Category: Japan

My Soul is Slashed (咬みつきたい, Shusuke Kaneko, 1991)

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Released at the tail end of the Bubble-era, Shusuke Kaneko’s vampire dramedy My Soul is Slashed (咬みつきたい, Kamitsukitai) is one of a series of films that seems to be filled with a prophetic sense of dread and the feeling that the good times are about to come to an end. Fiercely critical of the costs of the salary man dream along with the amoral capitalism that seems to have accompanied it, the film may also be drawing inspiration from a then recent contaminated blood scandal as haemophiliacs in Tokyo and Osaka sued the government in 1989 after contracting HIV through infected transfusions.

The hero, Ishikawa (Ken Ogata), works for a pharmaceuticals company that has been accused of engaging in corrupt practices and bribing the government to be able to sell unlicensed medical products. Ishikawa is not aware of this and does not believe the rumours, so is keen to find out what’s been going on at his company. After making some enquiries and attempting to get in touch with a friend in the media, however, Ishikawa is involved in a hit-and-run and taken to hospital where he receives a blood transfusion but eventually dies of his injuries.

A researcher at the same facility, Yuzuko (Narumi Yasuda), has secretly come by a pack of Dracula’s blood that was apparently lost during the recent revolution in Romania where deposed dictator Ceausescu had been experimenting with it. For reasons best known to herself, she decides to stash the blood in the “do not use” draw of the medical fridge, only for it to come to life and jump into the shelf below. Though there is some concern among the medical staff that the pack is not properly marked with a blood type or other information, other staff members become indignant on being questioned about it, so the operating team go ahead and use the unmarked pack without proper procedure being followed, which is how Ishikawa ends up receiving contaminated blood, in this case that apparently belonging to “Dracula”. A distraught Yuzuko attends Ishikawa’s funeral and tells his teenage daughter Saeko (Hikari Ishida) that, assuming she is a virgin, she can revive her father by sprinkling her blood on his ashes, which she does, though Ishikawa is not resurrected until a year later.

Ishikawa had been a loyal salaryman who worked hard and believed in his company, which is why he was so shocked by the rumours and by the suggestion of his colleague Kitahara (Takero Morimoto) that the buck stops with the company president. As a consequence of his dedication to the firm, however, Ishikawa has neglected his family and become a ghostly presence within his own home to the extent that he hardly ever sees his daughter and has, in fact, forgotten her birthday, asking his secretary to pick up a dress as a present which turns out to be too small for her to wear. Saeko appears rather indifferent towards him while is alive and has also started rebelling by staying out all night with her queer-coded, motorcycle-riding friend. Though she misses him when he’s gone, Saeko is also in favour of her mother remarrying a much more attentive man, Tokita (Kazuyoshi Kushida), who brought her a cake for her birthday and seems to fill in with all the other paternal tasks that Ishikawa never paid any attention to because he was so focused on his career.

It’s his dedication to his company that Ishikawa most regrets on being resurrected. A year has passed and his family’s already moved on, doing just fine without him, while he was scapegoated for the bribery scandal at work and died in disgrace which might explain why both Saeko and her mother are working around the clock to support themselves. He realises that even though he’s come back, he is not the same person and he cannot simply slot back into his former life even if he’s been able to forge a new relationship with Saeko who declares that she doesn’t care if he’s Dracula, he’s still her father and a good person. At the same time, Ishikawa comes to accept his new Dracula persona as a potential means for good, insisting that there are plenty of bloodsucking people in the contemporary society and Dracula doesn’t seem too bad by comparison.

The interesting this is that Yuzuko’s attraction to him also seems to be bound up with his position as a father, having lost her own at a young age. Yuzuko’s father was apparently one of the foremost Dracula researchers in the world who also helped countless vampires return to being human, even if it didn’t work for everyone and some ended up as ashes once again. Though dating an age-appropriate colleague, she complains that he’s “too young” for her, and longs for the centuries-old embrace of Dracula which is also a reflection of her quasi-incestuous desire for her father whom she never really knew. On the other hand, Saeko comes to a new appreciation of her now anti-corporate dad and resolves that, though she may have his workaholic blood, she won’t sacrifice herself for a company and will earn a living doing something she likes while hanging out with her maybe girlfriend.

Which is all to say, Ishikawa is more alive now he’s “dead” than he ever was while his heart was still beating. Using his Dracula powers to expose the company’s wrongdoing and force his killer to confess live on air, he turns his back on culturally defined notions of corporate success and retreats to live a quiet life with Yuzuko, who has also become a vampire, in a travelling blood donation van. “Clean blood is rare these days,” Ishikawa reflects hinting at the various corruptions of the late Bubble society which itself heading for an implosion. The project apparently started because Ogata wanted to play a role completely against type, which he undoubtedly does, in embodying an incongruous source of vampiric paternal authority that is determined to live outside the system rather than chase corporate success.

Never After Dark (Dave Boyle, 2026)

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When people talk about the veil between this world and the other, it may seem that where one ends the other begins, but it’s often more like a two-way mirror with each occupying the same space. Flip the switch, and you’ll see a different reality. At least that’s sort of how it is for travelling psychic Airi (Moeka Hoshi) in Dave Boyle’s gothic chiller, Never After Dark, as she finds herself tasked with dispatching another wandering soul at a disused hotel.

Having just purchased the property, wealthy widow Teiko (Tae Kimura) struggles to convince her sceptical son Gunji (Kento Kaku) that there really is a malevolent spirit stalking the halls rather than a figment of her imagination provoked by her loneliness and sense of isolation while living alone in this vast and empty space. Doors seem to open on their own, and she’s seen the terrifying figure of a man with half his face missing. After consulting a shaman, she calls in Airi to help deal with the problem but is surprised when she arrives alone. The shaman had told her about “a pair of sisters” who deal with cases like these. But the truth is that Airi is alone and not alone. Her older sister Miku (Kurumi Inagaki) is a spirit herself, frozen in the form in which she died, though Airi is now much older than she’ll ever be.

As for Airi herself, she’s much more comfortable with the dead than the living and a fairly stand-offish presence which somewhat disappoints the bubbly Teiko who tells her that she’s interested in becoming a psychic herself and was hoping to witness the ritual. Airi, however, prefers to work alone and tells her that it’s far too dangerous for her clients to be present, none of which helps to head off any lingering doubts as to her authenticity. Though told to stay away for their own safety, unbeknownst to her Teiko and Gunji each sneak back for a quick peek at what she’s up to, which also includes drinking alone and listening to records late at night. She waits for dawn to break before entering the spirit realm through a process of self-hypnosis, otherwise the balance would be tipped the wrong way and the forces of darkness would hold all the power.

But there are other ways in which the living can be haunted. The film seems clear in its cosmology that Miku is a “real” presence in the other world. Through she appears only in reflective surfaces, she is not only a reflection of Airi’s grief, guilt, and internalised shame about this “gift” that she’s inherited from an apparently absent mother. Nevertheless, Airi’s aversion to the living is born of this same trauma in being constantly doubted, accused of fraud or witchcraft, and facing threats of irrational violence from apparently “rational” people who reject the idea of the supernatural.

Airi may be right when she says she has more to fear from the living than the dead, but what she encounters here is more like an echo of the future reverberating in the past. Miku recalls being pursued by a girl with white eyes she later understood to be her own ghost shortly before she died, blown back in time by the force of her grief. In that sense, perhaps everyone is alive and dead at the same time, even if Airi is both dead and alive, alone and not alone, in less literal ways. Even so, the force she’s battling seems to have the power of foresight, just not as regards their own fate, and identifies with a kind of emptiness in Airi that is reflected in their own search for a soul by stealing those of others.

Faced with a threat that’s more flesh and blood than she was expecting, Airi’s first instinct is to run. This isn’t in her remit, she claims, and therefore not her problem, only for Miku to remind her that she has a responsibility not only to help the dead move on, but to her living clients, while in this case it may amount to the same thing. A hotel is, after all, a transient space and there is something uncanny about its disused state as a nexus of time where all moments become one moment and one may be both alive and the same time dead. Perhaps it’s time for Airi to move on too, if only into another purgatorial existence, as her candle burns itself down to its last.

Never After Dark is available on digital platforms in the UK from 2nd November.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tony Takitani (トニー滝谷, Jun Ichikawa, 2004)

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Do we wear the clothes, or is it more like the clothes wear us? There is something haunting about the sense of absence contained within an outfit that no longer has a body to wrap itself around, as if it were the flesh remaining long after the spirit has departed. This is, in a way, how the titular Tony Takitani (Issey Ogata) comes of see them, as shadows of his now departed wife never to be inhabited again.

Adapting a short story by Haruki Murakami, Jun Ichikawa maintains a gentle lateral motion of the camera as he proceeds through Tony’s early life as if we were gradually unrolling scroll painting. The motion seems to come to a stop on Tony’s unexpected marriage to a woman 15 years younger than himself who was already seeing another man when he proposed to her after only five dates. For a time, his life of loneliness comes to an end, if giving way to an anxiety that he will not be able to bear being alone again. The only cloud in his otherwise blissfully happy life is that Eiko (Rie Miyazawa) has an obsession with clothes that is not only a financial drain but potentially unhealthy. 

Tony himself says it’s as if she was born to wear them, as if Eiko existed solely to be the soul within the fabric. She says that the clothes, in turn, fill a hole inside her. It’s like an addiction. Tony asks her if she really “needs” so many, and she accepts that perhaps she doesn’t, but in other ways the clothes to her are something without which she cannot survive in the same way she could not survive without food or water. Tony’s mere asking her if she would consider reining her spending in is akin to breaking the spell, asking her to reject the very thing she is which may not be so different from dying anyway.

After her death, Tony hires another woman, Hisako (also played by Rie Miyazawa), to wear his late wife’s clothes clumsily explaining that seeing this simulacrum of Eiko will finally convince him that she is gone. Another being is now inhabiting the clothes, filling the void where Eiko once was. On seeing the room full of orphaned outfits, Hisako breaks down in tears. She tells Tony that she has never seen so many beautiful clothes and is overwhelmed by the sight. But perhaps she too is affected by this space that has become a manifestation of loneliness and the unfillable void that exists within us all. 

Tony’s void was perhaps forged by his lonely childhood. His mother died not long after his birth, and his father (also played by Issey Ogata) was a jazz trombonist ill suited to fatherhood who was always on the road. He gave him his unusual name anticipating an era of American dominance, but mostly it brought him nothing other than loneliness and isolation. Though he has made a successful career for himself as an illustrator, some say that his drawings lack warmth hinting at his inability, or perhaps lack of desire, to connect with other people before meeting Eiko.

Ichikawa too employs this distancing effect in having the tale narrated by an anonymous third party with the actors breaking in to speak a few lines of their own while trapped within a kind of dreamscape in which they are isolated and alone. The muted colour palette similarly hints at the colourlessness of Tony’s existence without the possibility of human connection. The ambiguous conclusion is either a tragedy or sign or new possibilities as Tony appears to want to reach out once again, but finds his call unanswered. Perhaps he will try another time, or otherwise remain mired in loneliness longing for connection but continually denied. In any case, Ichikawa’s film has a kind of elliptical quality, a poetic cycle of grief and longing that is at once filled with melancholy and enduring sadness but also a kind of transcendence in the rare moments in which two people fully connect no matter how brief or fleeting they may turn out to be.

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (Josef Kubota Wladyka, 2026)

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Sooner or later, the dance must end. Like Taichi Kimura’s Fujiko, Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! is a story inspired by and dedicated to the director’s mother featuring a bold visual style that harks back to the 1970s. A character study in grief, it is also an exploration of the dance between languages, the connection between motion and emotion, and the slow waltz we do with grief as a means of letting go.

Part of the reason that Haru (Rinko Kikuchi) cannot move forward, however, is that she is prevented from performing the culturally specific death ritual that would help her to so because it directly conflicts with the prevailing mores of her husband’s Mexican background. There are cultural and perhaps religious reasons that the family cannot accept the idea of his being cremated, but equally there is some territorial push and pull over who the remains ultimately belong to with Luis’ father in particular keen to bring the body “home” to Mexico. Haru, meanwhile, understandably feels that Luis’ home was with her in Japan and she better than anyone knew what his wishes were in the event of his death. In requesting his body, it’s as if his father is denying that she and Luis (Alejandro Edda) were a family or the choice that he had made in coming to Japan. Even so, in this way she must in the end let him go even if that means his spirit cannot really rest in peace and is haunting her in both a spiritual and literal sense.

Really what Haru comes to give Luis at the end is a kind of cremation that signals her decision to set them both free by accepting his death. Before that, however, she must try to find some kind of accommodation with it but largely becomes isolated and mired within her grief. The couple had been keen ballroom dancers, but Haru is unable to dance alone. Ironically, she song she dances to in the opening sequence, Watashi to Watashi by the Peanuts, expresses the idea of there being two people within one person (the Peanuts were a pair of twin sisters) as if Haru were already dating for/with an absent lover. After Luis’ death, she is visited by his ghost inside a cute crow mascot suit that symbolises that grief and sadness that hangs over her life and equally her own inability to let it go.

Her sister and cousin try to get her resume dancing a means of getting her life moving again, but doing so brings her into the presence of Latin dancer Fedir (Alberto Guerra)who on some level reminds her of Luis while her attraction to him simultaneously pulls her away from her late husband. The interplay between the two in her mind is neatly signalled in a fantasy sequence that seems to be an homage to Y tu mamá también, though the situation is as Haru puts it “messy”. Fedir is in an open marriage which is a concept that Haru struggles to understand. She pretends that Luis is still alive and their marriage is “open” too to facilitate a relationship, but at the same time becomes over emotionally invested in Fedir and jealous of his wife despite knowing intellectually that the relationship has no future and that Fedir is not Luis returned.

The situation is primed for an implosion, but as erratic as her behaviour becomes, it does eventually provide Haru with a path out of her grief and the realisation that she will have to let Luis go. Her sister and cousin perhaps preset two opposing poles, Yuki (Yo Yoshida) having been in a stable and conventional marriage for over 20 years with a grown up daughter, while Hiromi (You) has been living abroad in New in York and is enthusiastically playing the field following her divorce. Haru doesn’t necessarily have to choose either in her widowhood, and even in the film’s otherwise joyful conclusion is seen sitting alone in a train carriage with a large, empty space beside her. She has however rediscovered the joy dance, once again dancing alone but finding that others soon join in as she embraces her inner boogie-woogie. Broken with multilingual title cards and playing with interplay between various languages, the film has a playful quality that elides the heaviness of its subject but nevertheless lends true poignancy to its heroine’s gentle waltz with death as she prepares herself to let go of its hand. 

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! screens 10th/11th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hokusai’s Daughter (おーい、応為, Tatsushi Omori, 2025)

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Is there something a little ironic about the title of Tatsushi Omori’s biographical drama, Hokusai’s Daughter (おーい、応為, Oi, Oui)? The Japanese title is a humorous allusion to how she came by her professional name, but once again the English centres her relationship with her more famous father rather than the woman herself. Yet, in a way, the film does this too in exploring the interplay between Oei’s own artistic ambitions, her father’s legacy, and the patriarchal society within which she lives.

By 1820, which is when the film begins, Oei (Masami Nagasawa) has already given up artistry to get married, but ends up leaving her husband, claiming that she couldn’t stand his terrible paintings. According to her, the reason they were so bad was because of her husband’s cynical mindset which manifested itself in dull, emotionally unengaging work, though perhaps it was more that she saw the man she had grown tired of reflected in his mediocre paintings which were never going to live up to her father’s or indeed her own. Returning to her father’s rubbish-strewn shack, Oei then faces the choice of whether to get married again or resume her artistic career. She seems to have a crush on the current top painter in Edo who is young and not bad looking, though perhaps it’s being the best artist that attracts her more than anything else. In any case, he is not romantically interested in her and tries to let her down gently, all of which just makes it worse for Oei. When her father Tetsuzo (Masatoshi Nagase), otherwise known as Hokusai, retrieves the hair pin she dropped in the well while preparing to meet the object of her affection, she tells him that she doesn’t want it back signalling her decision to give up on the idea of marriage and devote herself to painting.

Yet, the film is a little ambivalent on her decision, strongly implying that she is lying when she says she’s not lonely and must necessarily have a degree of regret in having rejected romantic fulfilment rather than allowing her to simply be fulfilled by her art. In this way, the pet dog that she adopts becomes a child substitute, rather than just a domestic companion. On the other hand, her unconventional personality and masculine behaviour mark her out as an outsider in Edo-era society who cannot really fit into any other milieu than the artistic. Tetsuzo keeps trying to kick her out because he thinks he’s stopping her from leading a more conventional life as a woman, before finally realising that wouldn’t suit her and giving Oei her own artist’s name as a seal of approval on her career as an artist.

Tetsuzo is however cantankerous and emotionally distant, unwilling to visit his younger daughter who is seriously ill seemingly because he doesn’t want to face the emotional reality of her impending death. Oei is not so diffident and more willing to confront her emotions head on as symbolised by her fascination with fire. When a samurai comes calling to commission a painting on behalf of his lord and becomes irate with Hokusai’s continued refusals, Oei calls his bluff by suggesting he attack her with his sword if he’s really serious about stabbing someone while her father looks on in silence. In some ways, the samurai is even less free than she is as he can hardly go back to his lord, tell him Hokusai said no, and expect to keep his life, so this gamble is all he really has left. Hokusai, however, resents both the samurai’s crass attempts to wave his money in his face and the entitled privilege of the samurai class in general who think they can order him about as they see fit.

Tetsuzo’s poor business sense as an artist is another of his quirks which simultaneously sees him painting pictures of famous actors Oei thinks are not among his best work, and living in an absolute poverty that leaves him constantly moving from one rundown shack to another until leaving the city completely. Though it’s true that Oei is his longest serving disciple, it’s clear that most of her artistic development takes places while he is off on one of his travels that can last several years. When he suddenly returns as a much older man, he remarks that Oei now has her own style, perhaps as an acknowledgement that she has in some ways surpassed him in coming into her own as an artist while his time is coming to a close. Even so, the implication is that it would not have been possible for Oei to become a professional painter had she not had a famous father who approved of her talent, and that an artistic career would not have been open to her as a married woman in the repressively patriarchal Edo-era society. Using mostly natural light, Omori echoes the light and shade in Oei’s work as she begins to seek out not only a style that is distinctly her own, but a way of living as an outsider in a regimentally ordered society.

Hokusai’s Daughter screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Chatterboxes (みんな、おしゃべり！, Ken Kawai, 2025)

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Kazuhiko (Kazuyoshi Kezuka) has been running his electrical appliance shop successfully for many years, but finds his business frustrated by the local council’s attempts to rejuvenate the area and a subsequent feud born of a minor misunderstanding with the owner of the kebab shop that opens across the way. Ken Kawai’s down to earth comedy The Chatterboxes (みんな、おしゃべり！, Minna, Oshaberi!) examines the radiating effects of occasionally wilful miscommunication in an atmosphere that sometimes encourages fear and suspicion rather than acceptance or understanding. 

At least, there’s no real reason why Kazuhiko should immediately take against the Rifat (Murat Çiçek) and the Kurdish community who open a kebab shop nearby, but jumps to conclusions on noticing broken glass in his entranceway with Rifat standing over it. It was actually a little girl who broke a bulb on her way out and was too afraid to say anything, but Kazuhiko almost assumes Rifat has come in and broken something deliberately as an act of war. Kazuhiko’s reaction echoes that of the wider society which is not always accepting of difference, but is also ironic as Kazuhiko also feels himself to be an outsider not accepted by those around him because he is deaf. His shop has a sign saying that it caters to both hearing and non-hearing people, but it seems most don’t notice it and hearing people can sometimes behave insensitively at what they see as inconvenient service. One couple leave the store when Kazuhiko doesn’t respond to their question before he’s even had time to get out his sign out.

He has many things in common with the Kurdish community, but at the moment cannot see common ground only danger. The Kurds have moved into the community through a local government initiative run by the well-meaning Okita who seems like he’s trying to do a good thing, but going about it in the clumsiest way possible. He turns up unannounced to film a PR spot with Kazuhiko as the poster boy of his campaign, but badly botches the transmission by ignoring his wishes about how he wishes to be identified. Though Kazuhiko identifies himself as “deaf”, the subtitles have “hearing impaired”, which he finds offensive because he does consider himself to have an impairment. As his hearing daughter Natsumi (Itsuki Nagasawa) points out, there’s nothing difficult about communicating through sign language in their home because it’s simply their normal.

At a meditation meeting, the Kurdish community have a similar problem in that Okita repeatedly refers to them as “Turkish” and has only hired a Turkish to Japanese interpreter who cannot speak Kurdish. Rifat is particularly attached to the Kurdish language and for a number reasons prefers not to speak Turkish even if he can understand it, though other members of the community prefer to speak other languages such as Arabic. Part of the problem is caused by Okita’s assumptions, something which to his credit he does try to rectify by listening to the concerns of each community, but still to an extent looks down on them while his plan to use minorities to rejuvenate the town economically while making the council look compassionate is also a little exploitative if not patronising. Meanwhile, by having all the shops in this area run by minorities, he may be excluding rather than including them by effectively segregating them away from the more prosperous part of town.

Kazuhiko’s daughter Natsumi and Rifat’s son Hiwa (Yildirm Firat), who was born and raised in Japan, end up caught in the crossfire while quicker to realise that they have a lot more in common than might first be thought. They have each been forced into the role of interpreter for their parents who cannot communicate with the wider society due to a language barrier, but also have differing views on their role with Hiwa thinking he should translate his father’s Kurdish as accurately as possible even if it causes a problem, and Natsumi deliberately softening what her father signs to avoid creating additional conflict. They nevertheless became interested in learning each other’s languages and culture and grow closer through a process of cultural exchange. 

Something similar happens to her younger brother, Shun (Ohki Fukuda), who may also be neurodivergent as his teacher complains that he pays no attention in lessons, preferring to doodle instead, and makes no attempt to communicate with the other children at his deaf school. Fascinated by picking up a note in Arabic dropped by one of the Kurdish men, he begins to develop his own language which he then shares with the other children who begin to contribute to it too. The way the teacher reacts is emblematic of the fear associated with the inability to understand what another community is saying as she clearly views the children’s secret language as a challenge to her authority. Kazuhiko also jumps to the conclusion that the Kurds have been putting funny ideas in his son’s head, but equally he and some of the other parents don’t fully trust the teacher because she’s a hearing woman. They worry she’s forcing the values of the hearing society on their children rather than allowing them to embrace their deafness. Just as Rifat is fiercely protective of Kurdish, so Kazuhiko worries sign language may die out with all the new implants and apps that are being developed.

He also complains about the discrimination he’s faced and that hearing people often justify their decision to exclude him as “consideration” when it’s really just that they find communicating in a different way inconvenient so prefer not to bother. Of course, his late wife was a hearing woman and so is Natsumi so some of his comments are hurtful to her while reflecting an us and them mentality Natsumi would like to reject, especially considering her growing friendship with Hiwa. Nevertheless, words are often unnecessary for basic communication. You don’t need words to make someone understand you want them to come quickly because you need their help, and Kazuhiko is eventually able to make a sale just through gestures to an old man who is no longer able to speak and cannot write either. Kazuhiko only starts to rethink his views when Okita tells him he’s leaving the Kurds out of the project to avoid controversy, uncomfortably echoing the various ways in which he’s been excluded. 

Once misunderstandings have been cleared up, the communities find a source of friendship and solidarity embracing cultural exchange that leaves them feeling less afraid of each other and more welcoming towards others. Kawai deliberately leaves some of the Kurdish dialogue untranslated, simply transliterating it in the subtitles to make it clear that what is being said is not being understood outside of the community, leaving the audience in the same position as Kazuhiko and hearing monolingual Japanese people like Okita, but equally proving that not understanding fully isn’t really that much of problem, while being ignored and excluded is. Warm, funny, and venturing into absurdity in its final stretches, Kawai’s film is a much needed counter to the growing animosity of our recent times and a reminder of how much better life can be when you open yourself up to world beyond that you already know.

The Chatterboxes screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ghost Town (Katharine Round, 2026)

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What really is a ghost? An echo of frozen time or a manifestation of our own unresolved emotions? Most of the taxi drivers in Katharine Round’s documentary Ghost Town claim they don’t believe in ghosts, though some claim to have seen them. In any case, we can never be sure who it is that is unable to let go, those of us who are haunted clinging on to the spectres of those we’ve lost, or the ghosts themselves who for whatever reason aren’t ready to leave this world.

After the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, there were mass reports of ghost sightings with taxi drivers reporting picking up fares who mysteriously disappeared before reaching their destination. There is an eerie quality to the photography of Round’s documentary mainly shot inside a taxi cab and capturing the loneliness of midnight streets illuminated only by car headlights. One of the fares remarks on the darkness, wishing the city would invest in better street lighting to make streets a little brighter. Just like the wary drivers, we’re never quite sure what those headlights are going find in the darkness. One of the drivers describes seeing figures crossing the road and slowing down, only for the car in front to plough straight through.

Inside, meanwhile, line between the living and the dead seems to have become blurred. Any one of them may be a ghost, including the drivers themselves. One recounts having moved away to another town as a young man only to return on the very day of the tsunami. The fares mostly speak of their experiences that day and their own near brushes with death. One recalls the “foreshocks” before the main earthquake as reflected in her dreams in which she saw herself taken by the waves travelling a particular road. She decided not to go that way on the day, and reflects that none of those who did survived. Another recalls seeing the missing in her dreams only to hear that their bodies had been found the next day. That means they’re here, the taxi driver replies, explaining that he sees them too. The dead seem to exist in a kind of dream world that overhangs our own, or perhaps like another of the passengers, we too live in a waking dream.

The taxi driver says he saw the spirits gathering at a phone box, speculating that perhaps they wanted to call someone and go home. The unanswered ringing from the telephone box echoes an unfulfilled desire for communication along with the driver’s own regret and loneliness as he reflects on his misspent youth and longing for “a warm family”. Another passenger was invited to a home that had a zashiki-warashi, a kind of house spirit taking the form of a child. Though she could not see it herself, the forgotten thoughts and feelings of her childhood suddenly came back to her. Around the town we can still see the “temporary” housing that went up to shelter those displaced by the tsunami and where many are still living.

In this way, the living too are a little like ghosts. The drivers become tour guides, pointing out the places where something once was but isn’t any more. Describing the place as “lonely” and like a “ghost town” a passenger suggests that the population has dropped by two thirds since the tsunami, explaining its emptiness in a more literal way. Deer have begun to take the town over, roaming freely around manmade structures, though they too are said to emissaries of the gods. Like the spirits, perhaps they have something to communicate or simply wish to watch over us. Another of the drivers wonders if the spirits aren’t trying to guide us in some way. He’s given up the vices of his youth, gambling, drinking, women, and now mainly does sudoku puzzles on his tablet during his downtime. Among the passengers, documentarian and journalist Shiori Ito, also one of the film’s producers, reflects on the weight of her own loss with a close relative having passed away just as she was on her way to Kamaishi. We all return to nothingness in the end, the driver reflects, just as his passenger seems to disappear. Still, he keeps driving as the deer look on in bemusement, carrying the invisible spirits with him whether in body or in mind.

Meets the World (ミーツ・ザ・ワールド, Daigo Matsui, 2025)

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Adapted from the novel by Hitomi Kanehara, Daigo Matsui’s Meets the World (ミーツ・ザ・ワールド) takes its name from the heroine’s love of a BL manga in which all the characters are anthropomorphised versions of various cuts of meat that can be ordered at yakiniku restaurants. But it’s also, in a way, an apt description of her experiences as she begins to open herself up to the act of living while considering where it is she belongs and what it is that will actually make her happy.

This comes about largely due to an encounter with the mysterious Rai (Kotona Minami), a beautiful yet melancholy young woman who rescues her one night while she’s drunk and disorientated in the street. Rai offers her a literal sanctuary, but also challenges Yukari’s (Hana Sugisaki) view of the world by constantly questioning and undermining things that she had assumed to be true but without telling her what she should think or do. Rai offers her these little nudges, but at the same time lives in an apartment strewn with rubbish and repeatedly says that she longs for death. Yukari begins by clearing up, reminding her that one’s living arrangements reflect the state of one’s mind, but she finds it much more difficult to clean up Rai’s mental state or relieve her internalised listlessness and lack of enthusiasm for living.

In some senses, it’s true that Yukari becomes more fixated on the idea of saving Rai as a means of saving herself than she does on her personal growth, but at the same time gains greater experience and understanding through interacting with Rai’s social circle at the aptly named Loneliness bar. The irony is that though she becomes frustrated that she can’t seem to truly connect with Rai or reduce her desire for death, she rejects the same kind of interest from her mother (Mariko Tsutsui) whose calls she is forever avoiding. Her mother only really wants the same thing that Yukari wants from Rai and would seemingly be happy enough with a few texts as proof of life, though it’s something that Yukari doesn’t want to give her for whatever reason. She says that she didn’t like living alone with her mother after her father’s death, but there’s the same kind of absence felt in Rai’s apartment which she previously shared with the only person she claims to have loved but is now no longer in her life.

It speaks to Yukari’s naivety that she thinks she could heal Rai simply by reuniting her with this person, while she comes to realise that romance may not be the answer she was looking for either. Yukari had enthusiastically begun looking for a husband at 27 despite never having dated before because she thought it was what she was supposed to do, yet what makes her happiest is her obsessive interest in her favourite manga. These kinds of hobbies are often looked down by the surrounding society and it’s clear that Yukari has a degree of internalised shame regarding her interest in them. Even at her mother’s house, she hides all anime merch behind a curtain out of sight and keeps it a secret from her colleagues at the bank where she works. When Yukari eventually does mention her love of anime, her colleague begins to smirk a little as if she thinks that explains quite a lot and is internally laughing at Yukari while remaining superficially polite. Yukari’s prim and proper supervisor, meanwhile, gives her a stern look though it isn’t clear if that’s because she thinks Yukari’s hobbies are inappropriate for a woman her age, or because she may have similar hobbies of her own. 

In any case, it’s true that through her friendship with Rai she learns to be open about her interests and be fully herself in all environments, accepting that love and dating may not be right for her or at least that she doesn’t need to force them to satisfy the demands of others. It could be said that what she has with her anime characters is a one-sided relationship, but that’s also true of those around her including the host Asahi (Rihito Itagaki) who sees his marriage founder as his wife grows tired of supporting him as the number one host while he can’t win her back just as himself. Ironically, these kinds of one-sided relationships are a professional hazard that can otherwise lead to toxicity and violence. A gloomy writer, Yuki (Yu Aoi), also recounts the postnatal depression that led to the end of her marriage and subsequent realisation that what she had was the kind of happiness that someone who thought themselves unhappy wanted to find, but did not actually work out for her. 

What they are is in effect a series of bubbles that occasionally float close to each other or perhaps intersect without really connecting. Nevertheless, they offer each other a gentle sense of solidarity just by existing. Matsui films in a 4:3 ratio that seems constrained, but also has a cosy, protective quality while implying that loneliness is a natural fact of life that can’t be entirely cured, yet even if someone is not actually with you physically, or may not even physically exist, one’s love for them can still endure and be a healthy source of comfort and support while everyone has the right to live as they please free from the judgement of others.

Meets the World screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Unchained (四月の余白,  Keisuke Yoshida, 2026)

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Can a person really change, or should we just accept that some people are born bad and can’t be accepted in mainstream society? This seems to be the question at the centre of Keisuke Yoshida’s empathetic drama Unchained (四月の余白, Shigatsu no Yohaku) which suggests, in a way, that violence is a vicious circle as society tends to write off those with behavioural issues pushing them deeper into their isolation and giving them little opportunity for reform or rehabilitation.

“Mister Nishi” (Wataru Ichinose), as he seems to be known, is a former delinquent who committed acts of heinous violence in his youth, spent time in prison, and experienced a personal tragedy that acted as a wake up call and gave him the opportunity to turn his life around. He now works at a kind of tough love bootcamp that attempts to guide wayward teens back towards the mainstream. His methods, however, are not universally approved and especially not by contemporary teachers. Though corporal punishment has long been outlawed in educational facilities, Nishi believes that sometimes there is no other way to reach these children and violence may be the only way to teach them that their actions have consequences. 

A teacher takes him to task and asks him if he isn’t just teaching them to be violent and in fact pushing them towards and anti-social behaviour. Nishi disagrees, but the film doesn’t really explore the alternative any further and more or less sides with Nishi. The children at the facility do seem to be doing better than they presumably were beforehand and do not appear to be unhappy there. It also seems that they are expected to do farm work, and it’s unclear if they’re being compensated for that, though this may be a slight cultural difference that is not raised in the film either by the documentary crew that comes to film the facility nor by a journalist who tries to take Nishi down by accusing him of fabricating details of his backstory which eventually leads to the facility closing down. 

Nishi may, however, have met his match in Kaito (Hayato Kohsaka), a violent young man exhibiting an extreme lack of empathy. Kaito’s teacher first seeks out Nishi because she’s at a loss of what else to do, while the boy’s mother appears to be a good woman who has tried everything she can and is now at the end of her tether. Kaito has become violent towards her too and apparently beat the family dog to death in a fit of rage for which he feels no remorse. The mother is beginning to feel suicidal and willing to try Nishi’s methods as a last-ditch effort to save her family. There is no clear reason why Kaito became this way. We get a hint of generational violence in that Kaito seems to resent his father who is disabled and in his view defeated by life. His father does seem to have become depressed because of his disability and it’s because of the depression and sense of worthlessness that he’s been unable to hold down a job and has taken to drink.

In a twist of fate, it turns out that it was Nishi who crushed his knee and left him permanently disabled. Kaito’s father therefore piles all of his resentment onto him without taking any responsibility for the choices he made himself after that. When Kaito ironically injures another boy in the same way, his father begins to realise his mistakes and cautions the other boy against becoming consumed by resentment or a sense of defeat. It’s this notion of “defeat” that becomes central to the interrogation of a cultural notion of toxic masculinity in which the reason some of these young men are thought to act out is that they don’t want to be seen as losers and harm others to prove their superiority. This is in part true of Kaito who declares himself happy to hurt other people as long as he himself does not get hurt. It’s not that he is incapable of understanding that others experience pain in the same way that he does, but that he simply does not really care. 

Some argue that Nishi doesn’t either and that, as he was a delinquent himself, he is incapable of fully sympathising with victims and only has empathy for those commit acts of violence. Nevertheless, that does give him a unique perspective that allows him to help some of these teens both by supporting them and being a positive role model as someone who has been able to reform and live a more mainstream, settled life. Then again, some seem dubious of the way he seems to change after the media takes interest which leaves him with less time for the children while chasing the spotlight. Ms. Kusano (Kaho), meanwhile, wonders if she did the right thing or perhaps just did what was easiest for her in abandoning Kaito into Nishi’s care. She chastises herself for having forgotten a model student who spoke to her at a reunion while uncertain if it’s right to devote so much of her time to kids like Kaito rather than supporting those he victimised such as student who withdrew from the school due to his bullying.

While a fellow teacher’s characterisation of Kaito as a”bad apple” who should be “discarded” before he causes any more trouble may seem callous, it’s also true that without his influence the other kids who’d been in his gang begin to straighten out and give more thought to their futures. Though he struggles at the facility, Kaito does seem to benefit in a way from a less stimulating environment and shows signs of change, if also of self-sabotage and an inability to walk away from his delinquent life for fear of being seen as a loser. It’s only after he’s cajoled into another act of violence and receiving kindness in return that he begins to see the error of his ways. The film seems to suggest, then, that person can change but that equally society has to let them, rather than try to tear them down as they did to Nishi in denying him his fresh start by reminding him that no apology is enough to change what he did in the past. While perhaps controversial in some of its implications, the film is at least empathetic and even handed, filmed in an unostentatious style that tries to sympathise both with the dealers and the receivers of violence in the conviction that there is no one who cannot change.

Unchainedscreened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Flames of a Flower (火の華, Oudai Kojima, 2024)

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A former soldier finds it difficult to adjust to civilian life after becoming involved in a fire fight in which a close friend died while on a peace-keeping mission in South Sudan in Oudai Kojima’s politically-inflected drama, Flames of a Flower (火の華, Hi no Hana). The film takes its title from the literal meaning of the Japanese word for fireworks, but its hero is also in some senses closely aligned with a flower, both as a kind of sacrificial object burned after outliving its usefulness, and in also slowly growing in the nurturing environment of a family-run fireworks factory until finally coming into bloom.

Shimada’s (Ikken Yamamoto) growth is only, however, one side of the story as the film draws inspiration from a real-life incident of a Japanese soldier dying in a combat situation in Sudan which was covered up by the authorities as, under the pacifist constitution, Self Defence Force troops are not supposed to be deployed in combat areas while on peace-keeping missions. While serving in South Sudan, Shimada’s troop is ambushed and he is forced to shoot a child soldier when his comrade and close friend is killed after having put his gun down in an attempt to defuse the situation. While he and fellow soldier Tanaka (Ippei Tanaka) attempt to get Furukawa to a hospital, Captain Ito (Yohei Matsukado) is left behind and thereafter presumed to have been killed. On his return, Shimada is forced to sign confidentiality documents that prevent him from talking about what really happened on the grounds of national security, while the authorities report that Furukawa and Ito died as a result of a traffic accident.

It’s this inability to speak the truth that informs Shimada’s trauma as much as it is the physical stressors of the battlefield or his guilt over having to kill the child soldier. Two years after the incident, he’s working as a welder in a small factory but experiences a flashback which causes him to assault a colleague. Though his boss is sympathetic, he has no other option than to let Shimada go, but introduces him to a friend, Fujii (Masato Ibu), who runs a fireworks factory and seems to have a track record with rehabilitating those with difficult backgrounds. Working in a fireworks factory might not seem the best option given Shimada’s condition, but at the same time it gives him the opportunity to do something more constructive with the same material that caused so much destruction while he was a soldier. The film plays on this dichotomy, Shimada later visiting Sudan again to teach the children about fireworks as a means of explaining to them that they have a choice between using gunpowder for fear and killing or making something beautiful, but at the same time it ignores the third option which is obviously just not to have anything to do with gunpowder in the first place. 

Showing the children the fireworks plays into the idea that children are cruelly robbed of their dreams by egotistical adults, hinting both at the children who are forced to become soldiers, and Fujii’s own regret that he would not let his daughter Akiko (Yurina Yanagi) become a fireworks technician. She has since become a florist working with a literal kind of flowers and also helping Shimada with his recovery. His former comrades, however, have largely become consumed with anger and rage against the government for its lack of transparency. Ito, having survived, has formed a militia after meeting a former member of the Japanese Red Army and is planning some kind of revolutionary action to change the society.

Exactly how they mean to change it isn’t altogether clear aside from a clear desire for transparency and also an end to Japan’s dependence on the US for defence which they argue drags them into situations they don’t belong in because of American foreign policy they might not necessarily agree with. They don’t quite state if that means having a standing army that could go to war if necessary, or if they still believe in pacfism but want the Americans out. In any case, they plan to expose the fact that the government prioritises its diplomatic arrangements over the lives of ordinary citizens while keeping from them that this puts Japanese troops in danger overseas. 

A subsequent plot by a government official working with a Chinese gangster (Kim Chang-bak) who Shimada meets after ironically becoming involved with trading illegal weapons, further muddies the waters, though the film is at its best in exploring the ways in which Shimada is able to come to accommodation with himself while being supported by those at the fireworks factory who become a kind of surrogate family. This sense of community is, the film suggests, what prevents him from jumping off the deep end like his former comrades who have become dangerously fixated on revenge. Though at times its politics may seem muddled or obscure, the film is at least at pains to stress that war and violence are choices that are often made by those who won’t have to suffer the consequences, when it is much easier to channel those same resources into something beautiful that can bring hope and enrich lives rather than destroying them.

Flames of a Flower screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)