Love Doesn’t Matter to Me (愛されなくても別に, Aya Igashi, 2025)

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Two young women find solace and solidarity in each other after escaping toxic familial environments in Aya Igashi’s adaptation of the novel by Ayano Takeda, Love Doesn’t Matter to Me (愛されなくても別に, Aisarenakutemo Betsuni). Though some might say that parents always love their children even if that love was not conveyed in the optimal way, the two women struggle with their contradictory impulses in craving the love of a parent who in other ways they know is past forgiveness.

The problem for Hiiro (Sara Minami) is that the roles have become reversed. She is effectively the parent of her irresponsible mother (Aoba Kawai) who treats her like a housekeeper and is intent on exploiting her labour. Hiiro’s mother didn’t want her to go to university and is still charging her rent and board to live at home while Hiiro works several part-time jobs to jobs to support them. She believes that her mother lives beyond her means, but is unaware of the extent to which she’s been financially abusing her by keeping both the child support her absent father had been sending and the student loan she’d taken out as a safety net. Having to work so hard also means that Hiiro is tired all the time and is prevented from taking part in normal university life or social activities which leaves her unable to make friends. At times she resents her mother so much she’s worried she might end up snapping and killing her to be free, but at the same time loves her and therefore puts up with her ill-treatment.

Enaga (Fumika Baba), meanwhile, is ostracised because her father is on the run after killing someone, though the reason she is resentful of her family is a history of sexual abuse and exploitation that have left her feeling worthless. As she later says there’s no point comparing your unhappiness to that of other people, otherwise you just end up making yourself more miserable as if you were trying to win an unhappiness competition. Nevertheless, learning of Enaga’s situation wakes Hiiro up to the possibility that other people are unhappy too and her life may not have been as comparatively bad as she felt it to be in the depths of her isolation. 

Yet what both women seem to crave is the positive maternal relationship they’ve each been denied. Hiiro gets to know another student, Kimura (Miyu Honda), who also has no friends partly owing to a judgemental attitude and poor social skills whom she later discovers to be from a wealthy background despite her being desperate to find a job and working alongside Hiiro at the convenience store. Kimura resents her mother (Shoko Ikezu) for being overly controlling and possessive. She’s come all this way to university to escape her, yet her mother calls every few hours and is angry if she doesn’t answer and makes frequent visits leaving Kimura with no freedom or social output. To Hiiro, Mrs Kimura’s actions seem to come from an obviously loving place and she might have a point that Kimura is naive, having been kept sheltered all life by her own helicopter parenting, which is why she’s been sucked into a cult. Hiiro sees in Mrs Kimura the love and affection she’d have liked from her own mother and is jealous rather than seeing how seeing Kimura feels suffocated and is driven to despair in being unable to escape her mother’s control.

Lady Cosmos (Yoko Kondo), the cult leader in whom Kimura has found salvation, tells each of the girls that they were loved by their imperfect parents and ought to love them back, but they seem to know better. Though she makes some perspicacious comments, Lady Cosmos also tells them exactly what they want to hear and attempts to occupy a more positive material space to be the loving mother they never had. But, of course, not so different from Hiiro’s mother, she’s bleeding Kimura dry by forcing her to pay extortionate amounts for readings and holy water. Ironically she’s still controlling her much like her own mother had, but Kimura thinks she’s found freedom in cult and resents any attempt to undercut Lady Cosmos’ belief system even if she’s at least on one level forcing herself to believe it rather than being a true believer. 

What might be surprising is that the two women effectively break free of the “cult” of family in accepting that their parents aren’t good for them and the decision to cut them out of their lives is valid rather than the breaking of a taboo or an unnatural rejection of the sacred bond between a mother and a child. Instead they effectively remake the image of family for themselves as one of mutual solidarity and unconditional love between two people who aren’t related by blood but have discovered a much deeper bond rooted in shared suffering.

Love Doesn’t Matter to Me screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers (アングリースクワッド 公務員と７人の詐欺師, Shinichiro Ueda, 2024)

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According to hostess bar and real estate mogul Tachibana (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), the secret to living a peaceful, ordinary life is to avoid becoming angry. Though it may not altogether be bad advice in that it’s often best to try to remain calm and reach a rational solution rather than losing one’s temper and acting impetuously, the way he says it is a veiled threat. Leave me alone, he means, and I’ll leave you alone too, otherwise neither of us will know peace again.

Shinichiro Ueda’s timely heist caper Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers (アングリースクワッド 公務員と７人の詐欺師, Angry Squad: Komuin to 7-nin no Sagishi) makes unlikely heroes of the tax man in exploring the disparities of wealth and power in the contemporary society. Middle-aged tax officer Kumazawa (Seiyo Uchino) is a man cowed by conformity. He’s been doing his job a long time and believes in cracking down on notable evaders, but has also become cynical and if, on one level, aware of the corruption that exists within the system that allows the very wealthy to overcome the rules, he’s content to keep his head down and ignore it. After all, he has responsibilities too with a family to support. He can’t afford to lose his job playing the hero. His much younger and very ambitious colleague Mochizuki (Rina Kawaei) has no such concerns and is willing to take on Tachibana without real fear of the consequences. 

Yet at the same time there’s a quiet rage that seems to be simmering in Kumazawa about the compromises he’s continuing to make. He jokingly tells a young woman how to fudge her taxes to claim an eel dinner as a business expense, but knows better than to poke the bear by looking into Tachibana’s tax affairs. When Mochizuki takes him to task, Tachibana comes for him directly by accusing him of using violence and threatening to have him fired unless he apologises and promises never to come after Tachibana again. Conscious of his own financial situation Kumazawa nods along. Mochizuki refuses and has her promotion withdrawn, though she does at least keep her job.

But the thing that really makes Kumazawa angry is that Tachibana didn’t even remember the name of his friend who took his own life after Tachibana framed him for misconduct to get rid of him. It’s this that convinces him to team up with what later seem to be ethical con people who are after Tachibana as a kind of revenge on society that is later revealed to have a personal connection. Though Kumazawa is conflicted about the idea of committing what amounts to a crime, he accepts that it’s the only way they can ever hope to take Tachibana down. Even his old policeman friend tells him that his boss is chummy with Tachibana so they won’t go after him either suggesting this rot goes right to the top and the super wealthy essentially exist outside the law.

In a funny way, the weapon then becomes mutual solidarity and community action as this disparate group of people who each have a grudge against Tachibana come together to confiscate what he should have paid in taxes to force him to pay his fair share. The fact that his empire is built on hostess bars and is expanding into real estate suggests that his business is already exploitative while he only gets away with it because people don’t get angry enough to stop him. The authorities either take kickbacks, are being blackmailed, or enjoy being a part of his celebrity milieu so they shut down any attempts to ask questions. 

This Angry Squad are, however, prepared to play him at his own game harnessing Tachibana’s greed and vanity as weapons against him. As expected, they do so in a very humorous and intricately plotted way as the gang pool their respective strengths to pull off a major heist with a little unexpected help along the way. It turns out that you might need to take an unusual path to make even the tax office see the error of their ways, but it is after all for the fairly noble cause of reminding people that the rules should apply to everyone equally and all should be happy to contribute their fair share for a better run society.

Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kaneko’s Commissary (金子差入店, Go Furukawa, 2024)

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The tranquil life a man has built for himself after leaving prison is disrupted by unexpected tragedy in Go Furukawa’s social drama Kaneko’s Commissary (金子差入店, Kaneko Sashiireten). The commissary of the title refers to a service run by those like Shinji (Ryuhei Maruyama) which handles deliveries to people in prison and arranges visits by proxy. In Japan, visiting hours only take place during the day on weekdays making it difficult for visitors who work regular jobs or live far away. There’s no way to make an appointment, either. Visitors must simply show up and wait with the possibility that it might not be possible so see their friends and relatives after all given that there are only so many meeting rooms available.

The commissary service is intended to mitigate this inconvenience by acting as a bridge between the imprisoned and their families, educating them about the prison system and advising them on what can and can’t be delivered. For Shinji it seems to be a means of atonement. Sent to prison for a violent crime when his wife Miwako (Yoko Maki) was pregnant with their first child, he’d angrily lashed out her when she skipped a visit little knowing it was because she was busy giving birth to their son. Nevertheless, several years later he’s bonded with his son and is living a happy, peaceful life. The film subtly suggests that his is partly because he’s gained a strong and supportive familial environment anchored by his formerly estranged uncle who occupies the paternal space Shinji may otherwise have been lacking. He has a complex relationship with his mother who mainly visits when he’s not home to pressure Miwako into giving her money which she fritters away on toy boys much to Shinji’s embarrassment. It’s these complex feelings towards his mother that seem to fuel his fits of rage and threaten the integrity of his new family.

But by the same token, there is external pressure too in the low-level stigma and prejudice which surrounds them simply by virtue of their proximity to crime. Though they appear to be well accepted by the community, when their son Kazuma’s friend Karin in murdered by a young man with mental health issues, it refocuses the rage of the community on them too. Someone keeps smashing the flower pots outside their home, while Miwako is ostracised by the other women in the neighbourhood and de facto sacked from her part-time job because the other employees refuse to work on the same shift as her. Kazuma starts getting bullied at school because someone found out his father had been in prison, though what his father did is obviously nothing at all to do with him. 

In Japanese society, the extended family of those who’ve committed crimes is dragged into the spotlight. The mother of Karin’s killer Takashi is hounded by the media though as she says, much as she can’t understand why he did something like this, he’s a grown man and she’s not really to blame for his actions. Though we might originally feel sorry for her, especially as Takashi coldly rejects all her efforts on his behalf, she quickly becomes entitled and almost threatening. She pressures Shinji for news about her son, while he tries to avoid telling her that Takashi rejects her gifts and isn’t interested in her letters. Being forced to visit him tests the limits of his compassion as he too wonders if the man who killed Karin is really worthy of this level of care.

At the prison, he runs into another young woman who repeatedly tries to get in to see a prisoner despite the fact he keeps denying her requests. The lawyer Shinji works with has a theory about the girl, Sachiko (Mana Kawaguchi), and the yakuza she wants to wants to see. Now institutionalised, the yakuza discovered there was no place for him on the outside. His old boss was no longer around and he had no status in the underworld, so he probably committed a crime to be put away again, but at the same time maybe there was more to it than that. People save each other in unexpected ways, even it’s just with gentle acceptance and patience with a world that it is itself often lacking in the same.

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

Trailer (no subtitles)

Silence of the Sea (海の沈黙, Setsuro Wakamatsu, 2024)

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Can there be any greater humiliation than having your work plagiarised and the other person’s being better? Renowned artist Tamura (Koji Ishizaka) feels he has to say something on seeing an old painting at an exhibition honouring his late mentor and realising it’s not the one he painted. He doesn’t think he ever had the ability to paint something with this kind of power even when he was young, and he didn’t even use the materials which appear to have given this version a emotional depth that the original never had.

In some ways, this is Tamura’s past literally coming to the service to show him that his life has been a series of mistaken choices and whatever success he may have achieved it’s come at the cost of his artistic soul. The first part of Setsuro Wakamatsu’s Silence of the Sea (海の沈黙,, Chinmoku no Umi) ponders why Tamura might be so keen to confess this work isn’t his when he admits that it’s objectively “better”, but even if that might be true, he has to concede it isn’t him and therefore shouldn’t have his name on it. Though he appears to have become greedy and vain, trading on his connections and more of a celebrity artist than someone with real and urgent ideas to express, he is apparently willing to burn all his bridges on the altar of authenticity while simultaneously refusing to divorce his wife, the daughter of his late mentor, despite living with another woman and their child on the other side of the country.

But as someone else says, does it matter whose name is on the painting when it is beautiful in itself? Then again, this beauty is intended both to cover something up and to expose it. In his youth, Tamura apparently threw another artist, Lyuji (Masahiro Motoki), under the bus. 40 years later, Lyuji is a master forger living a life in the shadows tattooing young women with his fevered artistic visions. It’s true enough that he seems to see them only as “canvases” and otherwise rejects personal connection while still carrying a torch for Tamura’s now wife Anna (Kyoko Koizumi). He seems to be stuck in the past, forever meditating on a particular pairing, The Silence of the Sea which reflected his own moment of trauma when his parents both drowned when he was a child. 

The film seems to pain Tamura and Lyuji as two sides of the same coin. The more Tamura’s star rose, the sicker and more humble Lyuji became as if he were literally bleeding him dry. In the words of his assistant, Lyuji had an imperative to depict beauty, but art seems to deplete him. He literally vomits blood on the canvas while struggling to recreate his lost painting and thereby return to the source of his trauma. The sea for him seems to represent life and death along with the beauty and terror of life, while for Tamura it is perhaps merely picturesque even if for both of them the sun is always setting.

One man has almost painted over the other, stolen a life that might have been meant for him though his talent may lie more in an ability to play the game than in art itself. But at the same time, Lyuji has destroyed himself through his selfishness and single-minded obsession with his art along with the internal traumas it turns out he cannot simply paint over. His life is like the candle that Anna makes in his image, a life slowly melting away and producing only a single tear from a lonely soul. His eventual conviction is that beautiful things need only exist in our hearts and minds as memory rather than as material things. As he says, measuring art in money is mere foolishness, which paints his career of forgery as an ironic revenge against the art world which values only what’s popular and has become a game for the rich to play to enhance their status little caring for the nature of the art itself. Yet this covering up and later revealing of a truth has led to several deaths, among them a man who lived for art and a woman who yearned for love only to end up a scorned muse of an emotionally distant man. The sea took them all, but for Lyuji at least it may finally have fallen silent in the final perfection of his art.

Silence of the Sea screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2024 Eiga Umi no Chinmoku INUP Co.,Ltd

Strangers in Kyoto (ぶぶ漬けどうどす, Masanori Tominaga, 2025)

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A former capital city, Kyoto is renowned as a historical centre and seat of tradition. But on the other hand, no one wants to live in a museum and while some of these old-fashioned ways of life might seem quaint or comforting, they’re also burdensome and for some an unwelcome imposition. Madoka (Mai Fukagawa), the wife of the 14th heir to a Kyoto fan seller is full of earnest wonder, but she’s also an outsider here and bringing with her own preconceptions and anxieties. 

To begin with, she’s come as a kind of cultural anthropologist directly interviewing local people to gain material for the manga she’s drawing with a friend. When one of the ladies she’s talking to explains that she runs a cafe in a former bathhouse that’s been sensitively adapted so that his traditional space can find new purpose in the modern world, Madoka is visibly disappointed which of course causes offence to her interviewee. Something similar happens when she interviews a woman running a traditional sweet shop who explains that their top-selling items are their halloween specials. They no longer sell anything that would have been on sale when the shop opened a few centuries ago. 

Madoka, who is not from Kyoto, is obsessed with preserving the city’s “true face” and fails to see that these businesses have survived because they’ve been able to adapt to the times when others could not. Repurposing old buildings to house modern businesses is one way of keeping the city alive. Meanwhile, she idolises her mother-in-law’s traditional lifestyle, but is after all experiencing it from the perspective of a guest. It may very well be much nicer to eat rice cooked over an open flame, but she’s not the one who’s got to get up early to stoke the fire or spend hours stirring the pot. She takes her responsibility as the wife of the 14th heir so seriously in part because she doesn’t understand what it entails. Her husband, Mario, meanwhile is keen to remind his mother that he has a life in Tokyo and won’t be returning to take over the shop, at least as long as his father is alive. 

Mario tries to warn Madoka about the complex nature of Kyoto social etiquette, but she fails to understand and makes a series of embarrassing faux pas that gradually destabilise the local equilibrium. In Kyoto, a particular brand of politeness rules in which one’s true feelings are never expressed openly but only through barbed comments that everyone nevertheless understands. So, when someone wants you to know that the party’s over and it’s time you went home, they’ll politely ask if you want any green tea over rice. This level of subtlety is lost on Madoka who comes from a city where size of the community means you have to be explicit.

It never really dawns on her that mother-in-law might have become so fed up with her that it’s easier just to sell the house and end 450 years of tradition than to tell her go home. Then again, it seems like she may be missing some social cues in Tokyo too, while it’s also fairly obvious in any culture that putting her awkward interactions into the manga could end up upsetting those around her. They do, after all, have a point that it’s inappropriate for her to make herself the self-appointed guardian of a place she’s isn’t from and doesn’t live in, disregarding the thoughts and feelings of those who do (not that they really told her what they were). 

Perhaps as she said she’s beginning to understand Kyoto in this regard by fighting back passive aggressively to claim her right to take over the fan shop. She might have a point about the comparatively ugly and utilitarian apartment blocks taking over the city as old buildings are bulldozed to make way for the new, but on the other hand it may not be possible to continue this business as it is and simply bringing in more tourists who’ll just clutter up the place and not buy anything may not be the answer. What the answer is may not be clear, but Madoka at least seems to have found her little niche in the heart of Kyoto, even if it is no longer so polite as to keep its irritation to itself.

Strangers in Kyoto screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2025 Strangers in Kyoto Film Partners

The Hotel of my Dream (私にふさわしいホテル, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2024)

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What does a girl have to do to get her book published in this town? Adapted from the novel by Asako Yuzuki, Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s The Hotel of My Dream (私にふさわしいホテル, Watashi ni Fusawashi Hotel) follows its eccentric heroine through a literary feud with an established master in an attempt to defeat a misogynistic, hierarchal and exploitative publishing industry and finally publish a full-length novel. In part a meditation on identity, the trades on its heroine’s charms and the comedic prowess of leading lady Non.

Set in 1984, the film begins and ends at the Hilltop Hotel popular with writers through the ages thanks to its proximity to book town Jinbocho and the offices of big time publishers. Using the pen name Taiju Aida, Kayoko (Non) is an aspiring author who won her publisher’s newcomer prize a few years previously for a short form essay but has been unable to write anything of substance since after being stung by a harsh review from literary master Higashijujo (Kenichi Takito). After learning from her editor Endo (Kei Tanaka) that Higashijujo is in the room upstairs and is on a tight deadline to complete a story for an upcoming anniversary anthology, Kayoko decides to impersonate a hotel maid so he’ll stay up all night and not make it, forcing Endo to use her story instead.

The irony is that Kayoko’s story is popular with readers and she has real talent as a writer that’s being suppressed by the publishing industry at large in the form of her former publisher, Endo, and Higashijujo. Higashijujo is a representative of a particular kind of older writer and is effectively acting as a gatekeeper by suggesting that young women like Kayoko have no place in the literary scene. Even so, he’s captivated by the story she tells him that’s the same as the essay she later has published which cleverly weaves in some of his own personal details. She plays on his vanity and lasciviousness in telling him she’s a big fan and is romantically naive as if dangling herself as bait. Higashijujo realises that Kayoko is Taiju Aida and kicks off a kind of literary feud in which he disrupts her career and she puts on various different personas to upset or embarrass him. 

Nevertheless, his rivalry with her does seem to stimulate his own latent artistic mojo and have him writing manically once again if partly out of resentment, while Kayoko is forced to change her name again before winning a note literary prize as “Junri Arimori” and writing with a completely different style. On realising that they may both be being manipulated by Endo who is setting them against each other in order to stimulate their writing, they team up against him by attempting to disabuse his daughters of the notion that Santa’s not real only they already know. They were just going along with the ruse because that’s a child’s job in much the same as Higashijujo suggests a writer’s is to conjure a pleasant fantasy for the reader and Kayoko creates a series of false personas further her own literary dreams. 

Yet as Kayoko says she’s not given the kind of support that other writers get and even after getting a book published has to go round to stores on her own to encourage them to stock and promote it. She only rises to prominence by charming a bookseller after catching a notorious book thief who didn’t even steal hers because he only takes “popular” books. Kayoko is indeed a total crazy lady, but perhaps you need to be in order to survive in this environment that’s still dominated by men like Higashijujo writing borderline sleazy novels and hanging out with hostesses in upscale Ginza bars. Resented by his daughter, he stays out in hotels for days at a time, leaving his wife alone and neglecting his family. Kayoko has to fight tooth and nail for her place in this space and to prove herself worthy of a room at the Hilltop Hotel while Higashijujo’s ride was must less fraught with difficulty even if it may not have been easy. The final message seems to be, however, that art is created best in opposition and success isn’t always good for an artist as Kayoko finds herself frustrated, feeling as if she hasn’t achieved all of her revenge but has no left to take it against while perhaps still manipulated by Endo who provides a source of authority for her to kick back against as literary queen trying to hang on to her throne.

The Hotel of my Dream screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2012 Asako Yuzuki_Shinchosha © 2024 “The Hotel of my Dream” Film Partners

Streaming (스트리밍, Cho Jang-ho, 2025)

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There’s a kind of collective fantasy that lies at the centre of live-streaming. A bargain between the streamer and the viewer not to break the illusion, but the power dynamics between the two are vague and shifting. The viewers give “stickers” to express their appreciation or try to manipulate the streamer, while the streaming tries to fulfil the viewer’s wishes in the hope of getting more stickers without being too obvious that they’re letting the viewers lead them by the nose.

What Cho Jang-ho’s Streaming (스트리밍) suggests is that the snake is eating its own tail and the desire for streaming success has led the streamers to make ever more questionable decisions and the viewers to demand increasingly extreme action which may cause harm to the streamer or others. There are several points at which we might wonder why Woo Sang (Kang Ha-neul) does not appear to have alerted the police nor do his viewers do so for him. They sit and watch passively while another streamer apparently gets up and takes her own life, some wondering if what’s just happened is for real and they ought to try calling someone or if it’s just another bit.

We might even wonder if any of this is “real” or just a game being played for the benefit of the viewers who each join in with what amounts to a kind of scavenger hunt as Woo Sang tries to track down a missing streamer, Matilda (Ha Seo-yoon), who went missing after he recruited her to help him investigate a series of murders. In his interactions with Matilda, we can see Woo Sang’s own insecurity. He’s clearly brought her on as a glamorous assistant, but she keeps upstaging him and he’s finding it increasingly hard to hide his irritation. When they role play what they think might have happened between the killer and his victim after they snuck out of a nightclub, he takes things too far and shows a dangerous capacity for misogynistic violence. Some of the viewer’s concerns that he may have harmed Matilda in some way in revenge for her taking the lucrative top spot on the streaming charts away from him may be understandable.

But at the same time, Matilda doesn’t quite seem to be on the level either and may, in fact, be using Woo Sang to further boost her popularity and stay number one which would allow her to keep 100% of takings rather than pay the 50% commission to the streaming service. Despite his critiques of other streamers, Woo Sang too is shown to be an amateur detective exploiting the serial killer case for his own gain while somewhat cavalier about Matilda’s safety after using her in his video. In truth, solving the serial killer case might be quite bad for his business because without it Woo Sang wouldn’t have any more material for his show. But then, while shows like this exist, content may also rise to meet them and the film almost implies that true crime gives rise to a kind of bloodlust that simultaneously glorifies the host and the killer who are profiting in terms of notoriety even if the streamer is taking all the money. 

“When interest becomes excessive, it turns into an obsession,” Woo Sang tells his viewers somewhat disdainfully of a man who may have become fixated on the public image of “Matilda”, though it might as well apply to himself and his audience of armchair detectives. “Staging means death,” he intones, though there’s no way to know he hasn’t made all this up himself and it wouldn’t really be surprising given the streamers’ obsession with being number one. Some of the viewers maybe be sceptical, but the truth is they’re all playing this game too and it’s all good fun until it’s not, leaving Woo Sang and his audience in way over their heads. Or then again, maybe his old-fashioned battle of wits with a Moriarty-like killer is just that, which would explain Woo Sang’s strange conviction that he will honour the terms of their agreement not to kill Matilda until the deadline expires even though Woo Sang thinks he’s seen through his attempt to throw him off the tracks. A little muddy in its messaging, the film nevertheless makes plain that it’s Woo Sang that has become dangerously obsessed and deluded by the persona he’s crafted for himself into believing that he alone can bring a killer to justice.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Tough Guy (悪名, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1961)

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Starring a baby-faced Shintaro Katsu, Tokuzo Tanaka’s adaptation of a popular novel by Toko Kon, Tough Guy (悪名, Akumyo), went on to spawn a 17-film “Akumyo” or “Bad Reputation” series. Asakichi (Shintaro Katsu) is certainly the “tough guy” of the title and fulfilling a certain vision of post-war masculinity in this early Showa tale, yet getting a “bad reputation” is something he ultimately rejects in the film’s closing moments as he continues to straddle a line, not quite the “yakuza” he claims to hate but a noble rogue all the same. 

Asakichi is a small-town boy from rural Kawauchi. Despite the nobility which later comes to define his character, he’s disowned by his family after stealing a chicken from a yakuza-affiliated farmer to use in a cock fight. Originally, he skips town, with the farmer’s apparently married sister Kiyo who tells him that she’s pregnant though is probably not telling the truth. In any case, when they get to the next town he discovers she’s been engaging in sex work and breaks up with her, but Kiyo is only one element of his increasingly complicated love life. While staying in the town, Asakichi ends up developing a relationship with besotted former geisha Kotoito (Yaeko Mizutani) whom he eventually agrees to help rescue through another elopement. Meanwhile, he also becomes a “guest” of the local Yoshioka yakuza group and sworn brother of former enemy Sada.(Jiro Tamiya). 

The problem is that the Yoshioka gang is small potatoes in the town and does not have the resources to stand up against the hired thugs of the Matsushima red light district who eventually turn up to reclaim Kotoito. While she manages to escape on her own, Asakichi ends up randomly marrying a completely different woman, Okinu (Tamao Nakamura), who cannily makes him sign a contract saying they’re married before she’ll sleep with him. Nevertheless, when he hears that Kotoito came back to look for him and was recaptured, he springs into action and heads to Innoshima to battle agains the Silk Hat Boss and a wily yet fair-minded female yakuza who turns out to be the one really in charge of the island. 

Asakichi is, in many ways, an embodiment of a certain kind of masculinity in his determination to do what he sees as right even when others don’t agree with him. Consequently, his moral code seems inconsistent and difficult to define. He was fine with stealing the chicken, but doesn’t like the idea of cheating at gambling (though later does it to get money to rescue Kotoito) despite proving himself an expert at bluff and trickery. Similarly, he hates “yakuza” and refuses to become one, but is willing to stay as their “guest” and to help out when they need extra bodies for a fight. The only thing that certain is that he hates those who abuse their power to oppress the weak, which explains his objection to the yakuza, while otherwise doing what they claim to do but in reality do not in defending the interests of those who cannot defend themselves such as Kotoito who has been sold into the sex trade by a feckless father. 

Her position is mirrored in that of the female gang boss, Ito (Chieko Naniwa) , who eventually assumes control over Kotoito’s fate, an ice-cold and fearless leader who nevertheless respects Asakichi’s earnestness and brands him the tough guy of the title after he decides to return alone and accept punishment for freeing Kotoito. In giving them a week’s grace to have a kind of non-honeymoon (on which Okinu actually also comes along), she may not have expected the pair to return and is surprised that Asakichi insists on bringing the matter to a formal close. Eventually he defeats her by refusing to give in, insisting that they see which is stronger, his body or her cane, rather than begging for mercy and thereby accepting her authority. Having defeated her, he breaks the cane in two and throws it in the ocean to stand by his strength alone while crying out that he has won, yet suggesting that he does not want the kind of life that leads to a “bad reputation”. Tanaka makes fantastic use of lighting not least in the final shot of the shining sea that leaves Asakichi alone on the shore, a tiny figure in an expanding landscape.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Revolver LILY (リボルバー・リリー, Isao Yukisada, 2023)

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A former assassin is drawn back into the light when an old colleague is framed for the murder of a small family in Isao Yukisada’s adaptation of Kyo Nagaura’s pulp novel, Revolver Lily (リボルバー・リリー). Set in the Taisho era, the film finds Japan at a crossroads amid an atmosphere of rising militarism in what is still a very poor country trying to change its fortunes through imperialism while those like Yuri (Haruka Ayase) attempt to stave off the oncoming apocalypse of war.

Though Yuri (whose name means “lily” in Japanese) had been part of a spy ring in Taiwan and trained to further Japan’s interest through political assassinations, she evidently came to see the error of her ways when the group was betrayed and an attack on their hideout led to personal tragedy. Since then, she’s lived as a well-to-do owner of a geisha house apparently under her own name which somewhat conflicts with the idea that she is simultaneously on an international most wanted list. In any case, she’s swept back into action when one of her former comrades, Kunimatsu, is accused of murdering the family of a man named Hosomi who is apparently on the run while militarists also seem to be intent on finding his teenage son Shinta (Jinsei Hamura).

Shinta, who was born with a lame leg which would presumably rule him out for military service, later becomes a kind of symbol of Japan as a more enlightened nation that no longer sees the need to use violence in order to advance its own interests. His father, Hosomi, had apparently done a series of dodgy deals with the military and then run off with all the money which is why they want to find him. It later turns out that he took the money not so much out of greed as that he was trying to turn the tide by growing the country economically in the hope that there would no longer be the need for imperialistic conquest.

Yet the money becomes a means of setting the army and the navy against each other in an increasingly straitened Japan in which neither feels they have the proper finding to pursue their ambitions. Constant references are made to the devastating economic impact of the 1923 earthquake, yet the authorities spend increasing amounts of money on waging war and there seem to be increasing numbers of soldiers on the streets. The army, in general, are depicted as loutish thugs with little on their side except brute force, while the navy in their pristine white uniforms are backroom plotters and always one step ahead.

But there is obviously a giant irony at the heart of the film in that as Yuri declares at the end, “fighting protest nothing,” having just taken out most of the Tokyo garrison in an effort to protect Shinta so that he can be preserved as a symbol of a new pacifist Japan. Though she tries to avoid mortally wounding anyone, Yuri is still prepared to use violence in order to combat it while the fact that merely fight on the side of capitalism suggests that there is, in fact, already a war going on between competing visions of the nation’s future which are both destined to come to pass. Capitalism, too, however, has its rough edges as symbolised by the grinning yakuza boss (Jiro Sato) who boasts of being “a man you can trust” but is only really ever on the side of greed and power.

Yuri, meanwhile, seems to be reawakened by her latest mission. She tells her assailant who accuses her of living in a state of nihilistic limbo, that she has made a choice a live which also symbolically aligns her with the new future opposed to the death cult that is militarism. Nevertheless, history tells us that whatever promises are made the militarists will win and the people will suffer. Yuri, however, continues fighting for peace with the film making full use of Haruka Ayase’s growing stature as an action star following on from franchises such as Caution, Hazardous Wife as Yuri effortlessly takes out huge numbers of army goons assisted by her female comrades. The closing scenes hint at further adventures for Yuri amid the vibrant Taisho-era setting taking on the forces of militarism with impeccable style and elegance.

Revolver LILY is available digitally in US from 27th January courtesy of Well Go USA.

Another World (世外, Tommy Kai Chung Ng, 2025)

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The Another World (世外) in title of Tommy Kai Chung Ng’s animated adaptation of Saijo Naka’s novel SENNENKI -Thousand-year Journey of an Oni-, most obviously refers to that beyond our own which belongs to the dead and those who exist outside of time, but it also hints at the other worlds that might be possible if only we could find ways to channel our negative emotions into something more positive rather than allowing ourselves to be consumed by rage and resentment.

As Soul Keeper Gudo (Chung Suet-ying) says, the seeds of evil lie within us all though he does not necessarily believe that they destroy humans, rather that they may also push us to survive. Throughout his wandering adventures, the souls he encounters are angry for reasons that are not irrational but a natural consequence of the world in which they live. Goran is a powerless princess resented by her subjects for being the apparent victim of a curse. She blames herself for her mother’s death in childbirth and is consumed by feelings of worthlessness even before her father the king dies and riddles the court with conspiracy. Coming to believe that he was murdered, her rage blossoms turning her into a cruel despot inflicting crazed violence on her subjects until eventually fleeing the palace. Flower City is reduced to Wheat Village where the farmers are pressed by the occupying force which demands half of their already poor harvest and does not much care if they starve to death despite warnings that they won’t eat either if the peasants are either too weak or too dead to farm the land.

It’s starvation that is really the true evil most particularly when it is caused or exacerbated by human greed and cruelty. Echoing Yuri (Christy Choi Hiu-Tung), a young girl who does not know she is dead and is intent on finding her brother from whom she has been separated, Gudo makes this simple act of sharing food a means of connection and identification. Farmer Keung, meanwhile, believes that he can only free the village by becoming a “Wrath”, a creature of indiscriminate violence that arises when the seeds of evil blossom and threatens to destabilise both this world and the other. Gudo tries to dissuade him, showing him that those who succumb to their rage and anger often end up harming those closest to them no matter how much they say they’ll be different. But Keung’s eventual conviction that their salvation lies solidarity and standing together against the oppressive regime eventually backfires when they’re betrayed by its duplicitous soldiers. Ying too, a young orphan exploited as child labour and forced to work in a factory during the Industrial Revolution, witnesses someone close to her literally consumed by the machinery.

The film does not suggest that this rage is wrong or misplaced, only that giving in to it is a choice that only puts more fear and evil out into the world. Gudo suggests the solution is solidarity after all in that anyone can offer salvation, but it also requires time and faith in one’s self. His various charges must learn to forgive themselves before they can let go, lay down their burdens and prepare for reincarnation. This is really the only way it is possible to endure this impossible world, which is not to say that it cannot be changed or resisted but that the means of resistance is to live in the better world that does not yet exist rather than succumb to violence which will result only in more of the same.

Beautifully animated, the film appears to draw inspiration from the work of Studio Ghibli including a few homages in particular to Castle in the Sky, though relying more on verbal exposition than purely visual storytelling or thematic resonance. Nevertheless, there is something satisfying in the depiction of resentments as a series of knots to be untied leading to a gradual liberation as if symbolising the work to be done. The closing scenes perhaps imply that this world cannot be cured, even if the other one may be, but is not itself without hope, and that whatever else may be human warmth and the desire for the world to be better will endure.

Another World opens in UK cinemas 29th February courtesy of Central City Media.

UK trailer (English subtitles)