Sometimes people come into your life for a short time and then move on. Perhaps you won’t see them again, though the effect they have on you remains profound. Takaki is still hung up on a girl he met during his childhood and subsequently lost touch with to the extent that he has become isolated and emotionally distant. In remaking Makoto Shinkai’s anime 5 Centimeters per Second ( 秒速5センチメートル), Yoshiyuki Okuyama homes in on a sense of urban alienation and a longing for something greater that transcends ordinary life before arriving at an acceptance that sometimes there is no greater meaning beyond a pleasant memory.
Takaki (Yuzu Aoki) feels as if he’s looking for the feeling he’s lost while living in a soulless urban environment and doing a job that, as someone later says, isn’t all that much fun but not particularly taxing either. It’s clear that he wants something more out of life, but at the same time has become afraid to connect with people. As a child, he moved around a lot and so developed a habit of avoiding getting into relationships in order to avoid the pain of separation. As an adult, he never stays in one place for too long and is always moving on, quitting one job after another and moving to new parts of the city. He has a kind of girlfriend, but keeps her at arms’ length emotionally and is not seriously invested in the relationship.
The irony is that he and Akari (Mitsuki Takahata) bonded over the experience of being transfer students, but where Takaki has become a kind of nomad, Akari has begun to settle down with a regular job in a book shop. Though the film is told mostly from Takaki’s perspective, it seems that she has decided their youthful connection is something that belongs in the past as a comforting memory rather than a promise that will one day be fulfilled. She may think of Takaki from time to time, but also hopes that he has moved on and is living in the present rather than being hung up on the romantic ideal of their childhood connection.
TV news broadcasts discussing space probes that are destined to continue travelling in different directions echo the course of their relationship. Takaki assumes it’s an orbit and that their paths are destined to cross again eventually, when really their childhood friendship was a kind of launch point after which the distance between them would only grow. Their paths do indeed cross at times with several near misses at reconnection, but they remain liminal presences in each other’s lives.
The implication is that Takaki has retreated into a fantasy of idealised romance to avoid dealing the emotional difficulties of adult life, while for Akari the memory of her childhood friendship with Takaki has allowed her to move on into a more settled adulthood in which she is willing to accept the possibility of painful separations while putting down roots and forging relationships with those around her. Living through the illusionary “end of the world” affords Takaki a kind of rebirth in which he can learn to let go of the past and begin to move on by opening himself up to those around him.
Okuyama captures Takaki’s sense of alienation while finding beauty in the world that surrounds him, from the spaces of urban loneliness to the crisp white snow and cherry blossom tree that Takaki believes is his salvation. The environment both reflects his anxieties and feelings of isolation, and is at times a barrier to his reconnection with Akari, but is also a source of hope for the future that the impending end of the world will not in fact come to be. Takaki’s 30th birthday is rather a kind of coming full circle and the launch point for adulthood in which he can finally move on from idealised first love and begin to open himself up to all the joy and pain that life has to offer.
5 Centimeters per Second screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection
Kanna (Takako Matsu) married Kakeru (Hokuto Matsumura) after a whirlwind romance and to begin with they were blissfully happy, but the pressures of modern life soon placed a strain on their relationship and 15 years later they had just signed divorce papers when Kakeru was killed in a tragic train station accident. Left behind alone, Kanna can’t help reassessing their marriage and wondering what went wrong. When she drives through a tunnel undergoing structural repairs and emerges on the day she and Kakeru first met, it seems like a golden opportunity to rewrite the past and possibly save both Kakeru and her miserable marriage.
A quirky time loop romance, First Kiss (ファーストキス 1ST KISS) is essentially a portrait of grief as Kanna constantly returns to the past in an attempt to understand the present. The Kanna of the present day is a stand-offish middle-aged woman who hates people and animals. Though she still lives in the apartment she shared with Kakeru, it’s a cold cluttered space that seems to echo her internal depression. Her marriage began to fall apart when Kakeru gave up his dreams of studying dinosaurs to get a real grown-up job as a married man, having been told by his professor that a real man must provide for his family. His corporate persona slowly made him miserable to the extent that he bought a bed for the spare room and began sleeping in there. By the end, the pair were living parallel lives, eating breakfast separately and barely exchanging a word.
Given this opportunity to reconnect with the Kakeru she fell in love with, Kanna becomes determined to save him by tweaking the timeline so he never goes to the station on that day, but each time she returns home to his photo on the altar. After an incredibly insensitive visit from Ritsu (Riho Yoshioka), a woman Kakeru was being lined up to marry, who basically blames her for making Kakeru miserable and failing to look after him, Kanna wonders if the best solution isn’t that he never meets her at all but drifts into a marriage with Ritsu, remaining at the university working with her father. That way, he’d still be alive, as if Kakeru choosing her were a deviation from the original turn of events and she were merely restoring it at the cost of her own romantic fulfilment.
But at the same time, she’s falling in love with Kakeru all over again with the unexpected bonus that he too is drawn to her 45-year-old self despite being unaware of their romantic history. Her inability to change the past in any significant way seems to suggest that there are some things that are fixed and can never be altered, but within that you are free to decide how you live now and what you do with your life. It’s not so much about when you die or how long you live so much as making the best of the time that is given to you rather than spending it mired in resentment and misery. Aside from the status of her mission, returning to the past begins to brighten Kanna’s life, allowing her to enjoy interacting with people and be a part of the world again.
These are all also ways of allowing her to deal with her grief while reclaiming her marriage and saving Kakeru in a different way by preventing him from losing sight of himself and giving in to misery. Falling in love is about finding things you like about each other, Kanna tells the youthful Kakeru, but marriage is about discovering all the ways you drive each other crazy. Kakeru’s tendency to pick at her about leaving lights on hints at the way financial concerns eroded their relationship along with the outdated social pressure placed on Kakeru to be a “real man” by supporting his family financially though a “proper” salaryman job. Kanna filing his death certificate next to an excited couple registering their marriage seems to ram the message home that, as Kakeru says, life is short and the most important thing is to use the time well. Whatever else happens, you do have a choice how you live today, and even if you suffer later, the pain will be easier to bear with fewer regrets.
Consumed by rural ennui, three teenage girls set on a dramatic plan for escape in Takashi Koyama’s darkly comic youth drama, All Greens (万事快調〈オール・グリーンズ). The title turns out to be apt, not only in ironically referencing the drugs at the film’s centre, but also that the girls are all still fairly naive and just trying to figure out their place in the world. Whatever that may turn out to be, it’s clear that each of them is constrained by their circumstances from abusive fathers to absent parents and outdated patriarchal ideals.
The reduced horizons of their lives are evident in Hidemi’s (Sara Minami) description of the school as a place where everyone’s either given up on exams or is too poor to access better education. She and Mako (Mizuki Yoshida) seem to resent popular girl Milk (Natsuki Deguchi) and her seemingly perfect life, but are unaware that circumstances are similar to theirs or that she too is longing to escape this dead-end town. Hidemi is sick of her abusive father and submissive mother and finds release through rap music. Mako wants to be a manga artist, but is under pressure from her family who expect her to marry a man to take over their farm. And Milk has become a mother to her mother who appears to have had a mental breakdown following the death of her husband, a nuclear plant worker caught up in a radioactive incident.
The attitude of Mako’s family may seem excessively old-fashioned, but seems to reflect the traditional culture of the village. When the teacher warns their class about a flasher, he tells the girls to travel in groups and avoid going home alone while ensuring their skirts are not too short as if that had anything to do with the likelihood of being flashed. The three girls are briefly united when they witness a woman and her small child being dumped in the middle of an intersection by an abusive spouse. They hear later that the woman snapped, killed her abusive husband and burnt his house down before drowning herself and her daughter in the river. Each of them fear ending up like this woman, as if the village itself were an abusive spouse from whom they can’t escape. Hidemi’s dreams of rap stardom are even disrupted when she’s offered a promising opportunity with a “beat master” who first tells her he’s quitting the business because he’s getting married and needs a more stable line of work, and then matter-of-factly says that the job is conditional on sleeping with him. He even tried to drug her drink, but Hidemi has a healthy level of suspicion regarding men who offer help, so she switched their drinks which is how she finds out he has a safe full of marijuana seeds.
The drugs offer a more literal kind of escape in the prospect of a small business the three girls could operate illicitly together without really thinking about the consequences beyond the hope of making enough money to leave town. Later they bring in two fellow students who need money because they are gay and want to move in together to escape their oppressive families, though Hidemi’s assertion that karma isn’t real may seem hubristic while playing into her sense of the world as a lawless place in which there are no real consequences for anything because she’s used to seeing bad guys get away with their crimes. In trying their luck in the big city, however, the girls find themselves out of their depth as their small-town gangster dreams implode in the face of the realities of urban crime.
In the end, the only real answer may be to burn it all down, but the sense of solidarity between the girls has at least given them the courage to chase their dreams even if they may still prove elusive. As the fumes make their way through the school, it provokes a sense of liberation as the old codes of conformity begin to dissolve and people say what they really feel. It may be only temporary and perhaps lead nowhere at all, but for the moment at least the road ahead is wide open.
Not all memories are nice, according to the heroine of the latest film by Yoji Yamada, Tokyo Taxi (TOKYOタクシー). A remake of the film Driving Madeleine, the action follows a glamorous older woman (Chieko Baisho) as she enlists a middle-aged taxi driver (Takuya Kimura) to drive her around Tokyo with the final destination being a care home that she has reluctantly decided to move in to. As such, it’s really journey through the stations of her life, but also about Japan as it was 60 years ago and the Japan of today.
After all, it wasn’t all plain sailing, Sumire insists as taxi driver Koji escorts her to a series of Tokyo landmarks each with a link to her past. It’s clear that one some level the care home has come to symbolise death for Sumire who has made the decision to go there, but still drags her feet. On their eventual arrival, she begs Koji to take her to a hotel instead while he ties to coax her like a child, certain that there’s no real point trying to postpone the inevitable.
There is, however, something quite touching about this path towards the acceptance of mortality given that this is director Yoji Yamada’s 91st film, made when he was already 94. Star Chieko Baisho is similarly 84. The pair have worked together for over 60 years and it was apparently the desire to make one more film with Baisho that pushed Yamada to keep going despite no longer quite having the stamina to direct a major motion picture. The film also marks the 130th anniversary of Yamada’s home studio, Shochiku, bringing things neatly full circle.
Still, there’s a fair amount of sadness in Sumire’s passage from her father’s death in the fire bombing of Tokyo to losing her first love and experiencing domestic violence. Speaking of her youth, Sumire remarks that not everything was bad in those days, but a lot of things certainly were and some of them have not changed so much as one might hope all this time later. Back then, violence was something a wife was expected to endure and in itself not considered grounds for ending a marriage. Sumire’s husband picked her precisely because her circumstances made her an easy target for his bullying leaving her with few options for escaping her abusive relationship.
For his part, Koji too is somewhat lost as he meanders on the way to the care home. His daughter Nana (Runa Nakashima) may have the opportunity to attend a prestigious music college, but it won’t come cheap. He agreed before really thinking it through, and now can’t face the possibility of standing in the way of Nana’s dreams. But when he reaches out to his sister for help, she tells him that music school is just for rich people’s children with the implication that he’s getting above himself and should just accept that things like that aren’t meant for people like them. Reflecting a contemporary class divide, Koji’s quest nevertheless bears out a father’s love for his daughter as he racks his brains trying to think of ways to come up with the money so that she can chase her dreams in the way that he never could.
It’s this simple desire that allows him to bond with Sumire who, as it turns out, was never someone who felt compelled to accept the status quo and was prepared to take drastic action to challenge circumstances that actively impeded her happiness. As they weave through a Tokyo that often seems entirely foreign and unrecognisable, simple human kindness and the connections between people have remained constant. Koji does his best to get Sumire safely to her destination while patiently listening to her story and gradually opening up with his own. Beginning in the stomping grounds of Tora-san and ending up in an idyllic setting by the sea, the film, in a way, elegises the careers of both director and star with the acceptance of an ending still to come, though perhaps not quite yet. “The sun is setting,” Sumire remarks with accidental profundity, but there’s beauty still to be found even this twilight in simple acts of human kindness and compassion that will never themselves fade away.
Yasujiro Ozu liked to describe himself as a simple tofu maker. Daniel Raim’s documentary The Ozu Diaries uses the director’s own writings to probe into his professional life and gain a personal insight into his career while interviewing prominent contemporary filmmakers such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Wim Wenders. It is though important to note that it is an edited selection of the diaries that were discovered in the early 90s and skips over other aspects of his life such as the rumours of his homosexuality and wartime service, though Ozu had requested that some of his wartime diaries never be made public.
Nevertheless, much time is given over to his bond with director Sadao Yamanaka. Only three of Yamanaka’s films survive, but he was closely associated with the left-wing tendency film movement and was let go by Shochiku for those reasons, losing his exemption from the draft and consequently being shipped off to Manchuria where he passed away of dysentery. His last words to his friends were “make good films” which is something Ozu seems to have taken to heart and continued filmmaking in part to fulfil Yamanaka’s dream.
The film similarly explores his relationship with screenwriter Kogo Noda and paints Ozu as a larger-than-life figure who liked to drink and have a good time which is, perhaps, slightly at odds with the extreme control involved with his filmmaking. Likewise, recollections from actress Kinuyo Tanaka suggest a deep passion for cinema as she describes feeling as if he really loved her while they were making a film together to the extent that she began to think about marriage, but it was all over once the film was completed.
For his part, Ozu’s diaries also reveal that he was wary of casting Setsuko Hara because the industry wisdom at the time was that she couldn’t act. Yet the subtlety of her performance perfectly suited his aesthetic which is why he went on to cast her in so many films and particularly the Noriko trilogy. He also seems to have been adept at working with children and had a fairly unusual approach of interviewing parents to find out how they naturally behaved at home and then building the performance around that as recounted by a former child actor, now an elderly man himself.
In terms of his filmmaking technique, the films suggests that he held off so long on making a talkie because he wanted to truly master silent films and avoid using sound as a gimmick, while it may also have been a kind of solidarity with the benshi whose place in film exhibition was being destroyed by talking pictures. In Japan, though films also had intertitles, it was common for silent films to be narrated by a storyteller known as a benshi. Benshi could become stars in their own right and in fact be a bigger draw than the film, but still everyone wanted to chase the new with sound.
Other than perhaps in his 30s films, the suggestion is that Ozu was like a tofu maker more interested in perfecting his craft than with constant innovation. The film characterises him as carrying a profound sense of loss not only resulting from his wartime experiences, but from his childhood separation with his father. It’s this sense of loss that lends poignancy to films like Tokyo Story and echoes his preoccupation with the breaking and remaking of families. Archive photos and testimony meanwhile speak of his close relationship with his mother and the childlike way the pair of them used to play together. Ozu’s cinematic philosophy seems to be borne out in a passage about the lotus and the mud, that the post-war reality was muddy and chaotic, but there was still great beauty in it too and it was the artist’s duty to seek out both. The film seems to suggest that this was true for his life too, depicting him as an essentially melancholy man who also liked to drink and have a good time while dedicating himself to perfecting his art.
Black River is a good place to start this retrospective as, though it’s not his first film, it is the first time Nakadai played a prominent role on screen. His cinema career, however, began a little ignominiously with a small gig as an extra on Seven Samurai having been sent there by the acting school he was training at at the time. He had obviously never been involved with a period film before and Akira Kurosawa actually yelled at him that he “walked funny” and didn’t know how to move like a samurai. He was only in one scene all he needed to do was walk across the set, but Kurosawa kept making him redo it from 9am to 3pm before finally giving up.
Nakadai seems to have taken this quite badly and made a vow that he was going to become a great actor so he could turn down all of Kurosawa’s films, so he was quite reluctant to work with him again. He rebuffed all of Kurosawa’s attempts to do so and only accepted the role in Yojimbo when Kurosawa reached out to him personally, having apparently remembered him from Seven Samurai. Presumably, he’d either learned to walk like a samurai by that point, though he’d mainly done films set in the present day, or Kurosawa didn’t mind because his character in Yojimbo after all represents a kind of modernity.
In any case, Nakadai got his start in films proper after he was spotted playing Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts by actress Umeji Tsukioka who recommended him to her husband, the director Umetsugu Inoue, and he made his film debut in Pheonix in 1956 in which Tsukioka starred. He then played several small parts in other films before playing what’s really his first prominent role Masaki Kobayashi’s Black River, which is the film you’re about to see, after being recommended to the director by a friend of his who was an executive at Haiyuza theatre company where Nakadai had trained and continued to work.
Throughout his career, Nakadai was primarily a theatre actor. Though he was highly sought by each of the big five studios during Japan’s golden age, Shochiku, Toho, Nikkatsu, Toei, and Daei, he never signed an exclusive contract and preferred to remain freelance meaning that he was in the enviable position of having a lot of control over which projects he participated in. While the studio system was in place, the Big Five’s business model was largely based around a roster of exclusive stars that they slotted into whichever project they thought would suit them. If a director wanted to use an actor from another studio, they’d have to come to some sort of agreement which could be quite difficult to work out. But as Nakadai was freelance, he could work with any of the studios he wanted and was able to play a wide variety of roles rather than by literally type cast as a leading man or character actor or limited one particular genre.
That’s why you’ll see the Shochiku logo before Black River which was the home studio of director Masaki Kobayashi, while The Age of Assassins was made for Toho which was the home studio of Kihachi Okamoto. During the days of studio system, the Big Five would also train their own directors in house and there was no real other way to become a mainstream film director without joining a studio and working your way up from assistant director. That said, the interesting thing about Masaki Kobayashi is that he was a relative of the great star Kinuyo Tanaka who had also spent most of her career at Shochiku before breaking her exclusive contract following the backlash on her return from an American tour in 1949. She also went freelance in order to work with a wider variety of directors and later pursue a career as one herself.
The working relationship between Nakadai and Kobayashi was the most important in terms of their cinema work to the point that Nakadai really became a stand-in for Kobayashi on many of his films and especially his magnum opus The Human Condition. They were, however, from quite different generations. Kobayashi joined Shochiku as an assistant director after graduating from Waseda University in 1941 but was drafted not long after and left for the war though he regarded himself as a pacifist and resisted by refusing all promotions above the rank of private despite being considered a capable soldier. He spent about a year in a prisoner of war camp after the war ended and only returned to Japan 1946 to discover his father and older brother had died, while he was professionally disadvantaged as other directors who were exempt from the draft and had continued working throughout the war had leapfrogged ahead of him. He ended up serving as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita who was only a couple of years older than he was, though they got on really well and Kobayashi had a lot of admiration fro Kinoshita’s work who had, after all, been quite a close collaborator with Kinuyo Tanaka.
That might explain why his first couple of films were more regular Shochiku fare. The studio specialised in “shomingeki” or films that revolved around the lives of ordinary, lower-middle-class urbanites. It wasn’t until his third film, Thick-Walled Room that he began to address the themes that were more personal to him such as Japan’s wartime legacy and the struggle of the individual against a corrupt system. But The Thick-Walled Room which dealt with the still sensitive topic of wartime atrocities proved too controversial for Shochiku, which is not a studio that generally tolerates controversy. Consequently The Thick-Walled Room was shelved for a few years for fear of offending the Americans though the Occupation was already over and Kobayashi had to go back to making films that were much more typical of the studio’s style.
After testing the waters with cynical baseball drama I Will Buy You, Black River may be Kobayashi’s second attempt to work on material that directly interested him. Scripted by Zenzo Matsuyama, the film explores on the radiating corruption of US military bases in the post-Occupation society through the lives of those drawn into its nexus of violence and immortality. It opens with an American plane noisily zooming overhead above sleazy clubs with Western names catering American servicemen. Sex workers line the streets and it’s clear that the entire area is economically dependent on the base for its survival. Caught between those living in a rundown slum area and red-light district are recently arrived student Nishida and pure-hearted waitress Shizuko neither of whom feel they belong in this environment. Nishida is a student who’s chosen to live out here to save a few pennies, but at heart thinks he’s much better than the other residents at the tenement. Shizuko is attracted to him because he seems different and represents a link back to a more middle-class, respectable vision of Japan, but ends up being raped by local gangster Killer Joe who represents post-war moral decline in his wilful collaboration with the Americans. She’ll spend the rest of the film trying to retrieve the parasol that Joe took from her that represents innocence, while struggling with herself, unable to understand her attraction to the man who raped her despite her fear of him and his violence towards her.
Ineko Arima who plays Shizuko is another interesting case in that she actively fought for more control over the kind of roles she played even within the studio system. She started out playing male roles at Takarazuka Review and made her film debut in a Takarazuka Review film for Toho. Before moving to Shochiku she co-founded the independent production company Ninjin Club with fellow actresses Keiko Kishi and Yoshiko Kuga that aimed to circumvent the studio system and provide more creative freedom for actresses in particular. Ninjin Club is also one of the production companies listed for this film alongside Shochiku.
You actually might not recognise her to begin with because she’s wearing this amazing set of false teeth that give her a rather grotesque appearance, but the slum landlady is played by Isuzu Yamada, a star of the 1930s who mainly worked at Toho and often worked with Mizoguchi and Naruse. She had also gone freelance at this point having left Toho during the labour dispute that erupted in the mid-40s, so you could say that these are all very appropriate stars for a Masaki Kobayashi film in each having in some way rebelled against the corrupt studio system, even if Kobayashi himself was more or less complicit with it.
The landlady’s grotesquery provides an interesting counter to the amorality of Joe and his backer who are in cahoots with the Americans and want to knock the tenement down to build a love hotel. She is merely someone whose worst instincts have been indulged by the post-war moral decline as she gleefully teams up with Joe in the hope of many a bit more money from selling her apartment block, little caring that most of the residents have nowhere else to go and are only living here because they can’t afford anything better. The resistance, led by Korean communist Mr Kim, in the end proves ineffective and it seems there really is no solution other than violence to deal with a man like Joe, though in taking him out one would only damn oneself. Nevertheless, the film does not particularly blame the Americans so much as the Japanese for allowing themselves to be corrupted in this way and permitting this state of lawlessness to exist in which a man like Joe is free to behave as he does with no real consequences. I do hope you’ll enjoy it.
A young woman’s simple desire to be with her daughter sparks a quiet revolution in Taichi Kimura’s autobiographically inspired drama, Fujiko. Though set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not that much has really changed in terms of the difficulties faced by those raising children alone even if they’re less likely to be told that it just isn’t possible or that they’ve brought their struggles on themselves by choosing divorce.
Fujiko doesn’t so much choose divorce as have it thrust upon her by her own feisty mother. The family she married into don’t see her as much more than a labourer and are then put out when she has a child because it means she has less time for them. The mother-in-law eventually coopts Fujiko’s infant daughter, while Fujiko’s husband Jiro does nothing, unable to stand up to his mother. Having lost Mari, Fuji goes into a kind of depression before being dragged to a women’s liberation rally by her boss reawakens her desire to fight.
Though Fujiko’s decision making may not be consciously feminist, it’s here that she realises that nothing changes if you just keep quiet. You have to fight for what you really want. But the battle doesn’t end once she’s retrieved her daughter. Life as a single mother is, as many tell her, all but impossible. Securing a place to stay thanks to her boss, Fujiko struggles to find anyone to watch her daughter so she can return to work. It’s only with the intervention of a friend that’s she’s able to overcome these issues and earn her own living.
The other employers’ refusal seems to be down in part as a reflection of social prejudice but also a fear that she’s breaking the rules that govern an employee/employer relationship in having something that will always take priority. Time and gain, it’s the kindness of strangers that saves her as she goes on to forge a more independent way of life. In need of money, she can’t be too picky about what the joy actually is and ends up accepting a position as a cook for an illegal yakuza gambling den only to see the money she’s saved go up in smoke when her placed is turned over. It may seem like the world is against her, but with every setback Fujiko only seems more determined to make it through.
Fujiko finds a more positive example of supportive family by bonding with an old friend of her father’s who takes her in and helps her get back on her feet while helping her to see what she really wants out of life. Harbouring some resentment towards her mother for favouring her brother as the only boy, making her give up on art college so that he could go to Tokyo University, but equally disapproving of her marriage, Fujiko too struggles with the idea of conventionality that is projected onto her and the suggestion that she’s doing something wrong when the best option is simply remarriage. Given the option of marrying again and gaining a steadier home as a house, she once again has to decide if she’s going to fight for what she wants or be railroaded into settling for a more conventional success.
Rediscovering her father’s music helps Fujiko to get back in touch with herself and encourages her to follow her heart. Using psychedelic animation and propulsive rock music, Kimura lends Fujiko’s story a true punk rock spirit while staging much of the film as a flashback as Fujiko lays out her “sob story” for a prospective client having become an insurance saleswoman. Despite the difficulties she’s facing, the film remains upbeat and positive, seeing it all with a sense of humour as Fujiko does her best to escape the patriarchal net, refusing to be bound either by her first husband’s ineffectuality nor by what her mother insists her life should be. Instead she aims for an uncompromising independence, claiming her position as her daughter’s mother and doing her best to provide for her but also fulfilling herself in the midst of a patriarchal society which tells her that marriage and motherhood are the only rightful goals for a woman.
Back in the early 2000s, Nobuhiro Doi was a leading figure of the short-lived “jun-ai” or “pure love” boom with films such as Be With You, and Tears for You, as well as TV dramas like Beautiful Life and Orange Days. Adapted from the novel by Kasumi Asakura, A Moon in the Ordinary (平場の月, Hiraba no Tsuki) is a kind middle-aged take on the same material in which former classmates reunite 35 years later but discover that they aren’t really any better equipped to understand what love is than they were as teenagers.
The pair even bond over hearing Hiroko Yakushimaru’s Main Theme, the title song of the movie of the same name, in which the singer laments that they still don’t understand love even after living 20 years. Kensho (Masato Sakai) and Yoko (Haruka Igawa) have lived more than 20 years since they last saw each other and are each carrying their own particular baggage of failed or compromised romances. Each having returned to their hometown where they’ve reconnected with their former classmates, there is something of a return to childhood in their relationship even while tempered by the compromises of age. As one of Kensho’s former classmates says, he’s reached the age where doing new things is a bother and now the conversation turns on people’s health issues or those of their parents.
Kansho moved back after his divorce to care for his mother but she now lives in a care home and has advanced dementia. Every time he reminds her who he is, she replies that “Kensho is dead,” but he just humours her. Yoko, meanwhile, has moved back after an ill-advised affair with a younger man left her broke. Widowed young, she harbours a degree of guilt over the circumstances that led to her marriage while also perhaps a little embarrassed to be working in the hospital cafe having graduated from a good university and holding a well-paying job in the city. Despite her initial reluctance, she bonds with Kensho over their shared sense of middle-aged despair as he awaited the results of some potentially concerning medical tests.
Health issues are, however, only a part of the problem. Yoko is also carrying childhood trauma and a low sense of self-worth that once made her determine to live life alone, which is a difficult habit to break. Following her experiences, she lives in a spartan flat she says she keeps tidy to make life easier for whoever has to deal with it after she’s gone and also makes sure to sleep on the bed so the mess will be contained if it’s a while before anyone finds her if she passes away. Even before encountering her own life issues, she seems to be living in a kind of limbo state until reconnecting with Kensho. The “impossible dream” she describes might be as simple as getting to grow old with the person you love, though it’s something she doesn’t really think she’s entitled to or deserving of.
As Kensho says, they’ve both been plenty hurt already, what if they just end up hurting each other more? His older co-worker advises him that getting hurt is just part of it and he’d gladly go through it all again, but romance is as hard at 50 as it was at 15. Some things have changed and others haven’t. It’s a little ironic, in some ways, that the film ends with a Chinese-style disclaimer reminding audience members that it’s illegal for two people to be riding the same bike given that the film’s main theme is the unchanging innocence of romantic connection. After meeting Kensho, Yuko starts to plant flowers in her makeshift garden rather than purely practical herbs as if she were welcoming joy back into her life, but she still feels herself to be a burden and has a tendency to pull away rather than expose herself emotionally while Kensho’s decision to allow her to do that seems foolish in the extreme. In the end, perhaps there is only loneliness and absence. In a flashback to their teenage years, Kensho says that he didn’t want to become a regular grown-up which he inevitably has, now filled with middle-aged regrets while Yoko never quite managed to move past herself and accept the possibility of love as another than an impossible dream.
The first thing we see in Eiji Uchida’s elliptical crime thriller Night Flower (ナイトフラワー) is a sign reading “Paradise” that’s ironically positioned in the bathroom of a hostess bar staffed by middle-aged women that has the Japanese equivalent as its name. In a moment of dark foreshadowing, the sign tells us exactly where we’re headed while suggesting that the kind of familial utopia the heroine is seeking will always be just out of reach.
This is largely due to circumstances beyond Natsuki’s (Keiko Kitagawa) control. As hard as she tries to provide for her two young children, the fact is that the odds are stacked against her in this rather patriarchal society. The film opens with her boss shouting at her for having fallen asleep on the toilet, but it’s obvious that Natsuki exists in a permanent state of exhaustion. She’s already working multiple jobs and failing to make ends meet after having been abandoned by her husband who ran off after accruing massive debts. Even after moving from Osaka to Tokyo to try and escape them, she’s being hassled by loan sharks and is already at the end of her tether. It’s not surprising then that when she happens to come across a drug dealer who’s been mugged by his client she steals his remaining stash with the intention of selling it on.
The real villain is, of course, the society that fails to come to the aid of women like Natsuki and leaves them with little choice other than to turn to crime. None of her part-time jobs pay enough to live on and when she approaches the town hall, they tell her she can’t claim any more benefits for another month despite being down to her last few coins. The jobs Natuski does are those available to people with few qualifications where the pay is low and disproportionately done by women. There seems to be an implicit assumption still in place that a woman will to some degree have a man to rely on for financial security, though all of the men we see are unreliable from Tamae’s trainer (Ken Mitsuishi) whose gambling problem endangers the gym to Mrs Hoshizuki’s (Reina Tanaka) husband who refuses to take any responsibility for the domestic sphere and treats his wife as a glorified housekeeper.
To that extent, there is a direct line being drawn between wealthy housewife Mrs Hoshizuki, who is effectively a single mother because her husband is functionally absent from the domestic space yet provides financially, and Natsuki that suggests money is not the central issue. Natsuki’s young daughter Koharu is earnest and considerate. She well understands how difficult her mother’s life is and does her best to make it easier. Mrs Hoshizuki’s daughter, meanwhile, falls in with a bad crowd at school and begins using drugs. Her mother is powerless to help her and her father refuses to get involved. When she first hires a detective who discovers Natsuki and Tamae pushing drugs on the streets, Ms Hoshizuki asks if they have families too as if she understood on some level that they’re not necessarily bad people and were reluctant to get them into trouble, but also perhaps wondering how they can do this to someone else’s child if they have children of their own.
Natuski can’t really afford to think about the customers, and when earning more money through drugs continues her other part-time work and lives modestly wanting to provide for her children if something were to go wrong. She even asks her partner, aspiring MMA fighter Tamae, to look after them as if she were already resolved to pay the price if caught. Tamae is in this because she wanted to get out of sex work which she’d been doing to fund her career in the absence of a sponsor. It’s never quite clear if there is a romantic dimension to their relationship, but it’s certainly incredibly close as Tamae becomes an essential part of the family, dying her hair to match Natsuki’s and beginning to speak with an Osaka accent just like they do. For a time, they find the kind of paradise they’re looking for, but also seem to know that it can’t last.
It seems that Tamae was also abandoned by her mother, while the androgynous gang boss Ms Sato gives them a little leeway precisely because she admires the way Natsuki fights for her kids when theirs did not. Most of the other gangsters also report having bad or no relationships with their mothers, which circles round to a rather conservative viewpoint of blaming mothers for everything. But no matter how hard Natsuki and Tamae fight, the fact is they always lose and the odds are forever stacked against them. All they have is the solidarity they’ve found together as a family unit, but it’s not enough to protect them against the harshness of the world they’ve entered. Night flowers bloom when they feel like it, but it seems like this one only blossoms in an impossible paradise.
At 35 years old, Taiga (Takashi Kawaguchi) is beginning to tire of city life and thinking of settling down, but as a gay man in contemporary Japan, there are limits to how much that is possible for him. Inspired by real life stories from the LGBTQ+ community, Anshul Chauhan’s Tiger is more character study than issue drama, but explores the ways in which Taiga’s horizons are constrained by the way society receives his sexuality to the point that he finds himself considering entering a platonic marriage as the only real way to ensure a full domestic life with the possibility of raising children.
As someone from the “Friendship Marriage” organisation points out, even the recently introduced partnership system available in some areas of Japan is a long way from a legal marriage and is geared more towards housing provision and hospital visits. It doesn’t confer inheritance rights for those who own property, or even the right to attend a funeral if the other relatives object. Child adoption is relatively rare in Japan in any case and not generally available to same sex couples while even costly options such as IVF and surrogacy could be bureaucratically difficult given the way the family register system works.
Though the woman giving the presentation seems incredibly angry about the weakness of the partnership system legislation, labelling it “a disgrace”, it can’t be denied that Friendship Marriage is essentially complicit with the heteronormative views of mainstream society in which it is still socially and in some cases practically difficult not to be married. After signing up for the service, Taiga meets a woman who is half-Iranian and grew up in Tehran. It doesn’t occur to him that her decision to come to Japan was not made entirely freely and that she cannot safely return there without the threat of violence. Taiga may feel himself constrained, but he won’t be arrested or tortured solely for existing as a gay man. Nevertheless, he faces reduced options when it comes to employment and has never revealed his sexuality to his father fearing that he will reject or disown him.
Tensions come to a head, as they so often do, when the matter of inheritance is raised. Taiga’s sister Minami (Maho Nonami) is aware of his sexuality though does not seem altogether accepting and is resentful of his life in Tokyo which she assumes to be aimless and free of responsibility while she has had to shoulder the burden of caring for their ageing father alone. It’s obvious that she has been banking on inheriting the family home and is resentful on hearing their father has suggested leaving it to Taiga on the condition that he marries and has children, knowing that this is something that is not possible in contemporary Japan. The implication is that Taiga had no choice but to leave his home town in order to lead a more authentic life and essentially develops two opposing personas, that of “Tiger” the aspiring porn star and “Taiga” the would-be-family man.
Minami later wields this duality against him, asking him to baby-sit her daughter Kaede to whom he is especially close, while threatening to out him to their father if he doesn’t agree to give up his right to the domestic space represented by their family home. His former lover, Koji (Yuya Endo), has entered a conventional heterosexual marriage without disclosing his sexuality to his wife and is riddled with regrets over not leaving with Taiga and trying to start a domestic life in the city as a gay couple. The Friendship Marriage system removes the element of betrayal, but also elides authenticity in providing a mechanism for each partner to fulfil social and parental expectation while avoiding disclosing their sexuality, and equally prevents them from enjoying a full and loving domestic relationship with a same-sex partner.
The film never particularly suggests that there is anything wrong with the way Taiga is living in Tokyo nor with his desire to get into gay porn, but merely highlights the sense of emptiness he feels as someone denied the possibility a full domestic life. There is after all a kind of age cap involved in his life as a sex worker working at a men-only massage parlour which he may fast be approaching even aside from the clients who like to exorcise their own sense of powerless by paying money to abuse and humiliate him. In the end, all he’s left with is an uncertain liminal space living as a literal stand-in marooned on the sidelines with no place to call his own.
Windows on Worlds 