The curious thing, or perhaps a curious thing among many, about Shusuke Kaneko’s loose adaptation of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas Summer Vacation 1999 (1999年の夏休み, 1999 Toshi no Natsuyasumi) is that it takes place in a theoretical future that is also quite clearly an imaginary past. In a second introductory sequence, the voice of an adult man tells us that his is his memory, a fragment of the past kept alive by the clarity with which he remembers it. We don’t know who this voice belongs to, though the images encourage to think it must be the man the boy on screen, like the others played by a girl, will one day become but in another sense this boy doesn’t really exist either or at least is the bearer of several different identities.
The fact he travels to this remote mansion in the countryside on an otherwise empty train signal’s the place’s unreality and detachment from the regular world. We’re told it’s 1999, a year that was still to come on the film’s release in 1988, and inevitably hints at a millennial dread along with the new dawn the writer describes himself having in experienced in what is otherwise a summer holiday movie. However, in the opening sequence we witnessed a boy who looked very like this one slip what is later assumed to be a suicide note under another boy’s door before walking through the gothic space of the country mansion and out to a rugged cliff where he takes his own life by jumping into a nearby lake. The name of the boy who died, apparently brokenhearted and filled with despair after his romantic overtures to another boy were rebuffed, was named Yu (Eri Miyajima). This one claims his name is Kaoru (also Eri Miyajima) and is different in temperament in character to the boy who may have died, his body has not been found, though to the others staying at the school over the summer holiday he seems somehow like a vengeful ghost arriving to take them to task for Yu’s death.
Kaneko specifically frames the school as haunted through the gothic photography of its billowing curtains and 19th century European aesthetics but also through its emptiness. The sound of children laughing, the boys who have left and returned somewhere else, echo through empty corridors further framing it as a place of memory and it seems true enough that the other boys who remain are trapped here in the same way they are trapped within themselves in their inability to express their emotions. The youngest of the boys, the sensitive Norio, (Eri Fukatsu) intensely resents Kazuhiko (Tomoko Otakara) who is as he describes beloved by all but himself cannot bear to be loved and may have contributed to Yu’s suicide through the abruptness of his romantic rejection.
Later Kazuhiko recalls a memory of himself watching the sunset as a child in which he felt so terribly alone, as if he were the only person left on earth and there was no one with whom he could share this beauty. This sense of loneliness and isolation is further symbolised by the remote nature of the boarding school which seems to exist outside of time itself. Inspired by the setting of the novel, the boys dress in a fashion more associated with 19th century aristocracy than the late 1980s yet they are surrounded by machines and makeshift, retro futuristic technology in which they spend their days programming some kind of computer system. The leap into the lake is also into memory, but otherwise a kind of rebirth or rebaptism which allows Kazuhiko to make sense of himself and the other boys to come to an acceptance of Yu, Kaoru, and everything he embodies in relation to themselves.
Even so, the elliptical nature of the film’s ending hints that this is a continually looping story replaying endlessly in the memory of a now much older man recalling the journey into adolescence in which he ruptured the shell of his ignorance much as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly even if that butterfly was something that Kaoru wanted to kill without harming its beauty. Perhaps in away that’s what the man has done in preserving this memory with its all of its gothic shades of billowing curtains and shadowy corridors amid the ethereality of the twilight of youth.
Summer Vacation 1999 screened as part of this year’s Queer East.
Windows on Worlds 