Category: Japan

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat (女囚さそり 殺人予告, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1991)

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It had been 14 years since the conclusion of the rebooted Female Prisoner Scorpion series and 18 since the iconic Meiko Kaji had stepped away from the role when Toshiharu Ikeda decided to resurrect the iconic Nami Matsushima for Toei’s V-Cinema line. Ikeda was reportedly a fan of the original series and put his name forward to direct with the intention of getting Kaji to return as a now middle-aged Sasori but she turned him down flat so they instead embarked on a quasi sequel in which the original Nami has died and another woman slowly takes her place to become the next incarnation of the legend.

Consequently, Scorpion is not the protagonist of this film that otherwise bears her name. Cast in the lead role of a nameless hit woman, Natsuki Okamoto was then a popular pinup model known as “High Leg Queen”. The film opens with her emerging from a barrel of concrete after being dumped by a group of men who had gang raped and then left her for dead. She’s then rescued by a yakuza, Kaizu (Minori Terada), who teaches her how to kill and is effectively her handler. After posing as a bigger to knock off an obnoxious businessman, he’s recruited by Goda (Kenji Imai), the former warden prison stabbed in the eye (though not by Nami as he claims here) in the original trilogy but now a local councillor with aspirations of being elected to parliament. The prison is about to be redeveloped and Goda claims he’s been keeping Nami a prisoner in the dungeon for the last 20 years so he needs her knocked off before anyone bothers to have a look down there.

Of course, there are a few things that don’t make sense with this scenario and are out of continuity with the events of the original trilogy. In any case, now called 701 the assassin infiltrates the prison and knocks off a woman she’s been led to believe is the original scorpion but may not actually be. It seems Scorpion has already passed into legend and the woman has become less important than the idea or the inspiration she provides to the other inmates who are then minded to rebel against authority. By hiding Scorpion away, the authorities have made a rod for their own back in allowing her apotheosis into a goddess of vengeance of all women kind.

701 is in a way reborn as Sasori. Betrayed by the people who hired her, she’s crucified in the courtyard until rescued by fellow inmate and Sasori fan Shindo (Mineko Nishikawa) who helps her try to escape from the prison in an attempt to find out what happened to the “real” Nami. It’s she who first likens the fire in 701’s eyes to that of the Scorpion and begins to give her permission to take on her name and mission. A line is drawn between the two in Nami’s incasement in concrete and 701’s breaking out of it in the opening sequence. Though it would be wrong to call this horror film, Ikeda makes frequent use of ghostly techniques to imply Nami’s apotheosis such as the sound of her spoon scraping the concrete which she later bequeaths to 701 who then becomes the “new” Scorpion. 

The film was in fact a big hit for Toei video and theatrical sequel was planned as a co-production with Golden Harvest in Hong Kong though the project fell through when Okamoto took a break from show business ostensibly for health reasons though there were rumours she had objected to the requirements for nudity. Contrary to expectations for a straight to video release, there is not actually a lot of sexual content in the film which is mainly restricted to a single sequence in which two prisoners pretend to get it on in order to distract a guard to facilitate an escape attempt. Unlike other instalments in the series, the film doesn’t have a lot of women in prison elements either, though it does make space for Dump Matsumoto, a popular villain character from women’s wrestling, as a sadistic guard with a crush on another warden who is she says the only one who treated her like a woman. Instead, it focuses on 701’s passage towards becoming Scorpion and the fulfilment of her twin missions as an avenger of wronged women breaking free from the concrete dungeon of patriarchal oppression to take bloody revenge on the forces of corruption.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Okuni and Gohei (お國と五平, Mikio Naruse, 1952)

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“It’s a rough and difficult road.” The heroes of Mikio Naruse’s Okuni and Gohei (お國と五平, Okuni to Gohei), adapted from a kabuki play by Junichiro Tanizaki, are two displaced between the old world and the possibility of a new one if only they were brave enough to step away from the beaten path. Unbeknownst to them, they are being followed by the man they are seeking whose shakuhachi playing haunts them wherever they go as if taunting them with its presence. 

In this iteration of the tale, Tomonojo (So Yamamura) takes on a slippery quality almost if he were some supernatural devil sent to torment Okuni (Michiyo Kogure) and Gohei (Tomoemon Otani) leading them either towards or away from their salvation or damnation. In Okuni’s flashback, which is obviously coloured with her own nostalgia and regret, he’s a sensitive young man who promised himself in marriage to Okuni. But she is forced to refuse him. Her father rejects Tomonojo because he is without standing or prospects, and instead demands she marry a wellborn man of his choosing, Iori (Jun Tazaki). Iori is then killed in the street, uttering only Tomonojo’s name before he dies. It could then be that this is Tomonojo’s revenge on a society that has rejected him and robbed him of his love, yet the Tomonojo we later meet is much different than this idealised version in Okuni’s memory. He never denies killing Iori and offers no justification for it, but corners Okuni when she’s alone to tell her to free herself by dropping her quest for revenge. He’s also subtly blackmailing her, implying he heard her having sex with her manservant Gohei the previous night and in reality wheedling away pleading for his life.

For her part, Okuni seems torn in her motivations, uncertain whether she’s looking for Tomonojo to reunite with him or kill him, or perhaps is deliberately avoiding finding him at all. She was not married to Iori for very long and he was at the very least an insensitive and emotionally distant husband who spent most of his time at his friend’s house, claiming that it was “boring” to stay home with her. She has no great emotional desire for revenge, but has been told she must accomplish it in order to return to the samurai world, having been condemned to a kind of limbo as the widow of a murdered man. Even so, she has tired of her quest and asks herself what’s to become of them if Tomonojo is already dead. She repeatedly hints to Gohei that they should give up on finding him and on returning home, instead contenting themselves with their life on the road or else find somewhere to settle together in a new world in which a lady and her retainer could live as man and wife.

The film is both coy and somewhat transgressive in its depiction of the growing sexual tension between Okuni and Gohei from his taking hold of her injured foot and tender care for her when she falls ill, to the way they draw closer and then instinctively move apart. Passion later gets the better of them and it’s heavily implied that they sleep together, but Gohei instantly regrets it and cannot accept his class transgression. Given this development in their relationship, Okuni asks him to stop calling her “madam” but as she does so she is on one side of the fusuma and he on the other, so they remain in separate rooms divided by the ridge in the tatami. Gohei cannot let go of the old ways and is desperate to complete their quest so that his debt to Iori will be repaid and he can return in glory to be rewarded with position and the esteem of being a true samurai. Even if he tells Okuni that this quest has been his happiness in being on the road with her and knows that killing Tomonojo will end it, he does not turn back.

But the implication is that they can never escape Tomonojo who will, in fact, forever be following them. He taunts the pair with his shakuhachi and visits them in disguise. When they catch up to him, he tries again to convince them to give up their quest and live quietly together in a place free from the constraints of the samurai world, but Gohei cannot do it. Okuni first picks up her dagger and one wonders whether she about to use it on herself, but then turns on Tomonojo though it’s uncertain whether she now does so out of resentment or as revenge of herself for the way Tomonojo has again ruined her life. Just as she was a pawn of her father married off against her will to an indifferent man, she is further imprisoned by patriarchal social codes as Tomonojo needles Gohei that he had slept with her before her marriage. She has in fact already confessed to this to Gohei who transgressed by asking her what exactly Tomonojo was doing with his “shakuhachi” when they were courting, though she did so obliquely in telling him to remember his place and that he should “forget about the past.” Nevertheless she denies it now, but Gohei continues to see her as a “loose” woman with Tomonojo’s words ringing in his ears as a final revenge on the morally compromised lovers.

Their inability to let go of the quest, to do as Okuni suggests and continue on as they are along the rough and difficult path to a more egalitarian future spells their damnation. You can’t go back again. Their “home” is already lost to them. As a pedlar tells the pair along the way, they’ve already been forgotten and the village is filled with other gossip, but now they really have nowhere to go. The message may be for the coming post-occupation era that they shouldn’t try to turn back but keep moving forward into the new Japan or else risk becoming lost in a purgatorial world of confusion like Okuni and Gohei haunted by the choice to betray love for the outdated ideal of samurai honour. Haunted alternately by Tomonojo’s shakuhachi and the words of the villagers who told them they couldn’t be accepted until they fulfilled this quest, they find themselves displaced, unbalanced and uncertain amid the shifting power dynamics of class and gender, their duty and their feelings, but ultimately trapped by their cowardice in their unwillingness to cross the threshold to claim their freedom and happiness.

The Great Chase (華麗なる追跡, Norifumi Suzuki, 1975)

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What about if you rebooted the Bannai Tarao series, but the hero was a female spy who is also a champion race driver and martial artist? Norifumi Suzuki did actually make a Bannai Tarao move in 1978 starring Akira Kobayashi, but the heroine of The Great Chase (華麗なる追跡, Karei-naru Tsuiseki) certainly loves a disguise or two and like the famous man of a thousand faces seems to have no trouble pulling them off as she infiltrates a gang of evil traffickers led by a furry which has come up with an ace new plan of packing heroin into coffins and having them shipped to nuns!

Oh, and the gang were also behind the death of her father who “committed suicide” in prison after being framed for drug smuggling. The Great Chase takes place in a world of pure pulp which somehow maintains its sense of cartoonish innocence even after Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has infiltrated the heart of darkness and seen most of her associates killed by sadistic gang boss Inomata (Bin Amatsu). But at the same time, it delves into a deep sense of ‘70s paranoia as it becomes clear that the authority figures are all corrupt. Inomata has become a politician, while Shinobu’s father’s murder was orchestrated by the prison warden who was working with him in return for financial gain. The man who framed her father was a friend of his, implying that no one can really be trusted when there’s money to be made.

In a roundabout way,as this sense of anxiety is only reinforced by Shinobu’s role as some sort of secret agent working for the spy ring run by her uncle which is currently hot on the trail of the drug dealers even if they haven’t yet figured out who their boss is. Conversely, her home life is as wholesome as it could be with her two adopted siblings who run a florist’s along with Shinobu’s fan club. Her status as a kind of race car idol lends Shinobu a particular kind of ‘70s cool and turns her into some sort of superhuman figure capable of triumphing over any kind of adversity like a superhero worthy of any kid’s lunchbox. The siblings, Nagi (Fujika Omori) and Shinpei (Naoyuki Sugano), were taken in as orphans by her father which once again signals his goodness in contrast to the greed and selfishness of the gang that had him killed to cover up their crimes. 

That they peddle in drugs marks them out as a force of social disruption, but they’re also actively heretical in hiding behind the shield of the church. Suzuki frequently uses religious imagery in his films and here again echoes the romanticism of School of the Holy Beast with the use of red roses to decorate the coffin of the unfortunate young woman who has been turned into a vessel for smuggling drugs and has for some reason been laid out otherwise entirely naked. When it comes to retrieving the merchandise, we can see that many of the habits are being worn by men while Inomata himself masquerades as a priest. Then again, perhaps he is merely indulging his love of costume play seeing as he also has a hobby of wearing a furry bear suit to attack and rape women in his living room. 

Inomata’s claws then seem to represent something else, a rapacious, grasping sense of patriarchy in which he also uses drugs to bind women to him. Shinobu’s childhood friend Yukiko (Hisako Tanaka) has apparently fallen victim and laments that she is possessed by him body and soul to the point that the old Yukiko is dead which is why she hasn’t been able to step in and help Shinobu and is doing so now fearing that it may cost her her life. Suddenly, it’s all quite grim with the basement sex cult, whipping and torture, but Shinobu maintains her plucky spirit and is somehow able to lure Inomata towards a cable-car-based showdown. With a cameo from real life wrestler / singer Mach Fumiake, the film enters a kind of meta commentary on a real-life Shinobu (though she was not, as far as anyone knows, one of Japan’s top spies), but otherwise remains within the realms of pulp in which the heroine is able to pull off her difficult mission with the help of her talent for disguises before dramatically unmasking herself as the woman who’s going to take them all down. Camp to the max and incredibly surreal, the film never drops its sense of silliness even as the grim events enveloping Shinobu lead to tragic consequences that she barely has time to deal with before barrelling straight into the next duel with the forces of corruption.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Laugh, Everyone! (みんな笑え, Taichi Suzuki, 2025)

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A down of his luck second generation rakugo storyteller begins to discover a new way of life after meeting an aspiring female comedian in Taichi Suzuki’s lighthearted dramedy, Laugh, Everyone! (みんな笑え, Minna Waremashit). The title is taken from a moment of madness in which a resurgent Tamon pleads for everyone to just laugh rather than being at each other’s throats or feeling like they want to die, but that’s something he himself may not be able to do until he’s truly made peace with his demons.

Chief among them would be his father, Kenzo, a rakugo master who’s tormented and bullied him his whole life. In general, rakugo storytellers recite a canon of classical tales that have been passed down since the Edo era, but despite having inherited his father’s stage name, Tamon avoids performing the classical repertoire and sticks to original material. His acts don’t seem to please the audience, and it’s clear that his father’s other disciple, Kannosuke, resents that it was Tamon who became the official heir despite having no talent when he was the rightful successor. Unfortunately, Kanzo failed to plan for his retirement and now has dementia, meaning that he can no longer perform. Unable to make money through rakugo, Tamon has a part-time job in a warehouse to try to make ends meet all while being berated by Kanzo for bing a useless failure.

There are some touching moments later on in which Kanzo bonds with the son of his carer and plays with him as if he were Tamon, hinting that he might have liked to have been a different kind of father and have a different kind of life if it were not for the pressure of passing on his rakugo name. For his part, Tamon has become timid in the extreme and has been running away from anything challenging or unpleasant his whole life. In fear of not living up to his father’s legacy, Tamon avoids the old stories and sticks to telling the same original tale he’s been doing for the last 30 years. 

But if his problem is that he can’t master the classics, Kiko’s is that she can’t innovate and all her original material is pinched from somewhere else. She and her comedy double act partner Chi-chan have been trying to break into television, but can’t catch a break with their largely improvised act. While auditioning, they encounter entrenched sexism as the male panellist tells them that women aren’t funny and don’t take comedy seriously. Kiko’s mother Yoko experiences something similar at her bar where her sleazy backer is all over a younger hostess with whom he eventually hopes to replace her, while Chi-chan has also fallen prey to a predatory man working at a host club. She has been financially supporting Joe to help him achieve his dream while he forces her into sex work to make him more money, pushing her to quit comedy and work for him full-time. This kind of exploitation has regrettably become so common that a specific law was passed in 2025 to prevent young male “hosts”, who work in bars where they charm women into buying drinks and gifts, forcing their patrons into debt and then sexual exploitation. 

Nevertheless, Kiko strikes gold when she hears Tamon’s baseball-themed routine and realises it’s the same one her mother used to listen to on cassette tape. Reworking it as a manzai routine, she sees a way through her creative block even if it’s sort of plagiarism. After getting his permission to use his material, Kiko begins to think of Tamon as a mentor while he almost thinks the same of her as they encourage each other through their comedic failures even while working in opposite directions. A kind of rapport emerges between them as they were actually an accidental manzai double act along with a more positive paternal relationship than that seen between Kanzo and Tamon which is fuelled by a fear of obsolescence, ego, and resentment. Through his friendship with Kiko and rekindling that with her mother, Tamon eventually gains the courage to stop running away and face himself in classic rakugo both making peace with the complicated relationship he had with his father and carving out a new identity for himself in emerging from his father’s shadow. Sparrows fleeing the cage, both he and Kiko rediscover the healing power of laughter and with it the courage to face their troubles head on rather than continuing to run away in fear of failure and miss out on the joy the craft can bring to those around them.

Laugh, Everyone! is available to stream until 14th September 2025 courtesy of Chicago Japan Film Collective.

Trailer (English subtitles)

New Female Prisoner Scorpion: Special Cellblock X (新・女囚さそり 特殊房X, Yutaka Kohira, 1977)

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After Meiko Kaji declined to appear in further Female Prisoner Scorpion movies, Toei attempted to reboot the franchise under the “New Female Prisoner Scorpion” banner much as they did with some of their other franchises such as New Battles without Honour and Humanity. This second, and in fact final, instalment Special Cellblock X (新・女囚さそり 特殊房X, Shin Joshu Sasori: Tokushu-bo X) is not a sequel to New Female Prisoner Scorpion but itself another reboot that like its predecessor takes place amid a backdrop of paranoia and political corruption. 

Arriving back at the prison after a failed escape attempt, this Nami (Yoko Natsuki) has an all new backstory as an idealistic nurse whose doctor boyfriend was given shock therapy that destroyed his mind and left him in a vegetative state after threatening to blow the whistle on his hospital’s decision to let the man at the centre of a growing political scandal quietly pass away. These facts are first communicated to us through a surreal fever dream Nami has presumably caused by an infected wound on her leg. She first dreams herself frolicking cheerfully with the doctor before frightening figures of darkness pull him back into an abyss while terrifying clowns leer over and then rape her. She’s only saved from her life-threatening medical condition by the intervention of Kiyomi (Kaori Ono), a fellow prisoner who feels indebted to her because of a blood transfusion she received three years earlier before everything in Nami’s life went wrong. 

But otherwise Nami enjoys little respite in the prison as the other inmates take out their frustrations on her in regards to the reprisals enacted on them following her escape attempt. Like most other prisons in the franchise, this one employs a tactic of divide and rule encouraging the prisons to turn on Nami rather than the guards for their treatment of them. But things are changing in the prison. Chief guard Kajiki (Takeo Chii) had ruled supreme, but the warden has different ideas and objects to Kajiki’s tactic of appeasement by allowing things like cigarettes and chocolate to circulate in the prison to keep the inmates happy. He brings in a super tough security enforcer from the face male Abashiri prison which means Kajiki’s career is definitely on the decline and leaving him increasingly siding with the prisoners over the cruel treatment they’re exposed to by the warden who is too busy courting the justice minister in the hope of a government position to consider things like prison regulations or the welfare of the prisoners. 

Of course, it’s also the justice minister against whom Nami wants revenge. This Sasori is even more silent than most, glaring angrily at those around her but saying little other than stopping to advise Kiyomi not to get involved with her because it won’t end well in a prediction that turns to be accurate. When she eventually assumes her Sasori persona, it’s a little different from that of her predecessors as she dresses all in white (perhaps apt for a former nurse) with a long black over coat. Her black hat has a wide, stiff brim and a feather tucked in the side. She kills with a scalpel, as if she were literally excising the corruption in society and is prepared to play a little bit dirty. The justice minister had asked the warden to kill her and pass it off as an illness. She threatens to blackmail him though it’s obvious she’s not after money and executes the warden when he delivers the pay off on a cheerful fairground ride. 

Though it may lack the striking cinematography found in Ito’s trilogy, the film nevertheless skews surreal with its strange fever dream that turns out not to be so far from the reality as you’d assume along with weird gags like Nami and Kojiki stealing the clothes of a young couple after escaping together who happened to be dressed in identical outfits. Nami teaming up with a former guard is also something of a surprise and though she fights with him and rejects his romantic advances, she seems to have genuine pity when he gives up his life to save her. In any case, they each have something in common as those who now resist the system as Kajiki became a victim of a more authoritarian regime that doesn’t like his lax approach to rule keeping and Nami pursues her desire for justice in an unjust society at all costs. Dropping a bloody scalpel behind her, she disappears into the night, justice done, but presumably onto some other kind of vengeance against a corrupt authority that equally will stop at nothing to hang on to its power.

New Female Prisoner Scorpion (新・女囚さそり 701号, Yutaka Kohira, 1976)

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After the fourth film in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, star Meiko Kaji decided to move on but Toei had other ideas and opted for a reboot as signalled by the addition “shin” or “new” to the otherwise identical title to the very first film. New Female Prisoner Scorpion #701 (新・女囚さそり 701号, Shin Joshu Sasori: 701-go) moves in a slightly different direction spinning a tale of a less straightforward revenge coloured by conspiracy cinema and a series of real life high-profile corruption cases including the Lockheed Scandal, itself name checked in the film. Just a few months earlier, Roman Porno actor and fervent nationalist Mitsuyasu Maeno had lost his life in a suicide attack on the home of underworld figure and right-wing fixer Yoshio Kodama who had been instrumental in “convincing” Japanese airlines to buy Lockheed planes over McDonnell Douglas.

In any case, this Nami Matsushima (Yumi Takigawa) is an ordinary young woman who becomes concerned about her sister Taeko (Bunjaku Han) when she uncharacteristically drops out of contact after behaving strangely. Taeko is a political secretary to assemblyman Miura (Ichiro Nakatani) who is currently the vice-minister for justice and at the centre of a burgeoning corruption scandal. After Nami and her fiancée Toshihiko (Yusuke Natsu) manage to meet up with Taeko, she is suddenly kidnapped from the hotel car park while the man who was with her, Sugino (Nenji Kobayashi), is gunned down. Sugino is found to be carrying his passport and two airline tickets to Paris which, along with Taeko’s strange behaviour, imply they were planning to flee the country together. Looking more closely at the wedding presents her sister had given her, Nami realises she’s left her a cassette tape with the instruction to leak its contents to the press should anything untoward happen to her. 

Nami uses the tape as leverage with Miura to try and rescue her sister but ends up learning some unpleasant truths before being framed for Taeko’s murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Toshihiko, who had originally been supportive, betrays her, testifying at her trial that she may have been resentful that Taeko was against their marriage only to later marry Miura’s daughter and go into politics apparently siding with the bad guys. Toshihiko may have seemed like a nice guy, but it’s also true that he tried to pressure her into premarital sex that she didn’t want by insisting that he couldn’t wait for marriage, suggesting they blow off her sister and go to a hot springs in Hakone instead. Most of the men in the film are equally spineless and duplicitous not least the guards who with the exception of one are all corrupt and/or abusing the inmates. 

Not content with sending her to prison, Miura tries to have Nami offed with the assistance of the warden who puts her in a cell with the prison’s most notorious offender. Fusae (Mitsuyo Asaka) orders her minions to beat and torture Nami, at one point gang raping her while the only way she can think of to save her life is by claiming there’s another tape so if they kill her they’ll never know where it is and run the risk of the contents leaking. 

Meanwhile, she’s approached by a group of anarchists who tell her they need a leader which seems a little contradictory but nevertheless enables a jailbreak even as Nami develops a rivalry with the feisty prisoner number 804. Though she obviously didn’t commit the murder for which she was imprisoned, Nami is no pushover and in fact burns one of her tormentors alive not to mention stabbing another in the eye with a pencil and cunningly splitting a pair of scissors to gain twin knives. Rather than the classic scorpion look, she appears almost batlike, spreading her arms in her cape as she prepares to make her final act of revenge right outside the Diet building itself as if she were making a point about cleaning up politics aside from avenging her sister’s death and her own mistreatment. Director Kohira lends her a supernatural quality in her eerie silhouette as if she’s already become something else, a force of nature transformed by her righteous anger towards a corrupt society largely ruled by venal men willing to kill and use women for their own benefit or pleasure. Even Nami is forced to admit her complicity having learned her sister may have paid for her education through allowing herself to be traded by Miura as a political bargaining chip. She is not, however, willing to let it stand, resisting a controlling a patriarchal society with all of the resources available to her.

Linda Linda Linda (リンダ リンダ リンダ, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005)

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“We’ve only got a little more time to be the real us,” according to a young woman making a promo video for the upcoming school festival, but who really is the “real us”? Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s wistful high school dramedy Linda, Linda, Linda (リンダ リンダ リンダ) is in many ways about the process of coming into being along with the anxieties of what comes next. “We won’t end here,” the girl later adds, “We won’t let our high school days become a memory,” yet they already are in a kind of contemporaneous nostalgia and elegy for idealised youth.

Or at least, there’s already a kind of reaching back taking place as the tracks the girls pick for a replacement act are by The Blue Hearts, a 1980s punk band that has become a kind of cultural touchstone echoing a sense of youthful alienation and rebellion. “Linda Linda” is the kind of song everyone knows, and even if for some reason they don’t or don’t even speak Japanese, can at least join in with the riotous chorus. It’s this sense of universality that eventually gives it its power as torrential rain brings the entire school inside just in time to see the girls’ belated act and find themselves captivated by its infectious energy and an identification with their own sense of insecure anxiety.

It’s also the serendipitous rain that allows lonely songstress Takako an opportunity to perform having previously declined to do because it’s no fun playing on your own and all her former bandmates graduated the previous year. Moe, the girl who broke her fingers playing basketball in PE leaving the original band members unable to take the to the stage, also gets an opportunity to sing having otherwise been denied a moment of closure in being prevented from taking part in her final school festival. While Moe feels intensely guilty about rendering all their time spent rehearsing somewhat pointless, it’s really the drama between founding members Kei and Rinko that leads to the band’s demise in Rinko’s conviction that it’s “meaningless” to continue while the others decide to go ahead anyway asking Korean exchange student Son (Bae Doona) to be their vocalist because she just happened to come down the stairs at the right moment and said yes because she didn’t really understand what they were saying.

Prior to her involvement with the band, Son had been a rather isolated figure trapped in the “Japan-Korea Culture Exchange Exhibit” which seems to have been more her teacher’s idea than her own and in any case gets no actual visitors. Her Japanese is a bit limited and most of her interactions are with a little girl who lends her manga to help her learn quickly, but becoming part of the band allows her to find her voice both literally and figuratively in taking the lead as the vocalist. A boy who claims to have fallen in love with her (Kenichi Matsuyama) goes to the trouble of learning a long speech in Korean to convey his feelings, yet a bemused Son replies to him in Japanese that she’s pretty indifferent to his existence before switching to Korean to explain that she’s leaving because she’d rather be hanging out with her friends with an expression that implies she’s only just realised that’s what they are. By contrast, she has a bilingual conversation with guitarist Kei (Yu Kashii) in which they seem to understand each other perfectly and each express how glad they are that they got to be in the band together. 

Similarly, it’s the concert itself that seems to heal rifts with a simple “Are you alright?” from Rinko (Takayo Mimura) to Kei whose friendship might, as someone says, essentially be too close for them to really get along. Drummer Kyoko (Aki Maeda) decides to declare her feelings for a longstanding crush before the concert. In the end she doesn’t manage it, but it doesn’t quite matter somehow because their performance is itself a kind of coming into being in which “the real us” comes into focus if also in a moment that itself becomes romanticised or idealised as an encapsulation of youth. Yamashita travels through the school festival as if it were a passage from one state of being to another, from the noodle stalls and crepe stands to haunted houses and the boy creating his own moment through encapsulating them on film, before ending with an unending song “so we can laugh tomorrow,” and the “real us” lives on.

Linda Linda Linda opens in US cinemas 5th September courtesy of GKIDS.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Angel Guts: Red Flash (天使のはらわた 赤い閃光, Takashi Ishii, 1994)

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Sent to cover a pornographic movie shoot, a young woman finds herself confronted by the teenage trauma that continues to haunt her in the final instalment in the Angel Guts series, Red Flash (天使のはらわた 赤い閃光, Tenshi no harawata: Akai senko). Adapting his own manga, Ishii draws on giallo and classic noir as the heroine attempts to reclaim herself from the spectres that are haunting her even as Japan itself seems to be a land of predatory and dangerous men.

Nevertheless, as the film begins, Nami (Maiko Kawakami) seems to be holding her own aside from an apparent problem with alcohol that sees her drink far to much and end up in vulnerable, potentially dangerous situations. She has a job as an editor and ad hoc photographer where she’s regularly subjected to extreme imagery, while her sleazy boss is also sexually harassing her and in fact attempts to force himself on her in the lift. It’s being sent to take photos at a porno shoot featuring intense rape scenes that awakens her buried teenage trauma of having been abducted and raped on her way home from school.

Nami is haunted by the spectre of her attacker, though as her new ally Muraki (Jinpachi Nezu) tells her it’s only by killing this ghost that she might be able to “erase” the harmful memories of her rape and overcome the repulsion she feels towards sex with men. Perhaps problematically, the film then phrases Nami’s journey as one of repair in which the ultimate goal is being able to enjoy heterosexual sex which seems to be something Nami herself desires to the extent her inability to do so leaves her feeling as if there’s something wrong with her. Even so, it seems she is able to have successful and enthusiastic sex with bar owner Chihiro (Noriko Hayami) who seduces, or perhaps takes advantage of, Nami after bringing her home because she’d had too much to drink at the bar.

On another drunken occasion, Nami is ushered into a love hotel where she wakes up naked several hours later with no recollection of how she got there. Looking around, she spots not only a bloody knife in the sink, but the body of a middle-aged man hidden under the duvet, and camera which has apparently been filming the whole thing. The act of watching her assault, of which she has no memory, echoes the out of body experience of her rape in which she sees another version of herself save her by killing the attacker. What Nami is essentially trying to do is kill the attacker in her mind through discovering what really happened in the hotel room. As Nami has developed a fear of sex of men, she has a tendency to kick and punch violently in self-defence which, coupled with her drunkeness, lead her to fear that she killed this man after waking up during the assault. In another kind of haunting, Nami begins receiving unpleasant phone calls from someone using a voice disguiser who knows she was at the hotel and attempts to blackmail her in exchange for sexual favours. 

Her first suspect is Muraki, which makes sense because he was at the bar and saw her leave with the other customer so could easily have followed her and either observed her entering the hotel and put two and two together after seeing the crime on the news, or actually committed the murder himself while she was unconscious. She’s also been given a negative impression of Muraki by her jealous boss who tells her that his wife killed herself because his constant infidelities. But Muraki is also carrying traumas of his own in his guilt over his wife’s death which he acknowledges was influenced by his behaviour even if because of a misunderstanding or irrational jealousy rather than sexual or emotional betrayal. Thus, Nami becomes to him a means of atonement in the form of a woman he could save in place of the wife he could not.

Which is to say, Nami is pulled towards trusting the improbable presence of a “good” man even as Chihiro insists that they don’t exist. After they made love, Chihiro deepened the intimacy between them by revealing that she had been abused by her stepfather, though it does not prompt Nami to reveal her own traumatic memories of her rape and abduction. She is reluctant to go to the police not because she fears she is guilty of the crime and wants to avoid punishment, but feels ashamed and can’t bear the idea of the police watching the tape which would amount to a kind of second rape. She does eventually allow Muraki to watch it, but on realising that it may exonerate her is still reluctant to let the police see it while torn by her civic duty in knowing that she has evidence that may help catch the “real” killer. She and Chihiro wonder why it is men like to watch the rape videos she was sent photograph, but can’t come up with much of an answer though it hints and an ingrained misogyny, a desire for control and dominance of a woman and her sexuality. The fact that she was sent to photograph it all by this otherwise mainstream company again hints at a kind of desensitisation amid an overly sexualised atmosphere even as her boss tells her the UN has been critical of Japanese attitudes to sex. Nevertheless it seems that Nami is able to overcome her trauma, to an extent, through reclaiming her identity even if she still has the occasional red flashes of violent fantasy.

Angel Guts: Red Flash is available as part of Third Window Films’ Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami boxset.

Alone in the Night (夜がまた来る, Takashi Ishii, 1994)

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A woman enters the homosocial world of the yakuza in search of revenge for her murdered husband, but discovers only more degradation and hopelessness in Takashi Ishii’s rain-soaked noir, Alone in the Night (夜がまた来る, Yoru ga mata Kuru). Then again, perhaps it’s not really revenge Nami (Yui Natsukawa) is after so much as death itself, her relentless fall one of self-harm born of her sense of futility in world ruled by irony in which there is no such thing as truth or justice.

Indeed, one of the things that propels Nami on her mission is the injustice that her husband Mitsuru (Toshiyuki Nagashima), killed while working undercover investigating a gang dealing drugs, is then accused of taking the drugs he seized and selling them on himself. After her husband dies, she’s hounded by the press who paint him as a corrupt cop while she’s also denied his police pension because he died in disgrace. What she wants is to clear his name and thereby drag her husband back from the netherworld in an affirmation of their love for each other. 

But she too becomes corrupted by the darkness of the criminal underworld. Soon after the funeral, yakuza thugs break into her home and rape her while looking for the drugs they assume Mitsuru stashed somewhere. Amid the chaos, she attempts to take her own life by slashing her wrist with one of Mitsuru’s bones but is unexpectedly saved by a mysterious man. Reborn after her brush with death, she reinvents herself as bar hostess “Mitsuru” as a means of getting close to the gang boss, Ikejima (Minori Terada), she believes to be responsible for her husband’s death. Her attempts to kill him, however, prove unsuccessful. She’s once again raped, this time by Ikejima, and thereafter becomes his mistress until another opportunity arises which she then botches by stabbing him in a non-lethal way which only gets her beaten and tortured by his underling Shibata (Kippei Shiina) and eventually sold to a brothel in Chiba where they get her hooked on drugs to make her easy to control. 

In fact, she’s only spared death once again thanks to the intervention of the mysterious man, Muraki (Jinpachi Nezu), a middle-aged yakuza seemingly weary of life and perhaps drawn to Nami as to death. He seems uncomfortable and out of place in this world of brutal masculinity while his modernity is singled by his association with the gun to counter Shibata’s with the sword. He has other reasons for his duality, but is charged with rooting out moles in the yakuza of which there seem to be an inordinately large number. Despite warning her off, he does what he can to help Nami, in part of out of guilt and a need for atonement, but also a kind of escape from his own entrapment within the purgatorial space of the yakuza underworld. 

Permanently raining and shot in an eerie blue, the world around Nami and Muraki takes on an etherial, dream-like quality as if taking place somewhere between sleeping and waking. After rescuing her from an attempt to drown herself, Muraki remarks that Nami slept like the dead or perhaps as if someone was calling to her from the other side. Death seems to be beckoning each of them, even as Muraki desperately tries to keep Nami alive by tenderly nursing her back to health and helping her beat drugs so she can finally free them both by achieving their mutual revenge.

But the film’s irony is that Nami cannot achieve her vengeance on her own. She’s constantly rescued by Muraki who achieves some if for her while each of her attempts only plunge her further down the cycle of degradation and in danger of losing herself entirely. She is and remains an ordinary woman venturing into hell in search of justice, but discovering only cruel ironies and futility. Muraki too is unable to transcend himself and meets a personal apocalypse in embracing his authentic identity. Nami has been chasing a ghost all along, though in some ways it may be her own as she tries to make her way back into the world of the living by reclaiming a vision of the world she had before in which her husband was a good and honest man and there was justice in the world even she declared herself largely disinterested in world outside of their romance and their private paradise just for two.

Alone in the Night is available as part of Third Window Films’ Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami boxset.

Eight Men to Kill (賞金首 一瞬八人斬り, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1972)

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In the first instalment of the Bounty Hunter series, Shikoro Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) had been a shogunate spy intent on putting down rebellion to their oppression, but by the third, it seems he’s thoroughly fed up with the ills of feudalism and apparently no admirer of the Tokugawa who he feels to have failed in their responsibility to the people along with their personal greed and desire to hold on to their power.

Ichibei’s chief objection is their lack of healthcare provision, seeing as he is a doctor who mainly cares for the poor. That’s one reason he agrees to the job, asking for a large percentage of the gold he’s been asked to retrieve by a worried retainer who explains that the Edo government is relying on it to bridge a gap on their finances. If the gold’s not returned, the entire economy may crash. The government’s heartlessness is further borne out by the retainer’s words that it’s not the time to be concerned about one boy whose importance pales in contrast to that of the Tokugawa Shogunate when a rogue ronin kidnaps the son of the man responsible for the theft of the gold from a local mine. 

In a repeated motif, men attempt to swallow the gold as a means either of stealing or hiding it but it gets stuck in their digestive system and causes them a great deal of pain that could lead to death. The cruel mine owner Kanoke Tatsu (Minoru Oki) forces Ichibei to cut open the man’s stomach to get the gold out, while he insists on sewing him back up again because as a doctor it would be wrong not to. What he’s really performed maybe a kind of gold-ectomy, removing the toxic substance from the men’s stomachs even if he may not be able to save their lives or improve their circumstances.

Ichibei tells the bandit, Yasha the Wolf (Kenji Imai), who is held responsible for the theft of the gold, that he is as bad as him and is only looking for a fast way to make money, yet he wants it to use to build better hospitals for the poor, ironically using the government’s cash to make up for their failing. Meanwhile, he finds himself coming up against a man much like himself only inverted in the form of wandering assassin Yajuro (Shigeru Amachi), a former secret policeman in the rebellious Bishu domain who doubt crosses everyone he comes across in an attempt to get his hands on the gold. Ichibei asks the man who hired him why they don’t want to use government spies but he tells him that it’s because they’d run out. The ones they sent to investigate have all been killed, presumably by the treacherous Yajuro.

All around him, Ichibei discovers only omnipresent greed. A geisha he comes across is working with the mine owner to steal the cash, but simultaneously seducing Ichibei and the apparently won over by his bedroom prowess though it’s difficult to know which is an act, her fondness for Ichibei or pledges to sell him out to Kanoke. Meanwhile, Kanoke vacillates when presented with a binary choice by Yajuro, his adorable three-year-old son, or the gold. As always, it’s the innocent who suffer while personal greed and governmental indifference leave ordinary people little room to manoeuvre. 

This time around, the righteous Ichibei cuts a solitary figure. He no longer has a posse and is supported only by an older gentleman who is mute. As a result of his mission, he even ends up on a wanted poster himself with the shogunate, presumably unwilling recognise him, yet eventually congratulating him on a job well done, much to his shame and embarrassment having witnessed shogunate soldiers committing an atrocity. Very much in the western vein, Ozawa lends the dusty old mining town a sense of dread and decay as it rots from the inside out thanks to the corrupt authority of a weakened shogunate seeking only ways to cement its own power. The red-tinted final taking place during a solar eclipse seems to emphasise the hellishness of the situation even as Ichibei announces that they can all go to hell but he’s sending the money to heaven where it can be put to better use.