Category: Japan

School of the Holy Beast (聖獣学園, Norifumi Suzuki, 1974)

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“Why is sex wrong?” a rebel nun enquires, hinting at the hypocritical atmosphere of the convent which comes to stand in for the patriarchal superstructure of the contemporary society. That it does so might in a way be surprising given that Christianity has relatively little cultural relevance in Japan save its stance as a persecuted religion during the feudal era. Director Norifumi Suzuki jumps on the nunsploitation bandwagon but does so with a baroque romanticism mixed with punkish youthfulness as two young women find themselves rebels in the house of God.

They are both there for reasons largely unconnected to religion. 18-year-old Maya (Yumi Takigawa) is searching for the truth behind her birth and her mother’s death, while Sister Ishida (Emiko Yamauchi) claims she’s been sent there by a wicked stepmother. Ishida also kicks up a stink during a class by questioning the truth of immaculate conception which is quite odd for someone who wanted to become a nun, while otherwise punished for drinking whisky in the middle of the night. Punishment does seem to be the main thrust of their religious practice with the transgressions of “adultery”, which includes all impure thoughts, murder (!), and theft taken the most seriously. On her first night at the convent Maya is woken by the sound of another nun furiously whipping herself though in fairness there just isn’t much else to do. 

Suzuki rams home the erotisicm of ritual in the baptism Maya undergoes during her initiation as a nun in which she is totally nude and instructed to stand with her arms out as if on the cross in front of the altar. She must then bend to kiss the crucifix before receiving her veil as a bride of Christ. The nuns talk of lives of eternal virginity while burying themselves in asceticism in an effort to deny their natural desires but have to a degree sublimated their lust in violence. The most common form of punishment is whipping, while Maya is later tortured with thorns and artfully battered by roses. When one nun steals money in guilt for having abandoned her impoverished family to begin her spiritual journey to Christ, she confesses herself to a priest who offers her the same amount so that she can help her family and ease her conscience by returning it. But in reality the priest has tricked her. He resents that she feels as if her sin has been forgiven and she may forget her guilt, cruelly telling her that she will never hear the voice of God before going on to violate her. 

The act of betrayal, of himself breaking the code to which he should subscribe, is only a echo of an societal corruption which allows men to abuse their power often with the complicity of the women around them such as the abess who has long been in love with him. Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe) is a man whose faith has been shaken. He bears the scars from exposure to the atomic bomb in Nagasaki which is centre of Christianity in Japan. After telling Hisako (Yayoi Watanabe) that God will not see her, he asks if anyone has actually seen him and why he does nothing when his people suffer. 

Both he and the abbess are trapped in a hell of their own making, though as the girls both say the convent is akin to a prison. When Hisako’s sister visits her they talk to each other through glass as if she were a prisoner, though in many ways she is oppressed by her own repressed desires while those of the other nuns have begun to drive them quietly out of their minds and into sadomasochistic fury. This peculiar madness is only deepened by the arrival of a new Mother Superior who returns from Europe insistent on rooting out “witches” in league with the devil. Suzuki signals the absurdity by playing a chorus of elation when a tortured nun wets herself over a tablet featuring a crucifix in the inversion of a bizarre Edo-era ritual designed to identify secret Christians who were at that point illegal. 

To break free of the covent and return to her liberated life in contemporary Japan as seen in the cheerful opening sequences of her date with Kenta (Hayato Tani), Maya must also free her mother’s ghost and the souls of her sisters by forcing Kakinuma to reckon with his crimes if in the most ironic of ways. Suzuki shoots with febrile romanticism, the pastel colours of the church lending it a hellish glow even before the resurrection of a ghost enacts karmic revenge in a feverish atmosphere of romantic jealously and masochistic repression.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

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

Ajin: Demi-Human (亜人, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2017)

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Katsuyuki Motohiro’s 2001social drama Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius had attempted to show the government acting with compassion having discovered humans with a potentially dangerous power, in that case the unfortunate ability to broadcast their every thought. Rather than locking them up in labs, the government had allowed the Transparents to live in the community under the caveat that they must never be told of their ability while continuing to monitor them secretly and in fact micromanaging their lives with less than ethical attention. 2017’s Ajin (亜人), adapted from the manga by Gamon Sakurai, is in many ways Transparent’s flip side in which the government has discovered the existence of a series of people known as Demi-Humans with super fast healing ability meaning that they cannot die from injury and has been conducting what is essentially vivisection on them justifying themselves that “the Ajin are the precious key to the evolution of mankind”. 

Nevertheless, they are mindful that the public would not accept it if they knew the government’s claims of “protecting” Ajins was a smokescreen to disguise the fact they’ve been experimenting on them, let alone selling the results to commercial companies for the production of chemical weapons among other things. Previously a regular medical student, Kei Nagano (Takeru Satoh) is the third Ajin to be unmasked in Japan after being hit by a bus only to heal rapidly and stumble away. After a brief period of torture, Kei is “rescued” by crazed terrorist revolutionary leader Sato (Go Ayano) and his underling Tanaka (Yu Shirota), escaped Ajins 1 and 2, but becomes their enemy after he refuses to turn against the scientists who had been torturing him pointing out that killing them would only make him feel worse and is therefore counterproductive. 

The implication is that 20 years of brutal torture at the hands of mad scientists has turned Sato into a crazed fascist hellbent on the extinction of the human race, seeking an “autonomous” space for Ajin along with full civil rights for Demi-Humans. Though we are told that only three Ajin have been unmasked so far in Japan, the implication is that there are many more living quietly some of whom Sato recruits after putting out a call for all disenfranchised Demi-Humans to join his revolution not for equality but domination. It’s this movement Kei can’t support, the classically “good” Ajin who disapproves of Sato’s actions and wants to leave peacefully alongside humanity. As such, there’s something a little uncomfortable in his inevitable decision to team up with the people who were just vivisecting him in order to stop Sato achieving his goal of guaranteed civil rights for people like him asking for nothing more than that his family be protected and he be left alone and given a new ID to live quietly in somewhere in Japan when all of this over. 

The unpalatable implication seems to be that minorities are only worthy of respect if they serve those in power, both Kei and another closeted Ajin benefiting directly and individually by siding with humanity though humanity may not honour the various promises it makes while they are partially complicit in the torture and exploitation of other Ajins. Sato’s basic request is only to given his full rights in the freedom from torture, but even this cannot be granted because of the threat he presents to humanity in that the inability to die means that he cannot be controlled through violence. Ironically enough Sato does seem to believe himself to be the next step in human evolution, after 20 years of brutal torture believing that humanity is a lesser being which those like him are intended to replace. 

Kei meanwhile encounters kind humans such as Mrs. Yamanaka (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) who kindly offers him a place to hideout because when you see someone is in trouble you just help them even if a baying mob later turn up at your door to ask why. There may be a minor allegory in the way the Ajins are treated, feared by and excluded from regular society, forced to keep their true natures secret in order to live a “quiet” life but than again Sato and his cohort of equally crazed young Demi-Humans who presumably have never been tortured are depicted as quasi-fascist radicals selling their own organs on the medical black market and eventually prepared to unleash a chemical weapon on Tokyo to make it unliveable for regular humans in order to claim their own space. Nevertheless, Motohiro’s drama is at its best during its high impact, well choreographed action sequences displaying some top quality visual effects as the Ajins produce their ghostly avatars or reassemble themselves after catastrophic injury even if the discomfort of the underlying messages cannot be entirely escaped. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Target (薔薇の標的, Toru Murakawa, 1980)

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By 1980 Toru Murakawa was an in-demand director thanks largely to his extremely successful collaborations with late ‘70s icon Yusaku Matsuda. Fresh off the back of the Game series, Toei Central Film hired him to do for their aspiring star Hiroshi Tachi what he’d done for Matsuda with grimy noir Target (薔薇の標的, Bara no Hyoteki). Interestingly enough Target shares its Japanese title with the 1972 drama The Target of Roses, a truly bizarre thriller in which a hitman stumbles on an international nazi conspiracy that was penned by the same screenwriters but is otherwise entirely unconnected with the earlier film and shares no common plot elements whatsoever. 

Set firmly within the contemporary era, the action takes place in Yokohama and is essentially a tale of proto-heroic bloodshed as the hero, Hiroshi (Hiroshi Tachi), seeks vengeance for the death of his best friend, Akira, during a drug deal which is ambushed by a third party who make off with both the drugs and the money killing Akira in the process. Hiroshi goes to prison for four years and then sets about getting some payback on his release by chasing down the Idogaki gang through gunman Yagi who he believes was directly responsible for Akira’s death. 

The plot is perhaps straight out of the Nikkatsu playbook, a little less honour than you’d find in the usual Toei picture though also cynical and nihilistic in keeping with the late ‘70s taste for generalised paranoia. Hiroshi is soon targeted by the Idogaki gang, but is saved by an old prison buddy, Kadota (Ryohei Uchida), who is a little older than he is and to an extent has a noble reason for his life of crime in that he has a son who became disabled after contracting polio and wants to get enough money together to make sure he’ll be alright when he can no longer look after him. Kadota then adds a third a man, Nakao, a former narcotics cop who jokes that he was kicked off the force for rape but according to Kadota was forced out for noble reasons after his attempt to help a friend backfired. The three men team up to turn the tables on Idogaki by ambushing his own drug deal with, in a throwback to ‘60s Sinophobia, gangsters from Shanghai. 

Meanwhile Hiroshi is caught between the life he had before and the contemporary reality in reuniting with his former girlfriend Kyoko (Yutaka Nakajima) who has evidently become the mistress of a wealthy man and is presumably the mysterious benefactor who paid all his legal fees. After a meet cute at a florist he also strikes up a tentative relationship with a wealthy young woman, the daughter of a CEO who plans to move to Mexico. Despite the rising prosperity of Japan in the early ‘80s, pretty much everyone has their sights set on going abroad, Kadota planning to head to Canada after making sure his son is well provided for. Yet Hiroshi is trapped in the Japan of the past, obsessed with vengeance for his friend while torn by his relationship with Kyoko who similarly wants to exit her comfortable yet compromised life to return to a more innocent time at Hiroshi’s side while unbeknownst to him the mistress of high ranking Idogaki boss Hamada. 

What becomes clear is that there is no prospect of escape from contemporary Japan, not even perhaps in death, Hiroshi left alive but dead inside at the film’s conclusion having committed a kind of spiritual suicide born of the dark side of what remained of his honour in seeking vengeance for the death of his friend who had seemingly only participated in the drug deal at Hiroshi’s command in an effort to improve the fortunes of their gang. Once again produced by Toei’s subsidiary Toei Central Film, Target has lower production values than the films Murakawa was making with Matsuda (who has a small yet memorable cameo as a rockstar whose life has been ruined by drugs) with non-synchronised dialogue and a grimy aesthetic which only adds to its sense of fatalistic nihilism otherwise enlivened by Murakawa’s artful composition and atmosphere of moral ruin in which there is no more humanity nor justice. 

Baby Assassins: Nice Days (ベイビーわるきゅーれ ナイスデイズ, Yugo Sakamoto, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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After beginning to conquer the demands of adulthood, Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi) are taking a well-deserved break, or more like a working holiday to be precise, but soon find themselves with another unexpected mission to clean up a messy situation on behalf of the Guild. Baby Assassins: Nice Days (ベイビーわるきゅーれ ナイスデイズ, Baby Valkyrie​: Nice Days), the third in series of deadpan slacker action movies from Yugo Sakamoto, adjusts the balance of the previous two films shifting more towards action than the girls’ aimless lives while setting them against an opponent who is anything but aimless.

In fact with the girls find their way to the home of Kaede Fuyumura (Sosuke Ikematsu), is plastered in ironic motivational slogans that seem to be a kind of parody of salaryman’s kaizen obsession. Fuyumura likes to rank things and wants to make sure he’s at the top, but also wants out of the game because he’s bored with it and also fed up with difficult clients frustrated when one takes ages to decide whether or not he should kill the target resulting unnecessary stress for them and an unsatisfying kill for Fuyumura. That’s largely why he’s agreed to this one last job of killing 150 people who took part in cancelling a university student online. The problem is that Fuyumura is a freelancer which presents a problem for the Guild which has decided he must die for violating their rules and bringing the profession into disrepute. Thus Mahiro and Chisato find themselves in an awkward position when they turn up to kill their latest target and realise they’ve been double booked to take out Fuyumura ’s kill.

The admin mixup, though it isn’t one really, rams home the series’ persistent absurdity that this weird world of assassins isn’t so different from contemporary corporate culture while the girls are still subject to the same problems as any other 20-something. This time around, we’re introduced to another prominent agency which is run out of a farmer’s agricultural co-op and hides weapons inside boxes of vegetables, while Mahiro and Chisato get a pair of supervisors with the de facto team leader Iruka (Atsuko Maeda) going off on lengthy rants about why it’s impossible to work with Gen Z while the girls struggle with her uptight dismissiveness. Yet even when there’s tension or discord, the fact remains that the Chisato and Mahiro are also part of a team and have a vast network of support to rely on including their cleanup squad while Fuyumura is a lone wolf who’s driven himself half out of his mind with his quest to be the best, a message is brought home to him when he approaches the farmer’s union to ask for “a replacement” after getting one of their guys killed only to be told off and reminded the farmers work as one big family rather than a series of disposable minions. 

There is something a little poignant about Fuyumura’s wondering when his birthday is as if this small forgotten detail represented his missing humanity. The only time he feels like a human being is doing something mundane like cleaning his microwave and brushing his teeth. As she had the brothers in the previous film, Mahiro finds a kind connection with Fuyumura as they each discover a worthy match but knowing only one of them can survive. In an introspective movement, Mahiro asks Chisato if they can still hang out together on the other side if the worst happens, but she shuts the question down perhaps more in an attempt to shift Mahiro’s mindset but also berating herself for forgetting her birthday and making hurried plans to coverup her crime against friendship.

For all the absurdity about hitman union rules and rights of employment in an illegal profession, the films has a genuine affection for the relationship between the two girls as well as that between the wider team who are always around to have their back while they also take care to protect each other. Perhaps having to field a work crisis during their “holiday” is their final test of adulthood, and one they largely pass in enforcing their boundaries and defiantly having a good time anyway even if they did have to cancel their reservation at local barbecue restaurant to stakeout the home of a crazed killer. Once again featuring a series of well choreographed and innovative action sequences, the series’ third instalment seems to come into its own expanding the world of the Baby Assassins but setting them free inside it evidently a lot more at home with the concept of adulting.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Round Trip Heart (ロマンス, Yuki Tanada, 2015)

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“Somewhere in Japan, there’s someone waiting for me” sing the heroes of Yuki Tanada’s Round Trip Heart (ロマンス, Romance), each a little lost and unwilling to go home looking for something but also afraid to find it. In any case, they can only begin by stepping off the rails and taking a detour through their shared sense of loneliness bonding as they look for new directions and an accommodation with a disappointing reality. 

Ironically enough, Hachiko (Yuko Oshima) is a top operator of the refreshment cart aboard the Romance Car heading from Tokyo to the country by train. Hachiko claims to love trains because of their sense of certainty. After all they travel on rails, have a clear destination, and will definitely return after reaching the end of their journeys. She meanwhile feels a little lost and empty in her life of forced politeness with a feckless boyfriend who asks her for money before she heads off to work. An unexpected letter from her estranged mother, Yoriko (Megumi Nishimuta), and a strange encounter with a weird old man who tries to steal a packet of biscuits however force her change course, getting off the train and heading back into the past. 

Sakuraba (Koji Ookura), the biscuit pilferer, is a 45-year-old failed film producer on the run from the police and myriad loansharks. His sense of loneliness mirrors Hachiko’s own in that he is divorced with a 9-year-old daughter he hasn’t seen in two years and lifetime’s worth of regrets. Hachiko becomes for him a kind of surrogate daughter as he inappropriately reassembles the torn up letter and convinces Hachiko that it implies her mother may attempt to take her own life suggesting that they journey to the place it mentions, Hakone, where the family once spent a pleasant holiday. 

Familial breakdown is reason for their shared sense of displacement yet Hachiko has projected all of her resentment onto her mother who never got over her father’s decision to leave while Sakuraba fears that his daughter has grown to hate him and harbours a secret desire to restore his family but is too consumed with shame to approach them. By going to Hakone in search of her mother, Hachiko begins to reevaluate her childhood memories perhaps understanding a little more of her mother from the perspective of a grown woman rather than that of a small child who had sometimes felt left out by her parents’ closeness while they were together and rejected by her mother’s need for romantic validation once her father had left. In one particular scene we see Yoriko wearing dark glasses with what looks like a bruise over her eye while taking Hachiko to a restaurant where she orders steak only for her daughter presumably because she cannot afford two meals explaining that her boyfriend has broken up with her because of her lingering attachment to Hachiko’s father. 

The memory forces her back into a moment of resentment feeling as if her mother was only ever nice to her when men let her down, poignantly recalling her neediness in lamenting that everyone always leaves her while asking Hachiko to promise she never would. Sakuraba too complains that everybody leaves him though in his case in the wake of his repeated failures as a film producer and subsequent dealing with loansharks and other shady characters. Just as Yoriko had continued to dream of romantic fulfilment, Sakuraba continues to dream of success in film but crucially as a path back towards his family as perhaps finding a man might have been for Yoriko though she was never able to let go of the idealised image of her husband pining for the familial closeness of their Hakone trip. 

Even so the force that governs their lives is fatalistic passivity, Hachiko riding the rails to their certain destinations and back again, while Sakuraba makes every decision by tossing a coin, an action rendered meaningless by his inability to tell heads from tales. Only by rejecting their passivity in getting off the train and giving up the coin tricks can they begin to face themselves, deciding to set out and look for those who may be waiting for them rather than just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Then again perhaps if you sit in the same place long enough, what you’re looking for will eventually find you so long as you’re on the right track. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Wolves of the Night (夜の狼, Yoichi Ushihara, 1958)

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A cold-hearted yakuza starts to get second thoughts when confronted with the misery his actions create in Yoichi Ushihara’s slice of Nikkatsu Noir, Wolves of the Night (夜の狼, Yoru no Okami). Though the hero is ostensibly Tsukida (Ryoji Hayama), the conflicted gangster unable to reconcile himself with the fact that he has fallen in love with a women he himself destroyed, it’s equally about the women who get caught in the crossfire of a burgeoning gang war and are each victims of male greed and indifference.

In any case, gang boss Tachibana (Somesho Matsumoto) brings a lot of this on himself. The secondary narrative revolves around a woman, Takako (Mari Shiraki), who borrowed money from the Manji gang to build her bar, but now that it’s complete Tachibana swindles her by calling in the debt and foreclosing on the property, passing ownership to Tsukida with instructions to kick Takako out. She, however, doesn’t take well to this and is resentful of Tachibana for screwing her over so she vows revenge. Her original attempt to get it by seducing Tsukida doesn’t work out, so she recruits a yakuza from a rival gang to extort them claiming that they have mole and he’ll only reveal their identity when they hand over the cash. This plan has some pretty tragic consequences and not least for Tachibana himself, but none of this would have happened if he hadn’t behaved so badly in cheating Takako out of the bar she worked so hard to build. He’d also told Tsukida that the bar owner was a beauty and it was understandable if wanted to try seducing her. 

But by this point Tsukida has developed a fondness for Katsumi (Izumi Ashikawa), a young woman he first meets when she’s caught by some of his guys offering herself for sex work in their territory. The other ladies describe Katsumi as “odd” and “an outsider”. It’s clear from her behaviour and the way she’s dressed, not to mention a lack of awareness of the rules of the gang, that she’s never done this before and is terrified. Tsukida calls his men off and tells her to go home, but later realises that it’s his own fault she was put in this situation because he was responsible for collecting the debt her parents owed to Tachibana taken out because her father is bedridden. Tsukida seems shaken by the old lady’s intense resentment, but still takes their money if attempting to convince Tachibana not to pursue them any further because they have nothing left to give, correctly assuming that Katsumi resorted to sex work to get the money. 

It maybe the sense of guilt that proved the last straw as the old couple then take their own lives but rather than freeing her lead Katsumi on a lonely path of self-destruction driven only by her hated for Tachibana and Tsukida. The fact that she later becomes ill further emphasises her positioning as a symbol of a despoiled nation poisoned by the ruthless inhumanity of the post-war society, along with literal a embodiment of Tsukida’s guilty conscience. Tsukida rejects Takako as a person more like himself, an example of corrupted femininity using her body to manipulate men in a world in which a woman has little other power, and instead is drawn to Katsumi who was once innocent, demure, and cheerful but who he himself has destroyed through his own greed and heartlessness.

Spending some time in hospital following a failed suicide attempt seems to heal her in body body and soul, though the total about face in Katsumi’s feelings for Tsukida seems somewhat bewildering even if he did visit her every day and presumably win her over despite her resentment towards him for contributing to her parents’ deaths. Nevertheless, it’s his feelings for Katsumi that see Tsukida longing to quit the yakuza and retreat to the country to live a small, honest life with her free of the city’s corruption. But as so often in the movies, it’s not that simple and this time it’s a tragic consequence born of male failure and insecurity that eventually costs him his shot at a normal life even as his frenemy, a local policeman he often sees in the same bar and gives him unsolicited advice about how he should quit the yakuza, remains surprisingly supportive suggesting that his redemption may merely be on hold rather than cancelled. In any case, though shooting almost entirely on stage sets, Ushihara makes good use of stock footage of contemporary Ginza as a place of bright lights and equally dark shadows where gangsters lurk on every corner and mercy is in desperately short supply.

Tokyo Lullaby (東京夜曲, Jun Ichikawa, 1997)

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A meditation on lost love and middle-aged regret, Jun Ichikawa’s Tokyo Lullaby (東京夜曲, Tokyo Yakyoku) weaves a melancholy path through a lonely city but finds in it a sense of comfort or perhaps serenity in the gentle rhythms of ordinary lives that somehow become something greater. A diffident translator in love with an unhappily married middle-aged woman slowly uncovers a deep well of unresolved longing largely thanks to those around him who will remember for those who do not wish to speak. 

Ichikawa signals his intentions early on, transitioning from a nighttime shot of the city to a small cafe where a woman is sitting in the foreground looking forlorn while customers behind her discuss the reappearance of Koichi (Kyozo Nagatsuka), the son of the man who owns the electronics store opposite, who had walked out on his family several years previously but has abruptly returned. From this short scene, we can perhaps infer that there is some connection between Koichi and the woman, Tami (Kaori Momoi), though we aren’t quite sure what it is. In any case, the cafe, which bears the name of her late husband Osawa, becomes a kind of nexus uniting the lives of the various community members who each come there to play go and discuss the past. 

Like Tami, Koichi is reticent and melancholy. He says nothing of where he’s been and his wife, Hisako (Mitsuko Baisho), asks him no questions. She later tells the writer, Tei, whose affections she does not return, that she doesn’t really care about how Koichi is living his life because she is busy living her own and likes to do as she pleases. His sister asks him if he plans to stay this time, but Koichi can’t answer her seemingly uncomfortable in himself and unable either to stay or to go. Walking on crutches his injured foot seems to symbolise his emotional unsteadiness literally unable to find sure footing or move forward with his life. 

Piecing the tale together, Tei figures out that Koichi and Tami were once together but she suddenly married someone else who had a terminal illness and passed away shortly afterwards around the time that Koichi first went walkabout. Hisako, meanwhile, had been in love with Osawa though he loved Tami who did not love him. Somehow it’s all very complicated and incredibly simple, the way they’ve sabotaged their own lives and happiness though it couldn’t have been any other way. Tei watches something similar play out in the neighbourhood. One of the young men who works at the electronics shop had been dating a girl who worked at the record store, but he abruptly begins pursuing Ng, a Chinese woman who works at the cafe, and eventually marries her leaving the record store girl heartbroken. 

Things change and they stay the same. Ng takes over the cafe, Koichi’s foot heals while he also manages to resurrect the family business by turning it into a shop that video games as if taking a symbolic step into modernity that suggests this time he’ll stay just as Tami decides it’s time for her to leave. Paths cross endlessly, Ichikawa frequently cutting away to tiny vignettes of other cafe goers as their stories weave through each other, each one note in the great symphony of the city without which life would be impossible. Yet what’s more important is what is not said, the silences that exist between people and perhaps within them too. Things that are understood, and those which are not. 

Tami explains that she looked for answers but all she found was junk until the relief of boredom became her only frame of happiness. Only by escaping the city does it seem that she’ll be happy while Koichi seems as if he’s getting itchy feet and Tei, joining the cycle, decides to move on rather than remain in painful proximity to Hisako who as she said has her own life and does not seem to want to share it with anyone much less him. The pain of the past cannot fully be healed, only borne amid the cheerful scenes of city life, children playing, people doing business, the sun shining and elderly couples meeting in cafes. Pain and loneliness seem to be the natural conditions of urbanity, but Ichikawa paints them with a kind of rosiness, merely the sadness that unpins the lullaby of a city which is always changing yet remains the same in its unwalled alleyways and those that exist only in the deepest recesses of memory. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Retake (リテイク, Kota Nakano, 2023)

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What if life were like a movie and you could simply go for another take when things didn’t turn out like you planned? That’s the way it works out for the hero of Kota Nakano’s Retake (リテイク), a young man editing in realtime in an attempt to fix his mistakes and engineer a happier outcome while preparing to meet the end of his youth. Part summer holiday movie, part meta take on storytelling and the movies, the film is most of all about moving on whether things work out or not.

To that extent it’s telling that the film the teens are making is about a couple who attempt to go to a place where time does not flow. For the flighty Yu, the film’s architect, the desire seems to reflect her own anxiety about growing up and entering a new world of adulthood. “I wish this time would go on forever,” she sighs while discussing with her cameraman Kei how the film should end. Nakano plays with this scene, repeating it several times as if it itself were a land where time does not flow and Kei were playing out a memory in his head envisaging how something should have gone rather than how it did. Eventually the conclusion that they come to is that they should continue their journey instead of staying here, trapped in an eternal loop of dead time with no past or future. 

But moving forward is scary, after all it means leaving the past behind. Kei snaps images of the world around him as if he were trying to steal a moment, freeze it and take it with him. The hero of the film, played by his friend Jiro, is an artist who similarly tries to capture motion through the medium of sketching and constantly finds himself frustrated. He likes to sit still and concentrate, but he meets a girl who likes dance and move in the free flow of time. Kei is much the same, a natural observer yet sometimes blind to circumstance as in his decision to invite Allie, a girl they meet by chance while raiding the school broadcasting club for equipment, oblivious to the awkwardness that seems to exist between herself and Yu. 

The film teases the conflict, eventually settling on a disagreement if not exactly over a boy than surrounding him though for the rest of the runtime seems as if it may more have been more about the tension between the girls themselves. Nevertheless, Kei quickly fixes on the idea of repairing their friendship to prevent the film collapsing when his own attempt to confess his feelings is seemingly the straw that breaks the camel’s back prompting Yu into a petulant conviction that no one cares about her film and there are only ulterior motives among her crew. But paradoxically, what Kei learns is the importance of speaking up in the moment, shaking off his diffidence to support Allie when her suggestion is treated with callous indifference by Yu and thereby building bridges.

Though those same bridges may ironically leave him feeling left out and isolated as a peripheral figure on the team while the others all seem to pair off leaving him alone. He tries different approaches, and retakes his mistakes looking for the perfect ending while otherwise buoyed by the warmth of the summer and company of his new friends wishing like Yu and the protagonists of the film that this moment would never end, symbolically repeating and reliving it as if himself trapped in the land where time doesn’t flow. Nakano signals the unreality of his environment by allowing Kei to approach the unseen camera and turn it off, announcing a new take with a clapperboard and then editing in real time in search of perfect answers. In some senses, it’s the operation of nostalgia but also an adolescent desire to find the right path forward along with the courage to take it. But what the teens discover is that in the end you just have to go, frustrated by the boredom of being trapped in an external limbo of stagnant time and eager to see what the next scene will bring in a continual flow of isolated moments that somehow constitute a life.

Retake screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

August in the Water (水の中の八月, Sogo Ishii, 1995)

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How does the world, or perhaps the cosmos, attempt to communicate with us? As Douglas Adams once did, August in the Water (水の中の八月, Mizu no naka no Hachigatsu) suggests it maybe through the dolphins who here at least seem to be quasi-mystical beings existing in what is really the lifeblood of humanity. In the film’s opening scenes, we’re told that the hero, Mao (Shinsuke Aoki) whose name means “true fish” and his friend Ukiya (Masaaki Takarai) have taken part-time jobs at a marine part to learn how to communicate with dolphins, but it’s the heroine Izumi, whose name means “spring” who eventually claims to have learned to do so. 

At least, her final words are that the dolphins have taught her “the perfect balance” which has allowed her to open the floodgates both literal and metaphorical to return water to an arid land. We’re repeatedly told that there’s been a lengthy drought and a water shortage leading to rationing and locked pipes though the marine park remains open and the local festival goes ahead  hinting at the ways in which we do and don’t value our natural resources. Izumi’s science teacher tells the kids that humans don’t contribute to the Earth and waste the resources that it gives us which might help to explain the gradual ossification of the planet including a mysterious condition known as the Stone Disease which causes people to collapse in the street as their organs harden. 

Izumi’s sister Yo later remarks that she thinks humanity came from a distant planet long ago and yearns to go home but to do so we must become stone because water is a substance that exists only here on Earth. Turning to stone is however seen as quite a bad thing and also echoes a millennial distrust in increasing technology with TV pundits positing that if human brains were replaced with computer chips we wouldn’t need to worry about water shortages anymore. In Yo’s dream, after people’s brains have become computer chips they become connected to the universe and can transport their minds to the moon enabling them to communicate with anyone anywhere at any time. 

But then despite the potential for communication that computers were only just beginning to offer in the mid-90s, Izumi warns her sister to stay away from them as they leave you vulnerable to the Stone Disease. The boys’ ultramodern friend, Miki (Reiko Matsuo), is a computer addict and it’s she who eventually manages to unlock parts of the mystery but paradoxically as if she were some kind of seer correctly predicting that an accident will befall Izumi on 23rd August and discovering a prophecy that in the year humanity neglects the water god two meteorites will fall in close proximity and drought will follow. Only a ritual conducted by the chosen one under a full moon will be able to cure it. Two child-like old men also warn that nothing’s been the same since they moved the old shinto shrine over which there have also been sightings of UFOs.

After the diving accident in which Izumi plunges meteor-like into the pool, she herself feels as if she’s been split in two almost like the world itself which is divided between these ancient beliefs and modern advancements that have perhaps blocked the flow that once allowed us to communicate with each other and with the universe. A psychiatrist suggests that Izumi may be suffering with sudden onset schizophrenia as a result of her accident and that all of her talk about secret messages from dolphins and mysterious aliens who want to turn the world to stone is nothing but confused delusion though in the film’s closing scenes she herself takes on a supernatural quality as a kind of etherial saviour figure who realises that she may have been dead ever since the accident and is now something different, different and distant as her sister puts it, charged with the mission of rejuvenating a human spirit long since dulled by mechanisation.

In contrast to Ishii’s earlier films which brimmed with punkish energy, August in the Water unfolds at a leisurely pace with eerie yet nostalgic mood music and a new age sensibility speaking to millennial youth with a sense of turn of the century anxiety and human remorse that perhaps we’ve already poisoned our futures. Nevertheless, despite his youthful heartbreak, what Izumi bequeaths to Mao and humanity itself is seemingly the ability to live in the abundant fullness of existence until that existence is done and we return once again to water and the comforting embrace of the Earth.

August in the Water screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)

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“Even if someone kills you, you wouldn’t die,” a drunken husband somewhat sarcastically replies having pledged to come back and haunt his wife if he died and she married a man who didn’t drink. His words take on a prophetic quality given that the heroine of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Ningyo Densetsu) takes on a quasi-supernatural quality as an embodiment of nature’s revenge after someone tries, and fails, to kill her having already killed her husband for witnessing their murder of another man who’d tried to resist their plans of buying up half the town to build a nuclear plant. 

By the mid-1980s, Japan’s economy had fully recovered from post-war privation and was heading into an era of unprecedented prosperity which is to say that the coming of a power plant was not welcomed with the same degree of hope and excitement as it may have been in the 1950s when it was sold not only as a new source of employment for moribund small towns but an engine that would fuel the new post-war society. Several industrial scandals such as the Minamata disease had indeed left those in rural areas fearful of the consequences of entering a faustian pact with big business, which is one reason why the guys from Kinki Electric Power sell it as an amusement park project though even this has the locals wary not just of the disruption it will bring to their lives and potential ruin of their livelihoods which are dependent on the protection of the natural environment but that what is promised simply won’t be delivered. Fisherman Keisuke (Jun Eto) says as much when lamenting a previous aquaculture programme which didn’t pan out and caused lasting damage to marine life. 

In any case, as others say there’s no money in going out to sea anymore and its clear that the old-fashioned, traditional way of life practiced by Keisuke and his newlywed wife Migiwa (Mari Shirato) is no longer sustainable. Migiwa is an abalone diver working without modern equipment but using heavy weights to dive deep enough to reach the shells. As such she’s dependent on her husband to pull her back up to the boat when she tugs the rope. She must put her life entirely in his hands though in truth, he does not seem to take his responsibility all that seriously. The couple bicker relentlessly and not even she really believes him when he says he witnessed a murder which might be understandable given the extent of his drinking. All of which is further evidence against her when she manages to escape from the assassination plot and runs straight to the nearest policeman who thanks her for turning herself in implying he believes she is responsible for Keisuke’s death. 

The possible collusion of the policeman hints as a further sense of distrust in authority which has become far too close to corporate interests. Shady industrialist Miyamoto (Yoshiro Aoki) ropes in both the mayor and the head of the fishing association in his talks with Kinki Electric Power along with Shimogawa from the local tourist board who evidently opposes the plans as he is the man Keisuke witnesses being murdered. As Miyamoto says “sometimes your hands get a little dirty” though he never “directly” involves himself matters such as these. The situation is complicated by an unresolved love triangle between Miyamoto’s spineless son Shohei (Kentaro Shimizu), a sometime photographer, who is resentful of Keisuke and in love with Migiwa complaining that Keisuke always outdrinks him and gets the girl too hinting at his sense of wounded masculinity. Isolated by his class difference, he appears not to approve of his father’s actions but later does little to stop them and eventually sides with corporate interest over his feelings for Migiwa who in any case seems to have become more attached to Keisuke following his death which she vows to avenge. 

There is there is something quite strange in the prophetical quality of Keisuke’s words also predicting the “black sweat” of the Jizo on the beach and the mystical storm which does eventually sweep everything clean destroying the signs for the new nuclear power plant already installed on the beach. In this way, Migiwa becomes a vengeful force of nature taking up arms against those who wilfully ravage and pollute the natural environment while damaging the lives of those who lived on its shores such as herself and Keisuke. She takes revenge not only for the murder of her husband by corrupt capitalists but against that corruption itself even as she laments that “no matter how many I kill, they just keep coming.” “Don’t worry, maybe all this was just a dream,” Keisuke once again prophetically intones though it’s difficult to know if it’s defeating the capitalist order that is a fantasy or the maintenance of the idealised rural life to which Migiwa seemingly finds her way back swimming into an unpolluted sea surrounded by the floating barrels of ama divers and clear blue skies, a creature of nature once again.

Mermaid Legend screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.