Category: Japan

A Brother and His Younger Sister (兄とその妹, Yasujiro Shimazu, 1939)

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A young man’s love of go ends up getting him into hot water at work in Yasujiro Shimazu’s surprisingly progressive shomingeki, A Brother and his Younger Sister (兄とその妹, Ani to Sono Imoto). It seems office politics might not have changed all that much in the last 80 years even if many other things have, but conversely the film seems to have more to say about the changing nature of gender roles and attitudes towards women in a time in which it was becoming possible for a woman to live a fully independent life. 

This window wouldn’t last very long and the situation largely reversed itself even amid the supposed equality enshrined in the post-war constitution, but Fumiko (Michiko Kuwano) at least has a well paying job as a secretary at a large company and consequently little desire to marry even at the comparatively late age of 24. Her earning capacity is later put forward as a reason that there “aren’t many opportunities” for marriage as men apparently feel threatened and embarrassed especially if their salary is lower than hers. It’s not exactly that she’s against marriage, but as she can support herself and is otherwise happy living with her brother Keisuke (Shin Saburi) and his wife Akiko (Kuniko Miyake). She doesn’t see the need to rush into such an important decision. Though she might change her mind if the right person came along, for the moment she just isn’t interested. Then again, Akiko’s sucking of her finger when she’s ironically cut by a thorn on a bouquet of roses from an unwanted admirer might suggest another reason marriage is not on her radar.

Her suitor, Michio (Ken Uehara), despite his handsomeness is a little creepy in his courtship and cannot seem to take a hint that Fumiko isn’t interested in him. A friend of her boss, he has a habit of dropping into the office for no real reason and attempts to ask her out when the boss isn’t there. She lies and tells him she’s married already (to a penniless painter!) but after the boss reveals the truth it doesn’t seem to occur to Michio that if she made up a story like that it’s because she doesn’t want to go out with him. We’re told that Michio studied at Oxford and is attracted to Fumiko because he’s impressed by her language skills, but he’s also some kind of stockbroker which quickly paints him as no good seeing as the film seems to have a minor message about how dabbling in stocks and shares is little better than gambling and definitely dangerous.

One of Keisuke’s colleagues has been given a warning because there’s a rumour that he’s into shares while another has apparently been demoted because it came to light that he had a fondness for horse racing. More than a moral judgement, it seems the reason is that these sorts of hobbies may eventually lead someone towards embezzling from the company to cover their debts. Keisuke’s supervisor is also worried that his 18-year-old son is refusing to go to university and apparently wants to join some kind of “investment society” which admittedly does not sound like a good idea so he wants Keisuke to talk him out of it. The big boss, meanwhile, who is also Michio’s uncle, turns out to be into shares himself which makes him a very compromised authority figure. 

Keisuke is not into shares, but he is very into the game of go which causes him to stay out until late at night playing with his bosses. He does this because he genuinely likes playing, but Fumiko worries that his colleagues will come to resent him assuming that he does so to curry favour. Apparently, something similar happened at his previous job which is why he ended up quitting abruptly. As he was quite lucky to get this one despite how impressed everyone seems by his capabilities, it would be better if that didn’t happen again. Nevertheless, the perspicacious Fumiko turns out to be right as as his co-worker Yukito (Reikichi Kawamura) becomes increasingly jealous of his success fearing that he will leapfrog him to take the shortly to open up supervisor position which he believes to be his simply because he’s been there longer (which is generally how things work at Japanese companies). Consequently, starts a series of rumours that Keisuke is a snitch who got the horse racing guy demoted and is only in his position thanks to schmoozing with the bosses.

This obviously leaves him with a huge dilemma when his boss asks him to put in a good word for Michio with Fumiko whom he is pretty sure won’t be interested. To his credit, Keisuke maintains that it’s up to her and his career is nowhere near as important as her happiness though he is also aware it’s going to be embarrassing for him when she says no. Fumiko knows this too, and it’s clear that she also feels incredibly awkward when he puts it to her but only asks for a few minutes to think before offering her primary justification for refusing which would be that she fears Keisuke’s colleagues will resent him even more if they come to the conclusion that he sold his own sister in the hope of career advancement. This does in fact turn out to be the case as Yukito has already started a rumour about a dynastic marriage that turns the rest of Keisuke’s colleagues against him especially as he’s given the promotion immediately before he was going to tell the boss Fumiko isn’t interested. 

Confronted by the horse racing guy, Keisuke ends up quitting again after getting into a physical confrontation with a seemingly remorseful Yukito who probably didn’t mean for it to go that far. Keisuke quits because he won’t have people think he was gossiping behind their backs and is offended by this attack on his integrity, but his decision is also a rebuke against this infinitely corrupt employment regime in which hypocritical bosses hand out jobs to their favourites and maybe do expect that Keisuke will persuade his sister to sacrifice herself for his career. She meanwhile is portrayed as an independent woman, but ironically rejects the marriage to save her brother’s reputation though perhaps equally she feared her “no” would not be enough on its own. Then again, she had apparently turned down several suitors already and no one really expected her to say yes this time unless she’d suddenly begun to feel anxious about her age and declining prospects. 

Nevertheless, it’s refreshing that the film does not force Fumiko into accepting marriage as so many others would and in fact legitimises her opposition to it and right to live as an independent woman for as long as she chooses. Keisuke is also in some ways rewarded for quitting his job at the corrupt company in immediately getting another one from a former co-worker who’s since started his own business and wants to expand to Manchuria. But this final scene almost seems tacked on for the censor’s benefit. It is perhaps a little unusual for 1939 that the film has so far made no mention of Japan’s imperial ambitions nor made any kind of patriotic appeal. It’s even been quite pro-internationalist in the talk of people speaking English and engaging in European trade (even if the currency trading Michio’s doing is definitely framed as bad). Fumiko spots a little patch of grass clinging onto the plane as they take off for Manchuria with Keisuke remarking that he hopes this little piece of Japan will take root on the continent. On one level, it suggests that contemporary Japan was too corrupt for an “honest” man like Keisuke to prosper while Manchuria will offer greater freedom for himself and the independent modern girl Fumiko (who declares she won’t marry until Keisuke’s successful), but it’s also of course an unpalatable advocation for the ongoing imperialist expansion which seems so out of keeping with everything that’s gone before. Even so, the message is clear that it’s Keisuke and Fumiko who are in the right and should be allowed to live just as they are in a society free of judgement and hypocrisy.

Nanayo (七夜待, Naomi Kawase, 2008)

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Naomi Kawase had provoked a minor upset with her unexpected Grand Prix win for 2007’s The Mourning Forest and has since earned a reputation as a festival darling. Her followup film, 2008’s Nanayo (七夜待, Nanayomachi), however, failed to make much of an impact in the international festival scene and seems to have been more or less forgotten, considered among the most minor of Kawase’s disparate filmography. In some ways it picks up where The Mourning Forest left off as a young woman looks for meaning in the primitive beauty of nature, but it’s also a major departure in being the first of her films made outside of Japan and dealing with far broader themes from her familiar focus on familial disconnection to oblique references to the traumatic legacies of colonialism and the inefficiency of language as a tool for communication. 

The heroine, Saiko (Kyoko Hasegawa), arrives in Thailand it seems without much of a plan or a clear idea of where she’s going. Largely unable to communicate in any language other than Japanese, she wanders around lost looking for her hotel until someone is able to explain to her that she’s in completely the wrong place, and as the hotel is too far to walk she’d best take a taxi. The taxi driver, however, can’t understand her either but for some reason agrees to take her. Saiko falls asleep and wakes up sometime later to realise he’s driven her out to the middle of nowhere, belligerently insisting she get out of the car. Understandably fearing the worst, she manages to dodge past him and run off into the forest leaving her bags behind. Eventually she encounters a random Frenchman, whom she can’t understand either, who takes her back to the small guest house he’s staying at to learn Thai massage. Later the taxi driver, Marwin (Netsai Todoroki), turns up too and in a weird coincidence it turns out that he’s the brother of the woman running the massage school, Amari (Kittipoj Mankang). 

Despite having no common language, the four of them along with Amari’s half-Japanese son Toi (which in Japanese anyway means “far”) become an odd kind of family, relying on universal human gestures in an effort to communicate. To this extent, it is perhaps a shame that the film is subtitled in that the impossibility of true understanding through verbal communication seems to be a key theme. At one point, Frenchman Greg (Grégoire Colin) opens up to Saiko about his reasons for coming to Thailand, that he’d been in denial of his homosexuality and is finally beginning to accept himself. Perhaps he tells her precisely because she will not understand, but it’s an immense irony that her first question is to ask if the pretty bracelet on his wrist was a gift from a girlfriend. In their shared mix of broken English, she thinks he’s saying “lovely” when he’s really just trying to say that it looks like rain. 

Meanwhile, Amari has some Japanese, presumably learnt from Toi’s absent father of whom she gives no further details. Marwin later implies that she met him through some kind of sex work, and we later see him fall out with his daughter over something much the same in accusing her of being in a compensated relationship with a foreigner while she fires back that it’s none of his business seeing as he failed as a father in proving unable to support her financially. When Saiko makes the perhaps unwise decision to get in Marwin’s cab, it’s in the process of being vacated by a drunk and extremely rude Englishman who yells some vaguely racist abuse at him and then walks off with a Thai beauty. The prevalence of sex work appears as an extension of contemporary colonialism, something of which both Greg and Saiko may be accidentally guilty in coming to Thailand to look for something as nebulous as spiritual awakening, beckoned in by orientalist notions of Eastern mysticism. Amari, while never resenting Saiko, perhaps sees in her an echo of her absent lover, repeatedly asking her son if he’d want to meet his father or to visit Japan. The climactic fight which emerges seemingly out of nowhere is fought over Amari’s decision to send Toi to a temple to train as a monk, affirming that Saiko wouldn’t understand because her country is “beautiful and rich”, explaining that she wants her son to grow up rich spiritually not to be materialistic, though Saiko herself describes Japan only as “peaceful” lacking the warmth that she feels in the Thai people.  

Saiko of course cannot understand because she has absolutely no idea what anyone is saying, realising only that Toi has gone missing and everyone is so intent on arguing in several languages that no one’s bothering to look for him. She doesn’t understand why everyone’s shouting at her when she’s only a bystander, perhaps another comment on the legacy of colonialism, while to Marwin it seems obvious that the boy’s run off because he doesn’t want to be a monk and is sad thinking his mum doesn’t want him anymore. When Saiko finds him, it seems that he’s particularly preoccupied with whether or not his father loved his mother, perhaps beginning to understand the complexities of his birth and his dual nationalities. 

Once again adopting an elliptical structure, Kawase builds slowly towards the scenes which opened the film in which Toi and Marwin prepare to enter the temple as monks, the moment attaining a kind of spiritual catharsis which seems at odds with the conflicts of the preceding scenes which asked if Amari was right to separate from her son and force him to become a monk against his will. The temple scene is followed by a ritual dance similar to that in Shara in which Saiko seems to cast off her gloominess in spiritual release, building on earlier scenes in which she idly fantasised about intimate massages from a Japanese monk (Jun Murakami) apparently achieving an entirely different kind of enlightenment. Touch, Kawase seems to say, is the only true communication, leaving it to former soldier Marwin to expound on how we’re all different and speak different languages but we should love each other rather than kill in war. There is danger everywhere he explains, though Kawase’s gentle pan to the tranquility of life on the wide river might seem to contradict him.  

Trailer (no subtitles)

Genocide (昆虫大戦争, Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968)

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In the early 1960s, tokusatsu movies had begun to slide towards something which was much less serious than the early days of the genre, but as the decade went on others edged in the direction of the ‘70s paranoia thriller expressing a nihilistic view of contemporary Cold War geopoliticking. Given the rather provocative English title Genocide (昆虫大戦争, Konchu daisenso), as opposed to the more recognisably genre-inflected “great insect war”, Kazui Nihonmatsu’s wasp-themed disaster film is part anti-nuclear eco-treatise and part anti-US spy movie.

Then again, the film’s secondary hero, Joji (Yusuke Kawazu), a Japanese man obsessed with collecting rare insects he sends alternately to a researcher in Tokyo and a foreign woman living locally, cannot exactly claim the moral high ground. When he spots a US bomber falling out of the sky and runs to investigate the descending parachutes, he’s in the middle of tryst with Annabelle (Kathy Horan) while his wife waits for him patiently at home. Not only that, he picks up an expensive watch dropped by one of the airmen and attempts to sell it, he later claims to buy something nice for his wife, Yukari (Emi Shindo). Meanwhile, the voice of reason Dr. Nagumo (Keisuke Sonoi) is also seen conducting experiments on animals, injecting insect venom into a squirming guinea pig while explaining that the toxin affects the nervous system and causes madness and death. 

For all his own moralising, it’s this callous and selfish disregard for life which caused so many problems. The insects have apparently become fed up with human volatility and have decided that they don’t care what humans do to each other but they won’t go down with us in a nuclear war so the only solution is total eradication. The film’s true moral centre, the innocent Yukari, had tried to stop Joji capturing insects, reminding him that “insects have babies too,” while unbeknownst to him the insects he’d been capturing for Annabelle had been used for her sinister experiments to “breed vast numbers of insects that drive people mad and scatter them across the world.”

Annabelle’s quest is one of revenge, claiming that she doesn’t trust humans and likes insects because they don’t lie. She’s currently working with Communist spies supposedly researching deadly nerve toxins but with no loyalty to the regime, only the desire for the eradication of humanity in revenge for the murder of her parents in the holocaust. The Americans, meanwhile, only care about getting the H-bomb that the downed bomber had been carrying, eventually admitting that they’re considering simply detonating it to wipe out the insect threat in total indifference to the lives of those who live on the islands. When Nagumo challenges him, the American officer pulls a gun. One of the soldiers refuses the command to detonate, but is then killed. 

The Americans reject the idea that it was “insects” that brought the plane down, but tell on themselves on insisting that the airman onboard was hallucinating having become addicted to drugs to help him overcome his fear of combat situations. The insects do indeed cause him to hallucinate but with flashbacks back to his time in Vietnam, loudly exclaiming that he won’t go back there before asking for more drugs and being injected by a medic. The American officers claim they’re fighting for “freedom and independence,” but it rings somewhat hollow and is immediately challenged by Nagumo. “Sacrifices must be made in war,” they retort when he points out that detonating the bomb will not only kill everyone on the islands but irradiate the rest of Japan, wiping out the Japanese as if they too were merely insects. 

Even so, Nagumo too wants to wipe out the insects rather than consider the implications of their concern or find a way to live with them. Annabelle might have had a point when she said that human beings only knew hate despite her entirely twisted and exploitative plan to use the insects to complete her mission of eradicating humanity. In any case, in contrast to other similarly themed films, Nihonmatsu keeps things fairly realistic despite the outlandishness of the narrative, frequently cutting back to closeup footage of an insect biting into human flesh with its pincers before ending on an image of a nihilistic and internecine destruction that suggests there may be no real hope for us after all.

Drawing Closer (余命一年の僕が、余命半年の君と出会った話。, Takahiro Miki, 2024)

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Takahiro Miki has made a name for himself as a purveyor of sad romances. Often his protagonists are divided by conflicting timelines, social taboos, or some other fantastical circumstance, though Drawing Closer (余命一年の僕が、余命半年の君と出会った話。, Yomei Ichinen no Boku ga, Yomei Hantoshi no Kimi to Deatta Hanashi) quite clearly harks back to the jun-ai or “pure love” boom in its focus on young love and terminal illness. Based on the novel by Ao Morita, the film nevertheless succumbs to some of genres most problematic tendencies as the heroine essentially becomes little more than a means for the hero’s path towards finding purpose in life.

17-year-old Akito (Ren Nagase) is told that he has a tumour on his heart and only a year at most to live. Though he begins to feel as if his life is pointless, he finds new strength after running into Haruna (Natsuki Deguchi) who has only six months yet to him seems full of life. Later, Haruna says he was actually wrong and she felt completely hopeless too so actually she really wanted to die right away rather than pointlessly hang round for another six months with nothing to do and no one to talk to. But in any case, Akito decides that he’s going to make his remaining life’s purpose making Haruna happy which admittedly he does actually do by visiting her every day and bringing flowers once a week.

But outside of that, we never really hear that much from Haruna other than when she’s telling Akito something inspirational and he seems to more or less fill in the blanks on his own. Thus he makes what could have been a fairly rash and disastrous decision to bring a former friend, Ayaka (Mayuu Yokota), with whom Haruna had fallen out after the middle-school graduation ceremony that she was unable to go to because of her illness. Luckily he had correctly deduced that Haruna pushed her friend away because she thought their friendship was holding her back and Ayaka should be free to embrace her high school life making new friends who can do all the regular teenage things like going to karaoke or hanging out at the mall. Akito is doing something similar by not telling his other friends that he’s ill while also keeping it from Haruna in the hope that they can just be normal teens without the baggage of their illnesses. 

The film never shies away from the isolating qualities of what it’s like to live with a serious health condition. Both teens just want to be treated normally while others often pull away from them or are overly solicitous after finding out that they’re ill but at the same time, it’s all life lessons for Akito rather a genuine expression of Haruna’s feelings. We only experience them as he experiences them and so really she’s denied any opportunity to express herself authentically. Rather tritely, it’s she who teaches Akito how to live again in urging him that he should hang in there and continue to pursue his artistic dreams on behalf of them both. Meanwhile, she encourages him to pursue a romantic relationship with Ayaka, in that way ensuring that neither of them will be lonely when she’s gone and pushing them towards enjoying life to its fullest.

Nevertheless, due to its unbalanced quality and general earnestness the film never really achieves the kind of emotional impact that it’s aiming for nor the sense of poignancy familiar from Miki’s other work. Perhaps taking its cues from similarly themed television drama, the production values are on the lower side and Miki’s visual flair is largely absent though this perhaps helps to express a sense of hopelessness only broken by beautiful colours of Haruna’s artwork. Haruna had used drawing as means of escaping from the reality of her condition, but in the end even this becomes about Akito with her mother declaring that in the end she drew for him rather than for herself. Even so, there is something uplifting in Akito’s rediscovery of art as a purpose for life that convinces him that his remaining time isn’t meaningless while also allowing him to discover the desire to live even if his time is running out.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Lumberjack the Monster (怪物の木こり, Takashi Miike, 2023)

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Could being a psychopath actually be better? It might be an attractive thought for some, the absolute freedom of living without emotional or moral constraint. Emotion is after all a difficult thing to bear, though life without it might also be lonely and unfulfilling leaving a void often filled by other desires such as a lust for wealth, status, power, or proof of superiority. Based on a novel by Mayusuke Kurai, Takashi Miike’s Lumberjack the Monster (怪物の木こり, Kaibutsu no Mikori) finds its hero at a point of existential crisis no longer certain of his true nature or identity.

The film takes its title from a fairytale featured in a picture book being read by a small boy who has been abducted and illegally experimented on. A monster begins living as a lumberjack in a small town where he begins killing and eating the residents, only no one notices. Eventually it realises that he spends more time being the lumberjack than the monster and is confused about his identity. With no friends left to talk to (because it ate them all), the monster decides to move to another town to make more friends but ends up sneaking into the house of a lumberjack, stealing a baby, and fashioning after itself to create another monstrous lumberjack.

This is in a sense what’s happened to Akira (Kazuya Kamenashi), now a lawyer who discovers he has a “neuro-chip” in his brain that suppresses his emotions after he’s attacked by a masked figure and it breaks re-introducing him to an unwelcome humanity. This is quite inconvenient for him in that he’s done quite a lot to feel guilty about, firstly participating in a scheme with his “friend” Sugitani (Shota Sometani), a natural-born psychopaths, to facilitate his experimentation on live humans, and secondly that he murdered his boss who is also his fiancée’s father to take over his law firm. Though the fiancée, Emi (Riho Yoshioka), seems to be afraid of him, it’s also true that simple proximity to her warmth and kindness may have begun to reopen his heart.

Of course, it could be true that the mad scientists who abducted the children accidentally picked up a few who were already psychopaths but in this case it seems like the chip did its job on each of the victims of the axe-wielding assassin. Meanwhile, we also see “psychopathic” traits in lead investigator Toshiro (Nanao) who admits that she will do whatever it takes to get to the truth even if it includes throwing out the police rulebook. Akira asks her if her desire to solve the case isn’t also a roundabout means of vengeance for the death of her brother, leaving her not so different from the assassin who is also extracting vicarious revenge on man-made psychopaths, but she replies that that’s exactly how a psychopath might see it while also deflecting a similar question from embittered cop Inui (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) who remarks that if the killer’s only taking out psychopaths then why bother stop them?

In some ways, Akira is like the lumberjack. He was simply being what he was and knew no different, but gradually beginning to rediscover his humanity is burdened with guilt and remorse now acutely aware not just of the feelings of others rather than their consequences but of his own feelings too. The couple who abducted the children claimed they were doing it to save their son, trying to reverse engineer psychopathy so they could cure him though their actions were themselves psychopathic and like the lumberjack they created only more monstrous children like themselves. Akira has it seems rediscovered the person he may have been if he had been raised in the loving family from which he was abducted and is determined to search for the meaning of life, but he is also responsible for the decisions he made as a man who knew no guilt or remorse and may in fact have to pay for the moral transgressions he was not fully aware he was making. Miike conjures a sense of the gothic in the creepy, candlelit mansion where the children were kept and otherwise sticks to standard procedural for the “real” world, but finally lands back in the realms of fairytale as his hero finds himself part of neither one world nor another while faced with a choice that may earn him redemption but also loneliness and futility.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Passing Fancy (出来ごころ, Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

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“We have to help one another” a sympathetic soul insists towards the conclusion of Yasujiro Ozu’s Passing Fancy (出来ごころ, Dekigoroko). Ozu’s depression-era silents are not as devoid of hope as it might at first seem, but it is a much more positive statement and perhaps surprisingly the central messages lie more in the necessity or otherwise of repaying kindness and the kinds of forms that action may finally take. It is also, however, the first in a loose trilogy of films revolving around a single father named “Kihachi” and the only one in which he is not (at least potentially) exiled from the family he has been trying to protect. 

This Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) has one young son, Tomio (Tokkan Kozo, AKA Tomio Aoki), and casual job working in a brewery though he is hardly a model employee and is often late due to oversleeping after a night of heavy drinking. A roguish womaniser, he is also a kinder soul than he seems which is why he stops to talk to a pretty young woman, Harue (Nobuko Fushimi), wandering around in distress late in the evening. His first approach is slightly crass, responding to her question about lodging for the night by explaining that he has a kid and no wife but then he takes her to a local cafe he frequents and persuades the owner, Otome (Choko Iida), to take her in. Otome takes a liking to her, and decides to offer her a job as a waitress. 

Kihachi develops a hopeless crush, comically dolling himself up in his fanciest kimono and getting an advance from work to buy a pretty comb, an unmistakably romantic gift, to present himself to Harue. Of course, she’s grateful but sees him as a nice older gentleman rather than a potential husband. In fact and somewhat surprisingly she develops a crush of her own on the brooding Jiro (Den Obinata) despite the fact he is constantly rude to her and more or less implies she’s an untrustworthy woman out to take advantage of “vulnerable” men like himself. There is something quite touching and unusual in the brotherly friendship between the two men that occasionally comes off as something more in Jiro’s deep antipathy to Harue, which is to say she isn’t going to come between them but the situation is indeed complicated. 

Harue is, in that sense, a distraction that takes Kihachi’s eyes off his proper role as responsible father. He and Tomio have a close, interdependent relationship and it’s clear that it’s often little Tomio, older than his years, who finds himself managing Dad. Kihachi is immensely proud of his son, fond of saying he’d be top of his class if only he had better manners. Like any father what he most wants for him is that he escape their life of poverty which is why he’s so glad that the boy does well at school. But little Tomio finds himself bullied precisely because of Kihachi’s lack of standing. The other boys mock his illiteracy, unable to believe a man could reach adulthood without being able to read. When his son is taken ill, Kihachi laments circumstances even more. “It’s horrible not having an education”, he tells Jiro, “I got my son sick and I can’t even pay the doctor’s bill”.

The depression may be less visible than in Ozu’s other ‘30s films, but its evidence is everywhere. Harue ends up on the streets after losing her job at a silk mill and having no family to fall back on. At the naniwabushi performance which opens the show, a series of spectators hopefully open a lost wallet but find it empty. Kihachi notices the discarded purse is slightly bigger than his own and makes a swap as a hopeful investment for the future. Just before the performance ends, several of the guests seem to be plagued by fleas. Kihachi is forever asking for advances for frivolous reasons but assumes he’ll be able to manage hand to mouth only to enter a moment of crisis when hit by the unexpected expenses of his son’s illness for which he feels responsible in attributing it to an excess of luxury after giving a him a pocket money bonus which he unwisely blew in one go on sweets (like father, like son after all). 

Yet what shines through is compassion and camaraderie. A friendly barber loans Jiro the money for a doctor, which is one reason he intends to leave for Hokkaido even after realising his feelings for Harue. As with the other Kihachis, this Kihachi rediscovers a sense of fatherly duty in feeling as if this debt must be his, that he should be the one to go to Hokkaido to repay it even if that means leaving his son behind. The barber tells him not to bother, the sentiment is enough for him and he doesn’t mind missing the money knowing it saved a boy’s life. “We have to help one another”, kindness doesn’t necessarily have to be repaid directly but can be paid forward in becoming a way of life. The Kihachis of A Story of Floating Weeds and An Inn in Tokyo are exiled from their families and serve their sons only by abandoning them, but this Kihachi turns back, his sense of “responsibility” perhaps a “passing fancy” but one that’s taught him the true meaning of fatherhood and what it is to live in a society.

Hey! Our Dear Don-chan (おーい！どんちゃん, Shuichi Okita, 2022)

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A trio of actors undergo a coming-of-age tale of their own when a baby is suddenly abandoned on their doorstep in Shuichi Okita’s charming slice of life dramedy, Our Dear Don-chan (おーい！どんちゃん, Oi! Don-chan). A take on Three Men and a Baby, the film stars the director’s own daughter and follows her over a period of three years as the actors attempt to adjust to fatherhood and the new kind of family that has arisen between them. 

As the film opens, Michio (Tappei Sakaguchi), Ken (Hirota Otsuka), and Gunji (Ryuta Endo) are struggling actors working in slightly different media but having about the same amount of luck and continually dejected about their lack of career success. Ironically while playing the game of life, Ken has a baby girl in the game but is surprised to hear one crying for real on the street below. On reading a note in her pushchair, Ken realises that the baby has been left by a previous girlfriend, Kaori, with the instruction that he raise it. 

Of course, the situation gives rise to a degree of panic, Ken wondering not only if he is the father but if he can be while supported by the other two guys, along with former houseman Sakamoto and his girlfriend Akari, taking care of more practical matter likes getting nappies and baby food. Then again, some of the practical details are already overcome by virtue of their occupations which allow them to be home during the day taking shifts to watch the baby they christen “Don-chan” on account of not knowing her real name. 

As they struggle with the demands of fatherhood, the three men each commit themselves to Don-chan’s well being, mindful of the memories she’ll make in the future and wanting to make her present as happy as possible. At one point they decide to take a camping trip in order to show her that they can be “manly dads”, but otherwise entertain her at home or take her on trips to the aquarium acting as a trio even if Ken is technically the primary dad forming a new kind of family that makes it easier to care for a small child than it might otherwise have been. If Ken had been on his own, he may not have been able to raise her. Michio and Gunji both complain at the precarious state of childcare facilities, lamenting that you can’t get a place unless you work full-time but you can’t work full-time if you can’t get childcare for when you’re at work. 

Meanwhile, they continue to struggle in their professional lives. A humiliating audition for a TV commercial causes Ken to rethink his career plans, stopping off to buy new toys for Don-chan on the way home lamenting that he “danced like an idiot for no reason.” Michio continues to go full method over researching all his roles for seconds of screen time in TV and movies, while Gunji’s stage career is disrupted when the manager of his troupe decides to admit himself to a psychiatric facility for long term care. Through their interactions with Don-chan, however, they all begin to grow up gaining further life experience which enhances their performance ability and gives them a greater goal to work towards aside from mere career success. 

A heartwarming familial drama, the film doesn’t gloss over how difficult it can be to raise a child in contemporary Japan especially as a single-parent but rather embraces a larger idea of the word family which centres platonic friendship and community while simultaneously understanding of Kaori’s position in the knowledge that none of this is easy and she may not have had access to the kind of support that made it possible for Ken to care for Don-chan with so much love and attention. In any case, little Don-chan is certainly lucky to have so many people around her all invested in her happiness and future whose lives she has also enriched just by her existence. A truly happy film, Okita adds small doses of absurdity to the already surreal events along with a nostalgic sense of childhood comfort right down to the childish font of the film’s titles complete with corrections and crossings out that are, much like life, evidence of joyful trial and error. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Jeans Blues: No Future (ジーンズブルース　明日なき無頼派, Sadao Nakajima, 1974)

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Nihilistic lovers on the run make a break for the sea only to find their pathway blocked in Sadao Nakajima’s anarchic love tragedy, Jeans Blues: No Future (ジーンズブルース　明日なき無頼派, Jeans Blues: Asu naki Buraiha). As the title suggests, the heroes find themselves devoid of hope, pressing the accelerator as far it’ll go with no clear destination in sight and nothing really left to lose while discovering a twisted kind of salvation in their unlikely connection.

Sensing danger in the air, grave-digging drifter Jiro (Tsunehiko Watase) decides to run off with all the money after his gangster friends off a moneylender on the orders of a businessman. Meanwhile, across town, bar lady Hijiriko (Meiko Kaji) decides to walk out on her unsatisfying life taking some money from the till and her boyfriend’s car for good measure. The pair quite literally collide, but realise that they are much the same in their growing sense of emptiness and impossibility. Nothing really really interests Hijiriko anymore, and watching the car burn after Jiro tossed a cigarette is the only thing that’s made her feel alive in eons. Running through his many and various jobs, Jiro reflects that work is “no fun” either and that the reason he wanted the money was for his sister who he says has run up huge debts paying for medical treatment for a close friend and is now facing the threat of being forced into sex work. 

His sense of impotence is palpable in his desperation and the knowledge that there is no good way to come by large amounts of money especially for a young man from the country with limited prospects. At one point he is beaten by a man with a golf club, a symbol of the class privilege and middle class success that will always elude him. The money, much more than he needs for his sister, gives him a new sense of confidence and possibility even if he remains somewhat frugal, picking up an old banger from a second hand car salesman that immediately blows a tire and apparently belonged to “Koji the murderer” which explains the huge dent in the bonnet. Yet he does at least pay his way, even leaving a collection of notes next to the body of a man he ran over intended to pay for medical treatment which casts him as something of a naive innocent cast adrift in a corrupt society and driven into criminality by desperation.

Trapped inside a shipping container and fearing he may be about to die, Jiro comes to see his fate as karmic retribution for having taken the money that was earned by killing others. Inside the container, the pair are in a sense already dead but also undergo a kind of rebirth if only one fuelled by desperation and the connection that has arisen between them. Hijiriko appears to be suffering from some kind of trauma, experiencing a flashback to the orgy going on at the bar which she had been invited to join but declined much to her customer’s disappointment. He remarks that she always did before, a comment which seems to annoy her though perhaps not as much as the arrival of an older woman a male voice tells her on the phone is a actually quite wealthy and doesn’t need the money but does sex work as a kind of hobby. 

It’s Hijiriko who begins to fight back against the world, dressed in the stylish black leather suit Jiro buys her while he struts around in a cap and three-piece tartan suit. Jiro does not actually kill anyone, but Hijiriko does without a second thought perhaps because she herself is already dead. Using her sexuality as a weapon, she asks a hunter if she can hold his gun and trying his luck he lets her only to end up getting shot when he tries to fight back. The pair rob a petrol station for money but come up with only a few notes and coins while the attendant reveals they’ve already made their daily deposit at the bank signalling just how out of luck these lovers really are. They’re bound for the sea, but travel to the mountains and find there only danger and disappointment. Nakajima lends their flight from a dissatisfying existence a kind of desperation in its breakneck pace and frenetic camera work but equally injects a sense of cosmic irony in the many coincidences and reversals that frustrate the lovers’ escape and in the end leave them only one way out from the society which constrains them.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Parades (パレード, Michihito Fujii, 2024)

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Living a life without regrets is easier said than done. The protagonists of Michihito Fujii’s The Parades (パレード, Parade) each have unfinished business that prevents them moving on from this world, but what they discover is an unexpected sense of solidarity among similarly lost souls as they try to lay themselves to rest. After all, all they can do now is observe and reflect while helping others like them with their own lingering doubts and regrets.

Drawing inspiration from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Fujii first introduces us to Minako (Masami Nagasawa). A 35-year-old single mother, she wakes up on a beach and frantically looks for her seven-year-old son Ryo (Haru Iwakawa) little realising that the reason no one seems to be able to hear or react to her is because she’s already dead. Picked up by fellow ghost Akira (Kentaro Sakaguchi), she’s taken to a disused fairground that doubles as a hub for wandering souls. Though it takes her a while to accept her new situation, she gradually bonds with others at the camp each of whom have their own unfinished business which isn’t all that different from her own in that they mostly want to be sure the people they left behind will be alright.

The film takes its name from the monthly processions in which wandering souls meet by lantern light to look for their missing people together. This sense of solidarity and empathy seems to echo the best of humanity along with a melancholy longing. There appears to be little rancour in this afterlife, a yakuza who was killed in a gang war simply feels sorry for his father and so guilty about the girlfriend he left behind that he’s been afraid to face her for the last seven years, and a high school girl who took her own life because of bullying first thinks her unfinished business is vengeance on the bullies but later accepts is actually a desire to apologise to her best friend who then had to take the brunt of the bullies’ cruelty on her own.

What the film seems to say is that we should have more of this fellow feeling in life. Former film producer Michael (Lily Franky) constantly references his days as a student protestor remarking that they might not have amounted to very much but at least they had unity. His regret is less his failed revolution than a moment of emotional cowardice that saw the woman he loved marry someone else instead. Constant references to the end of Casablanca echo their plight as if Maiko (Yuina Kuroshima / Hana Kino) married Sasaki (Ayumu Nakajima / Hiroshi Tachi) for the good of the revolution though she really loved Michael who unlike Rick just walked out on it because in the end he wasn’t brave enough to risk the consequences of its success or failure. 

The world building may not always be consistent and the rules of this universe appear unclear. It seems that in general the ghosts don’t linger long. Even the heavenly liaison Tanaka (Tetsushi Tanaka) appears to have been dead not longer than 40 years with Michael seemingly the only other long-stayer with the others’ deaths fairly recent. In general they are only really waiting for themselves or others, wanting to make sure that their loved ones will be alright in their absence even though there’s nothing more they can do for them now other than observe. Though they can walk through this world and interact with physical objects, their presence is otherwise invisible unless the person they wish to contact happens to be in an altered state. To this extent, the resolution may seem like a bit of a cop-out but does lend an additional poignancy and imply that these lessons learned in limbo can still be taken into the mortal realm creating additional empathy and solidarity among the living so that they may be able to live their lives freely and fully perhaps not entirely without regrets but at least with fewer of those that would prevent them from moving on when their time comes. But even if they find themselves trapped in limbo, they’ll hopefully find others like themselves and a gentle sense of hopefulness about what’s to come even as they prepare to leave this world.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Lightning (稲妻, Mikio Naruse, 1952)

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In many ways despite its matter of fact bleakness, Lightning (稲妻, Inazuma) is among the more optimistic of Mikio Naruse’s films ending on a note of cheerfulness and hope in which the storm has been broken and the heroine seems to have rediscovered a sense a faith in humanity. Yet the attitudes she displays are often contradictory and firmly at odds with the kind of Shitamachi spirit one might find in the films of a director such as Yoji Yamada in films like The Sunshine Girl released a decade later.

The qualities that most define Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine) are, as her mother Osei (Kumeko Urabe) suggests, an inner strength that eludes her older sister Mitsuko (Mitsuko Miura) and a forthrightness that sees her struggle to pursue the kind of life she wants rather than that she is expected to lead. Yet some might see her as snobbish and judgemental, at times attacking her mother for having married four times and given birth to four children each with different fathers. In this she sees a particular moral failing on the part of Osei, but perhaps also expresses a deeper distrust in her mother’s repeated attempts to find stability only through harnessing herself to a man. 

Echoing Takamine’s role in Hideko the Bus Conductor, Kiyoko has a job as a tour guide showing off the sites of bustling Ginza though explaining that this part of the city only really comes alive at night. The job gives her a sense of independence and self-sufficiency a woman in this era is not really permitted to have. Her oldest sister, Nui (Chieko Murata), asks if she contributes to the household but the meeker Mitsuko replies that she wanted to but they told her to save her money instead. In any case, it’s towards marriage that she’s pushed when Nui attempts to play matchmaker brokering an engagement with a 35-year-old baker, Goto (Eitaro Ozawa), who has aspirations of opening a love hotel into which Nui and her feckless husband Ryuzo (Kenzaburo Uemura) have invested. Of course, it turns out that Nui is herself having an affair with the baker who is oily in the extreme and disliked by most of the family though eventually manages to make his way into the beds of two of the sisters.

Kiyoko has little desire to marry and asks her mother if any of her four marriages made her happy, but her mother only says that happiness is not an important concept hinting the hardship she’s faced in her life and that a woman of her generation may have had to put up with a certain of degree dissatisfaction to keep a roof over her head and food on the table. While working on the bus, Kiyoko spots Mitsuko’s husband talking to another woman in the street but decides to say nothing only for him to suddenly die and the woman turn up with a baby asking for financial support. Kiyoko tells her sister that marriage is hell, but she smiles and says Kiyoko will be the exception in an expression of the various ways in which women enforce these arcane social codes against each other despite their own misery. Mitsuko too wants to escape but admits she doesn’t have Kiyoko’s courage which is how she too eventually falls into the clutches of Goto much to her sister’s disappointment. 

There is something undeniably poignant in Kiyoko’s frustrated defiance, looking longingly at the paintings and books of their lodger, a young woman from a more middle-class family working her way through university. Kiyoko says she wants to study too, but her mother shoots her down. She’s already 23, and it’s a little late to be picky about marriage let alone strike out for a more stereotypically middle-class life with a white collar job and nice house in the suburbs. It’s the suburbs though to which she eventually moves, without even bothering to tell any of her family. When the nice landlady asks if she has any she admits she has but also has nothing to do with them, which earns her a confused frown. She later says something similar to the pair of piano-playing siblings who live next-door in a kind of suburban utopia, quite clearly ashamed of her humble Shitamachi roots and family members she sees as common and immodest.

In any case, her admiration of the siblings and obvious attraction to the brother (Jun Negami) who is so much more sensitive and caring than her own (Osamu Maruyama) who appears to use the wartime bullets lodged inside him as an excuse not to move on with his life, suggest that she is still in the end looking for a conventional family only one she sees as more positive (or just posher). Perhaps it’s not so much marriage she rejects but dependency and subjugation, believing a marriage to a man like this might be one more of love and equality than the dissatisfying relationships experienced by her mother and sisters. The expressionistic bolt of lightning which appears during a difficult conversation with her mother is like the breaking of a storm, a kind of letting go in which her resentment begins to melt away and her mother agrees to retreat realising that unlike Mitsuko she can take care of herself and to that extent at least is an independent post-war woman. Ambivalent, but in its way warm and forgiving the film gives Kiyoko permission to embrace her aspiration, defy the social codes which constrain her and seek her own happiness, but also allows her to shed her cynicism in rediscovering a faith in humanity and re-embracing her admittedly imperfect mother all while leaving her behind.