tried to build for themselves and extract even more salacious detail. She describes Yoshiko as “happily married,” but she’s living in a rundown house on the margins of the city. It seems her husband maybe ill and therefore unable to work. Yoshiko may have married him out of a lack of other options and it’s not clear if her husband knows about her past or how he would react if he learned of it now. The fact that Nami’s attempt to interview others about Yoshiko fails bears out the social stigma that can surround those who’ve experienced sexual assault and suggests that Yoshiko has now become an outcast. The photos that they publish only black out Yoshiko’s eyes making it easy for those in her community to identify her which could certainly make her life much more difficult and lead to a loss of employment or social further exclusion.

It’s clear that Nami hasn’t really thought any of this through and is only focussed on impressing her male editors to be given better assignments. This may in part be what she means when she says that she’s been assaulted in her office by the people she works with on gaining more of an insight into the consequences of her writing. Though he threatens to rape her himself, Muraki seems to be a representative of a more compassionate masculinity but at the same time has been emasculated, rendered impotent after his own wife was raped by an intruder and then left him because he couldn’t satisfy her sexually. He connects Nami with a mentally disturbed nurse who was assaulted by a doctor with an autopsy fetish, though the incident was covered up by the hospital. None of these men, except Muraki, is held responsible for their actions. Nami, however, becomes all of these women, envisioning herself abandoned at the scene half-naked and clothes torn, discarded on the rubbish tip of the modern society. At the beginning of the film, a woman smashes the lens of the camera as a man moves towards her, as if she meant to rebuke us for watching, while even Nami finds herself becoming dangerously aroused by watching other women being assaulted or listening to their stories before she too cracks and begins to see herself as nothing more than an anonymous object at the mercy of male society.

Angel Guts: Nami is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom (天使のはらわた 赤い教室, Chusei Sone, 1979)

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Chusei Sone’s Angel Guts: Red Classroom (天使のはらわた 赤い教室, Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Kyoshitsu) opens with grainy 8mm footage of a woman being gang raped, but this turns out to be a film being watched by the protagonist, Muraki (Keizo Kanie), rather than the one we’re actually watching. Nevertheless, in presenting the footage in this way, the film has made us somewhat complicit in witnessing this woman’s exploitation for the purposes of entertainment. A producer of pornographic magazines, Muraki is captivated by the woman’s ruined innocence and becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her.

Though he says he doesn’t think she belongs in this world, Muraki does not so much want to save Nami (Yuki Mizuhara) as get her to work for his magazine. He declares that years of this kind of work have left him numbed and desensitised. Watching her video was the first time he’s felt moved in years. However, it turns out that this may be because the video wasn’t a movie in which the actress had consented to appear, but raw footage of an actual gang rape committed against a trainee teacher. The implication is that this traumatic incident has numbed Nami in the same way Muraki has been numbed by his exposure to pornography, leaving her with a permanently vacant, inscrutable expression and reducing her to nothing but a sexual object. Though the 8mm “blue movie” is an illegal form of pornography that can be watched only in underground clubs, she claims to have run into several men like Muraki who recognise her and has concluded that the only way to get rid of them is to satisfy their desire by sleeping with them. She says she won’t feel anything anyway, but has scars on her wrist and seems to have turned to potentially dangerous sex with random men as a means of self-harm.

Muraki refuses to sleep with her, but in Nami he seems to be looking for his own buried innocence and masking the shame he feels towards his line of work. His parents think he publishes books for children, he tells Nami, but rants to another woman that his magazines are all the same and he doesn’t know how to make them better. He can’t take the kind of pictures he wants to, because he wouldn’t be able to publish them under the increasingly strict censorship laws. Repeated references are made to the need to avoid showing any pubic hair which is considered obscene under Japanese law, though they’re otherwise free to depict scenes of sexual violence and degradation. Ironically, Muraki is unable to meet Nami at their rendezvous because he’s been arrested for breaking the Protection of Minors Act after having photographed a 15-year-old girl, though Muraki claims he was just trying to help her. He says she told him she was 19, recently arrived from Aomori and had been reduced to shoplifting, so he gave her a job out of the kindness of his heart.

It’s things like this that might have Muraki desperate to prove he’s not “scum” but a good man and an artist rather than a purveyor of pornography and exploiter of women. The film has its cake and eats it too, critiquing female exploitation but simultaneously trading on it, if doing its best to make the viewer feel at least conflicted. Three years later, Muraki is in a relationship with a woman he once exploited who couldn’t let him go and has fathered a child, but the papers are full of news about suicides and domesticity does not seem to him provide much of a refuge. He continues to search for Nami in order to reclaim his innocence, but discovers that she has become a vacant sex worker, ironically working at a bar called “blue” and the plaything of a man in a James Dean-style red jacked who has broken dreams of his own. Unlike Muraki, she has only fallen further, and he is ultimately forced to watch what his business has reduced her to as a group of men set on a captive high school girl like a pack of wolves, ironically echoing the opening sequence. Yet in the end, it’s Nami who frees him by literally showing Muraki the way out of this place as he urges her to leave though she seems to say it’s already too late. Looking at her own distorted image in a puddle, she no longer knows who she is and has no identity that is not forced upon her by a violent male gaze.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Blades of the Guardians (镖人：风起大漠, Yuen Woo-Ping, 2026)

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“I haven’t seen moves like that in the martial world in forty years,” quips a bystander in a post-credits sequence, and this adaptation of the manhua by the legendary Yuen Woo-Ping certainly does its best to bring back some of the charm of classic wuxia. Produced by star Wu Jing, Blades of the Guardians (镖人：风起大漠, biāo rén fēng qǐ dàmò) also features a cameo appearance by Jet Li as well Nicholas Tse, Tony Leung Ka-fai, and Kara Wai, as a cynical bounty hunter rediscovers his duty towards the common people while escorting a would be revolutionary to the ancient capital of Chang’an.

A former soldier, Dao Ma (Wu Jing) now wanders the land with a child in tow in search of wanted criminals, but when he finds them, makes an offer instead. Pay him triple the bounty, and he’ll forget he ever saw them. As we’re told, this is a world of constant corruption under the oppressive rule of the Sui dynasty. Zhi Shilang (Sun Yizhou) is the famed leader of the Flower Rebellion that hopes to clear the air, which makes him the number one fugitive of the current moment. This is slightly annoying to Dao Ma in that it necessarily means he’s number two when forced on the run after killing a corrupt local governor (Jet Li) in defence of an innkeeper with a hidden martial arts background whose family the official was going to seize for the non-payment of taxes. Taking refuge in the small township of Mojia, Dao Ma is given a mission by the sympathetic Chief Mo (Tony Leung Ka-fai) who agrees to cancel all his debts if he escorts Zhi Shilang to Chang’an safely before they’re both killed by hoards of marauding bounty hunters, regular bandits, government troops including two of Dao Ma’s old friends, or the former fiancée of ally Ayuya (Chen Lijun), the self-proclaimed Khan, He Yixuan (Ci Sha).

When given the mission, Dao Ma asked why he should care about the common people or Zhi Shilang’s revolution only to be swept along as they make their way towards the capital and witness both the esteem with which Zhi Shilang seems to be held by those who believe in his cause and the venality of the bounty hunters along with the mindless cruelty of He Yexian’s minions. As is usual in these kinds of stories, Mojia is a idyllic haven of cherry trees in bloom where the people dance and sing and are kind to each other, which is to say, the seat of the real China. Though Ayuya longs to see Chang’an and harbours mild resentment towards her father for his “control” over her, Chief Mo is the moral centre of the film and not least because he cares for nothing more than his daughter’s happiness. When she decides not to marry He Yixian on account of his bloodthirsty lust for power, Mo walks barefoot through the scorched land of the desert to free her from the obligation and, after all, has trained her to become a fearsome archer rather than just someone’s wife or a pawn to be played as he sees fit. 

But as someone else says, who is not a pawn in this world? There are other shadow forces lurking behind the scenes playing a game of their own while taking advantage of the corrupt chaos of the Sui Dynasty court. Dao Ma, however, revels in his outsider status. “Not even the gods control me now,” he jokes in advocating for his freelance lifestyle loafing around as a cynical bounty hunter who can choose when to work and where to go, in contrast to his life as a soldier of the Sui forced to carry out their inhuman demands. When the innkeeper’s son tells him he wants to be a swordsman too, Dao Ma gives him a sword as a symbol of freedom and instructs him to take a horse and go wherever he wants when he’s old enough. His fate is his own, whatever his father might have said. 

If that might sound like a surprising and somewhat subversive advocation for individualism, the final message is one of solidarity, as Dao Ma rediscovers his duty to the people and various others also fall in behind Zhi Shilang, who is hilariously inept at things like riding a horse and remaining calm under fire, to take the revolution all the way to Chang’an. With stunning action sequences including an epic sandstorm battle, the film successfully marries old-school wuxia charm with a contemporary sensibility and an unexpectedly revolutionary spirit as Dao Ma and friends ride off to tackle corruption at the heart of government.

Blades of the Guardians is in US cinemas now courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Final Piece (盤上の向日葵, Naoto Kumazawa, 2025)

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When a body is discovered buried with a priceless set of shogi tiles, it unearths old truths in life of an aspiring player in Naoto Kumazawa’s sprawling mystery, The Final Piece (盤上の向日葵, Banjo no Himawari). In Japanese films about shogi, the game is often a maddening obsession that is forever out of reach. Hopefuls begin learning as children, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, but there’s age cut off to turn pro and if you don’t make the grade by 26, you’re permanently relegated to the ranks of the amateur. 

Junior policeman Sano (Mahiro Takasugi) was one such child and in some ways solving the crime is his final match. The thing is, he loves the game and admires Kamijo’s (Kentaro Sakaguchi) playing style along with the aspirational quality of his rise from nowhere not having trained at the shogi school and turning pro at the last minute to win a prestigious newcomer tournament. He’s hoping Kamijo will win his game against prodigious player Mibu (Ukon Onoe) with whom Kamijo’s fortunes are forever compared. Which is all to say, Sano really doesn’t want Kamijo to be the killer and is wary of accusing him prematurely knowing that to do so means he’ll be kicked out of professional shogi circles whether he turns out to be guilty or not.

Nevertheless, the more they dig into Kamijo’s past, a sad story begins to emerge that strongly contrasts with his present persona, a slightly cocky young man with a silly beard and smarmy manner. While Mibu seems to have been indulged and given every opportunity to hone his skills, Kamijo was a poor boy whose father had drink and gambling problems and was physically abusive towards him. His mother took her own life, leaving Kamijo to fend for himself with a paper round while his father occasionally threw coins at him and railed against anyone who questioned his parenting style. Good intentions can have negative consequences, the landlady at his father’s favourite bar remarks recalling how he went out and beat Kamijo for embarrassing him after another man told him he should be nicer to his son.

Toxic parental influence is the wall Kamijo’s trying to break in shogi. Aside from the man raising him, Kamijo finds another, more positive, paternal figure in a retired school teacher (Fumiyo Kohinata) who notices his interest in shogi and trains him in the game while he and his wife also give him clean clothes and a place to find refuge. But Kamijo can’t quite break free of his father’s hold much as he tries to force himself to be more like the school teacher. As an impoverished student he meets another man, the cool as ice yakuza-adjacent shogi gambler Tomyo (Ken Watanabe), who insists he’s going to show him the “real” shogi, but in reality is little different from his father if more supportive of his talent.

Kamijo finds himself torn between these three men in looking for his true self. Though he may tell himself he wants to be like the schoolteacher being good and helping people in need, he’s pulled towards the dark side by Tomyo and a desperate need for shogi which tries to suppress by living a nice, quiet life on a sunflower farm that reminds him of the happier parts of his childhood. There’s a cruel irony in the fact that the police case threatens to ruin to his shogi success at the moment of its fruition, even if it accompanies Kamijo’s own acceptance of his internal darkness and the way it interacts with his addiction to the game. 

Tomyo’s own obsession may have ruined his life as he looks back over the town where he spent his happiest months with a woman he presumably lost because of his gambling and need for shogi glory even though he never turned professional and remained a forever marginalised presence as a gambler in shogi society. Unlocking the secrets of his past seems to give Kamijo permission to accept Tomyo’s paternal influence and along with it the darker side of shogi, but there’s something a little uncomfortable in the implication that he was always doomed on account of his “bad blood” aside from the toxic influences of his some of his father figures from the man who raised him and exploits him for money well into adulthood, and the ice cool gangster who taught him all the best moves the devil has to play along with a newfound desire for life that may soon be snuffed out.

The Final Piece screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

LUPIN THE IIIRD: The Movie – The Immortal Bloodline (LUPIN THE IIIRD THE MOVIE 不死身の血族, Takeshi Koike, 2025)

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Lupin and the gang find themselves in a race against time after being lured to a mysterious private island in Takeshi Koike’s latest instalment in the classic franchise, LUPIN THE IIIRD: The Movie – The Immortal Bloodline (LUPIN THE IIIRD THE MOVIE 不死身の血族, Fujimi no Ketsuzoku). A sequel to a series of specials, the film opens with a lengthy recap explaining that each member of Lupin’s team has been targeted for assassination and seen off their adversaries using their own particular skills. Now Lupin’s home has been destroyed taking most of his loot with it, so he too is in hot pursuit looking for answers about who might be trying to kill them and why, along with some treasure, of course.

What he discovers, however, is that the island is a kind of graveyard for the unwanted. The place is full of mindless men in masks, the hitmen who didn’t make it reduced to animalistic predation. Disused military equipment scatters the landscape as if in reminder of mankind’s folly. But Lupin (voiced by Kanichi Kurita) is here because according to apparent mastermind Muom (Kataoka Ainosuke VI), he’s trash too and doesn’t belong in the new world Muom is trying to create by making the earth immortal. The air on the island is toxic to people like Lupin and unless he and his friends find a way off it within the next 24 hours, they’re destined to become zombie-like masked men too or else fade away into oblivion leaving not even a legacy behind them. 

The war is then against a notion of obsolescence or the idea that a person can become somehow unnecessary. The gang were followed to the island by Zenigata (Koichi Yamadera) who is still trying to catch Lupin but ends up becoming trapped too. Lupin is obviously very necessary to Zenigata as without him he doesn’t really have a reason to exist. That’s one reason he ends up ironically teaming up with him, protecting Fujiko Mine (Miyuki Sawashiro) and breaking his own code to shoot some bad guys in an attempt to keep Lupin alive to face justice. 

But as it turns out, Interpol might not be the best place to turn for back up as there’s some sort of blackout code on all things related to the island which is marked on no maps. Zenigata’s contact describes it as “sacred” and rather than sending the helicopter he asked for, explains everyone who sets foot on it will have to die because they know too much. As weird as Muom’s plans to make the earth immortal sound, it appears it’s locked into something bigger. All of which is quite good for Lupin who starts to realise there might not be much treasure here after all, but he’s found something more precious in a lead on even greater riches just waiting to be plundered.

This might be his way out of the purgatorial space of the island, the “hell for those burdened by karma” as Goemon (Daisuke Namikawa) describes it, in kicking back against Muom’s plans by identifying his nature and, quite literally, heading straight to the heart of the matter while reclaiming his identity as the gentleman thief from those who think he’s an unwelcome presence. Returning to the lair, he burns the history of himself and declares that life is a fiction to be enjoyed while immortality is a worthless gift that robs existence of its meaning. Separated on the island, the team must face their personal traumas alone before reuniting to try and figure out how to defeat their seemingly immortal captor and fight their way off the island before being consumed by its toxic gases.

The last in Koike’s Lupin cycle, the film is, in some ways, intended as a prequel to Mystery of Mamo, the very first Lupin anime released in 1978. As such it continues the style Koike has established in the series so far complete with kinetic action sequences and retro jazz score. Though this may seem like the end of the line for the gentleman thief, it is really just another beginning in returning the franchise to its point of origin. Lupin is, in a sense, reborn to steal back everything that was taken from him, with Zenigata hot on his heels and the world set to rights again, saved by his very particular brand of chaos.

LUPIN THE IIIRD: The Movie – The Immortal Bloodline opens in UK cinemas 21st February courtesy of Anime Limited.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © MP / T

Ura Aka: L’Aventure (裏アカ, Takuya Kato, 2021)

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Frustrated by career setbacks and loneliness in her personal life, 34-year-old boutique store manager Machiko (Kumi Takiuchi) decides to open a secret Twitter account to rival a younger colleague’s Instagram success. To boost her follower count, she starts posting photos of her breasts which become increasingly explicit as if she were stripping herself bare as pathway towards liberation. When a random man contacts her, she eventually agrees to meet and has a torrid night of steamy sex she had not intended as a one night stand though her much younger date, Yuto (Fuju Kamio), had other ideas.

In her voiceover, Machiko recounts that there was a kind of excitement she felt on her first night in Tokyo that she evidently no longer feels. We see her pick out clothing from a dumpster we later infer to be from stock she bought as a buyer for the store that didn’t sell and intuit that it stands in for Machiko herself who also feels as if she’s been thrown away and abandoned by her workplace. After making a loss on the clothes, they demoted her to manager and now ignore her warnings that the new designs they’re going for are too safe. Her colleague agrees with her and calls them boring but soon changes her tune when the new buyer shows up, telling him she thinks they’re great and wants to buy some herself.

Walking through the store in a daze, Machiko becomes increasingly obsessed with her secret account and is dependent on the sense of validation she gets from skeevy men liking her posts and expressing a desire to sleep with her. She later confesses that she started the account out of a sense of loneliness and a desire to be wanted, but also because she realised that her life was empty and she had nothing at all to show for her work. Though she’d devoted herself to her career, she’s not been rewarded and her bosses are sidelining her because of her age and gender while she’s forgone personal relationships and is perhaps romantically naive and lonely.

Sex with random men which they video and she posts on her channel provokes a kind of liberation but also deepens her sense of loneliness. Yuto, the man she met who originally reignited a spark she thought had gone out, makes a habit of approaching women on social media and having sex with them which he videos as a kind of trophy. When he crassly shows her the tapes believing her to be a kind of ally after an unexpected reunion, she remarks that all the women are her as if seeing herself for the first time. Yuto, meanwhile, suggests that he did out of a sense of nihilism that his life had been too easy and its lack of imperfection was too difficult to bear.

The new clothing line Machiko suggests to save the failing store is ironically to be called “The Real You,” though that’s something she’s perhaps lost sight of after splitting her persona in two with the secret account making it impossible to see who the “real” Machiko might be. Nevertheless, newfound confidence does seem to improve her working life even as she’s sucked into the potential danger of Yuto’s nihilistic existence. He takes her to a working-class eatery, spinning a tale of small town upbringings and factory closures that may or may not be true but in any case expresses his own loneliness in his potentially self-destructive tale of big city success. 

Yuto’s motto, which turns out to be not entirely his own, is to have fun in world which isn’t bearing out his dissatisfaction with the contemporary society even if it turns out his issue is ennui rather than a genuine reaction to the kind of issues that colour Machiko’s existence like ageism, sexism, and the vagaries of the fashion industry. Seemingly informed by Roman Porno, Kato shoots the city with moody melancholy but finally allows Machiko to begin reintegrating herself though throwing away her phone and everything that comes with it. Detaching from the urban environment, she begins to run as if reclaiming her physicality and desire for forward motion before finally arriving at the dawn suggesting that her long night of the soul is finally over and a new life awaits.

Ura Aka: L’Aventure screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Images: © 2020 Ura-Aka L’Aventure Production Committee

Nemurubaka: Hypnic Jerks (ネムルバカ, Yugo Sakamoto, 2025)

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Is it better to have a goal and know what you want, or is it easier to be just kind of muddling along? The heroines of Yugo Sakamoto’s oddly titled slacker comedy Nemurabaka: Hypnic Jerks (ネムルバカ) are coming at this from opposite sides. Ruka (Yuna Taira) is a rock band and her dream is to make it as a musician, though she isn’t really sure she has what it takes, while Yumi (Shiori Kubo), though in some ways the more sensible of the pair, has no idea what she’s doing with her life.

The fact that Yumi addresses Ruka only as “sempai” bears out the ways in which she feels slightly inferior to her, and, in fact, to everyone. As she says to Ruka, it’s like everyone else has a foot on the ladder, but she can’t even see where the ladder is let alone climb it. Ruka offers to split her pay for polishing up some ornaments for a friend who works as a maid at a posh person’s house as long as she does half of it, adding that now at least Yumi’s on the bottom rung while simultaneously trying to make her an equal. While Yumi idolises Ruka, Ruka seems to be jealous of Yumi’s carefree nature and relative lack of impetus. 

Then again, the way she seems to quickly shut down anyone making romantic overtures towards Yumi along with her habit of gazing at her while she’s asleep may suggest another kind of desire. The gazing turns out to have a practical dimension, at least, that somewhat dissolves the disparity as it’s Yumi who has facilitated Ruka’s art and, to an extent, all her songs appear to be about her. This may be what she means when she tells Yumi that she’s very important to her to try and quell her feelings of low self-worth and inferiority. Nevertheless, this notion of being somehow lesser is only reinforced by the intrusion of a guy, Taguchi (Keito Tsuna), who pretends to have romantic interest in Yumi but is in reality after Ruka who exploits him for free food and the use of his car. 

Exposed, Taguchi calls Yumi “low-tier” and “a simpleton”, but inexplicably still expects Ruka to date him despite having just confessed to using her friend and then insulting her as part of a botched apology. Part of the problem is that Taguchi is a spoiled rich kid who doesn’t understand how the world works. He has a useless GPS device installed in his car featuring a maid-style character who deliberately gives rubbish directions because men like him generally prefer women to be stupid and cute even though he’s set his sights on Ruka who is moody and rebellious. While the girls are humming and hawing over a new rice cooker and going hungry at the end of the day, he’s obsessing over getting a new outfit for his GPS mascot. His comparatively more sensible friend who sort of mirrors Yumi indulges in superhero fantasy and is jealous of Ruka because of her certainty about her path in life even if Ruka is anything but certain in her ability to follow it.

It’s that sense of uncertainty that, in a way, convinces her to accept an offer of a record contract despite the fact they only want her and not her bandmates while she’ll also have to move out of the flat she shares with Yumi to go to Tokyo. She admits that she’d like to live this aimless life with her for longer, but is frightened of becoming stuck and never able to progress to anything else. But the price of that is she ends up making soulless idol pop for the commercialised music industry despite having been signed for a punk anthem about youthful despair. Yumi may be the “sleeping idiot” of the title in a more literal sense, but perhaps Ruka isn’t really fully awake either but allowing others to lead her towards what she should want but perhaps really doesn’t. In any case, unlike similarly themed films, this one doesn’t really lean into the idea that an aimless life is fine itself but encourages Yumi and the others to try and find a sense of purpose as she becomes a “sempai” herself, if also maintaining the courage to walk away from a compromised vision of success that isn’t at all what they wanted.

Nemurubaka: Hypnic Jerks screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Images: © Masakazu Ishiguro, Tokuma Shoten_Nemurubaka Film Production Committee

Adabana (徒花 –ADABANA–, Sayaka Kai, 2024)

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What constitutes a good life? Is it what you leave behind, or the experience of comfort and contentment? The Adabana of Sayaka Kai’s existential drama refers to a barren flower that will never bear fruit and is intended to survive for only one generation, yet its life is not without meaning and for the time that is alive, it is beautiful. Accepting the burden of death can be liberating, while the burden of life provokes only suffering born or constraint.

Or at least, the conflicted Shinji (Arata Iura) has begun to contemplate after becoming terminally ill pressured to undergo surgery that will save his life at the cost of his “unit”, a kind of clone intended for the provision of spare parts should their individual encounter some kind of medical issue. In this world, a virus has inhibited human reproduction and led to a desire to prolong life in order to provide a workforce. This is done largely through the use of clones, though it’s clear to us right away that this is a technology only accessible to the wealthy elite.

In the Japanese, the units are referred to euphemistically as “sore” or “that”, as if their presence was slightly taboo and Shinji is encouraged to view his not as a person but as a thing to be used when needed, like a replacement battery or parts for an engine. Nevertheless, it nags at him that another being will die for him to live. The hospital director instructs him that he cannot die because he is important as the heir to this company which suggests both that his existence is more valuable than others and that he is actually worth nothing at all outside of his role as the incarnation of a corporation. Kai often presents Shinji and his clone on opposite sides of the glass as if they were mere reflections of each other or two parts of one whole. Their existences could easily have been switched and either one of them could have been designated the “unit” or “original”. 

On Shinji’s side of the glass, the world is cold and clinical. He feels constrained by his upper class upbringing and feels as if he is ill-suited to this kind of life. He has flashbacks to a failed romance with a free-spirited bar owner (Toko Miura) whom he evidently abandoned to fulfil parental expectations through an arranged marriage deemed beneficial to the family’s corporate interests. He has one daughter, but has no feelings for his wife and resents his circumstances. Beyond the glass, meanwhile, is a kind of pastoral paradise where his unit fulfils himself with art, though Shinji never had any artistic aptitude of his own. The unit says that there was a female unit he can’t forget who was taken seven years ago hinting at his own sad romance, yet he’s completely at peace with the idea that his purpose in life was only to give it up so that Shinji might live. In the surgery, he will achieve his life’s purpose, though Shinji is beginning to see it only as a prolongation of his suffering. 

The unit’s speech is soft and slightly effeminate in contrast with the suppressed rage and nervousness that characterise Shinji’s way of speaking, and what becomes clear to Shinji is the ways in which they’re different rather than the same. He wonders if his unit would be kinder to his family and more able to adapt to this way of life from which he desires to be liberated. His psychiatrist, Mahoro (Kiko Mizuhara), too finds herself conflicted by his interactions with his unit beginning to wonder what her own nature and purpose might be. The units are shown videos featuring the memories of their originals, though apparently only the good parts, which suggests that in some cases the original actually dies and is replaced as if they and the unit were otherwise interchangeable with the unit learning to perform a new role despite having had completely different life experiences that are only partially overwritten by a memory transfer. What is it then that makes us “us”, if not for our memories both good and bad? On watching her own tape, Mahoro feels as if it’s somehow changed her, resulting in a nagging uncertainty about things unremembered coupled with the pressures of being under constant surveillance. For Shinji at least, it may be that he too sees liberation in death and envies a life of fruitless simplicity over his own of suffering and constraint.

Adabana screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Images: © 2024 ADABANA FILM PARTNERS _ DISSIDENZ

Chaos (カオス, Hideo Nakata, 2000)

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A down-on-his-luck handyman finds himself swept into intrigue when he agrees to a help a pretty young woman fake a kidnapping in Hideo Nakata’s noirish drama Chaos (カオス). Chaos is certainly what unfolds in the non-linear narrative as we try to piece together this fracturing tale of multiple betrayals and double crossings in which nothing and no one is quite as it seems and we can never really be sure just what game anyone is playing.

Goro (Masato Hagiwara), for instance, seems to be a bit of a sap. His ex-wife accuses him of being incapable of thinking of others, though his young son Noboru comes to him after having been bullied at school. He doesn’t seem to be very invested in his life of odd jobs which includes requests from lonely old men to play go as well as to visit the apartments of pretty women who’ve encountered some kind of plumbing disaster. Perhaps it’s no surprise he’s convinced to help Saori (Miki Nakatani) stage a kidnapping to test her husband’s affections seeing as she suspects he’s started an affair with a younger woman who is just nicer than she is, so she can’t compete.

What is surprising is that Goro turns out to be some sort of kidnapping expert. He explains to Saori that she should wear rope bindings for added authenticity when she’s released as well as refrain some taking showers. She should also not feed the tropical fish her friend asked her to, because if she’s been kidnapped then she’s not available, but then the fish will die, which means she’s sacrificing the life of living creatures just to prove a point. Though Goro treats her with tenderness, he frighteningly turns on after he’s helped her tie herself up, threatening rape. This is then revealed to be a ruse in order to get a real reaction of fear and terror for when he rings her husband Komiyama (Ken Mitsuishi) with the ransom request. 

This reversal makes clear to us that we don’t know who we’re dealing and anyone could suddenly change at a moment’s notice. We’ve just been told, for instance, that Saori tied the ropes so she could easily untie them by herself to go to the bathroom, which means that she could have done so anytime while she thought Goro was attacking her but didn’t. Obviously, she may have been too frightened to think of it, but then again perhaps she is also playing along with her own game too. When Goro extorts Koniyama’s sister, it looks like a cunning double bluff to lend authenticity to the original kidnapping plot while simultaneously pulling off a different scam, but maybe it’s also Goro going rogue and doubling his pay packet.

Despite his circumstances, however, Goro doesn’t seem to be in this for the money so much as white knighting for Saori even though he obviously knows she’s already married. On realising she may have betrayed him, Goro goes into a fairly convincing detective mode, posing as a policeman in order to investigate. He discovers that Komiyama’s mistress was a model who’d recently been cast aside by the agency because of a rumour she slept with a client while they also seem to have a repressive rule about dating. One of her colleagues says she hardly ever goes home to the flat her agency rents for her because she’s secretly living with a boyfriend. This is, perhaps, a world in which a woman can’t really be all of who she is because men are always trying to imprint their vision of idealised femininity on them. Womanhood is, after all, a kind of performance and one which Saori may be manipulating for her own ends. 

Yet it’s not clear where, if anywhere, the performances end and the authentic begins. Even having discovered at least a degree of the truth, Goro isn’t sure he can really trust Saori, while she may not really know either. What he resolves is that that might not matter, but what each of them is really looking for is a kind of escape from the constraints of their lives either through love or money only to discover that there is none, or else it lies only in death either literal or figural in a total reinvention of one’s persona. With shades of Vertigo, Nakata piles on the confusion and uncertainty to create an atmosphere of pure dread in which nothing, really, is quite as it’s assumed to be.

Trailer (English subtitles)