Like many directors during the 1980s, Nobuhiko Obayashi was unable to resist the lure of a Kadokawa teen movie but His Motorbike, Her Island (彼のオートバイ彼女の島, Kare no Ootobai, Kanojo no Shima) is a typically strange 1950s throwback with its tale of motorcycle loving youngsters and their ennui filled days. Switching between black and white and colour, Obayashi paints a picture of a young man trapped in an eternal summer from which he has no desire to escape.
Ko (Riki Takeuchi) tells us that he’s an unusual guy because most people dream in colour but all of his dreams are in monochrome. He’s a student and dispatch rider overly attached to his admittedly very handsome Kawasaki motorbike. After getting beaten up by his boss due to deflowering the guy’s sister and then breaking her heart, Ko skips town for the open road, just him and his bike. However, he repeatedly runs into the same mysterious girl who lives on an equally mysterious island and develops a deep seated need for her, secondary only to that for his bike. Miyo (Kiwako Harada) has also taken a liking to the Kawasaki and is intent on getting her full motorcycle license. Her growing obsession with the bike threatens to become an all consuming need driving a wedge between the two young lovers.
Obayashi begins in a black and white sequence window boxed in the centre of the screen before expanding to 4:3 when Ko has his fight with his boss and only hits 16:9 for the first colour scene which sees Ko taking off on his beloved bike. He told us that his dreams are in black and white but the film seems to disagree with him, segueing into various gradated colour schemes as Ko narrates his melancholy tale of tragic lost love. Ko is not necessarily a very reliable narrator in any case, but in each instance the on screen action is always coloured by the recollections of the older man who offers his voice over commentary.
Like many Obayashi films, the overriding feeling is one of melancholy mixed with a youthful apathy. This is a story about modern young people, but refracted through rebellious ‘50s movies from Rebel Without a Cause to The Wild One and a hundred others inbetween. Ko is a university student (of what we don’t know) but seems to have no great ambitions. He takes things as he finds them and his only passion is the bike itself. When he first meets Miyo and she asks him where he’s going, he simply replies that he’s “looking for the wind” – a motif which recurs throughout the film.
Later on when he arrives at Miyo’s island, it takes on an opposing symbolism to his bike. Just as Miyo can’t get enough of the Kawasaki, Ko is originally attracted to the island much more than to the girl. It’s not quite a coincidence that each time he visits there it’s the Bon festival where the dead are temporarily allowed to return to the world of the living. Later he says that Miyo wasn’t just a girl but an island, and he wan’t just a boy but a bike, and together the two of them became the wind. They became one entity, inseparable one from the other. Finally the esoteric colour scheme begins to make sense, we’ve been watching a ghost story all along. This island is an unreal place, existing only inside Ko’s memory where Miyo waits for him with a full tank of gas.
Once again youth is seen as a brief yet unforgettable period filled with longing and regret. The older man is forever trapped by this one glorious summer, a place to which he can never return but neither can he escape. The nihilistic tone and voice over narration have an edge of the French New Wave but ‘50s American cinema of alienation seems closer to Obayashi’s intentions. An elliptical and strange tale of tragic love retold as a ghost story, filled with phantoms of memory and landscapes coloured by dream and emotion, His Motorbike, Her Island is another characteristically offbeat effort from Obayashi which once again embraces the aimlessness of youth and age’s regret.
Unsubtitled trailer – goes through to a video of Kiwako Harada singing the title song, in case you were in any doubt what this movie is for.
Or, here is the film’s opening (which also features the title song)
Enfant terrible of the Japanese film industry Sion Sono has always been prolific but recent times have seen him pushing the limits of the possible and giving even Takashi Miike a run for his money in the release stakes. Indeed, Takashi Miike is a handy reference point for Sono’s take on Shinjuku Swan (新宿スワン) – an adaptation of a manga which has previously been brought to the small screen and is also scripted by an independent screenwriter rather than self penned in keeping with the majority of Sono’s directing credits. Oddly, the film shares several cast members with Miike’s Crows Zero movies and even lifts a key aesthetic directly from them. In fact, there are times when Shinjuku Swan feels like an unofficial spin-off to the Crows Zero world with its macho high school era tussling relocated to the seedy underbelly of Kabukicho. Unfortunately, this is somewhat symptomatic of Sono’s failure, or lack of will, to add anything particularly original to this, it has to be said, unpleasant tale.
Akira Kurosawa’s later career was marred by personal crises related to his inability to obtain the kind of recognition for his films he’d been used to in his heyday during the golden age of Japanese cinema. His greatest dream was to die on the set, but after suffering a nasty accident in 1995 he was no longer able to realise his ambition of directing again. However, shortly after he died, the idea was floated of filming some of the scripts Kurosawa had written but never proceed with to the production stage including The Sea is Watching (海は見ていた, Umi wa Miteita) which he wrote in 1993. Based on a couple of short stories by Shugoro Yamamoto, The Sea is Watching would have been quite an interesting entry in Kurosawa’s back catalogue as it’s a rare female led story focussing on the lives of two geisha in Edo era Japan.
Mikio Naruse made the lives of everyday women the central focus of his entire body of work but his 1963 film, A Woman’s Story (女の歴史, Onna no Rekishi), proves one of his less subtle attempts to chart the trials and tribulations of post-war generation. Told largely through extended flashbacks and voice over from Naruse’s frequent leading actress, Hideko Takamine, the film paints a bleak vision of the endless suffering inherent in being a woman at this point in history but does at least offer a glimmer of hope and understanding as the curtains falls.
Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore. Kiyoshi Kurosawa neatly reverses Dylan’s poetic phrasing as his shoreline is less a place of endings but of beginnings or at least a representation of the idea that every beginning is born from the death of that which preceded it. Adapted from a novel by Kazumi Yumoto, Journey to the Shore (岸辺の旅, Kishibe no Tabi) takes its grief stricken, walking dead heroine on a long journey of the soul until she can finally put to rest a series of wandering ghosts and begin to live once again, albeit at her own tempo.
“What would John do?” is a question Cassavetes loving indie filmmaker Tetsuo (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) often asks himself, lovingly taking the framed late career photo of the godfather of independent filmmaking in America down from the wall. Unfortunately, if Cassavetes has any advice to offer Tetsuo, Tetsuo is not really paying attention. An example of the lowlife scum who appear to have taken over the Japanese indie movie scene, Tetsuo hasn’t made anything approaching art since an early short success some years ago and mainly earns his living through teaching “acting classes” for young, desperate, and this is the key – gullible, people hoping to break into the industry.
What is it about ghosts and high school girls? Maybe it’s shrines and graveyards mothers ought to be warning their daughters about rather than moody guys with motorbikes. Anyway, the somewhat salaciously titled Love Ghost (死びとの恋わずらい, Shibito no Koiwazurai) is not quite the film it claims to be, though it is haunted by the violent spirit of strong emotion. Innocent high school romance is suddenly infected with the cruel complications of adult love, mental illness, and suicide as a strange curse descends over a previously peaceful town.
If the under seen yet massively influential director Yasuzo Masumura had one recurrent concern throughout his career, passion, and particularly female passion, is the axis around which much of his later work turns. Masumura might have begun with the refreshingly innocent love story 
Windows on Worlds 