Category: Japan

Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days (この日々が凪いだら, Yutaka Tsunemachi, 2023)

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Life goes on as usual, until it doesn’t. The couple at the centre of Yutaka Tsunemachi’s debut feature Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days (この日々が凪いだら, Kono Hibi Ga Naidara), are about to hit the crisis of youth in which they begin to think seriously about their futures and fear that their lives can no longer continue simply as they were but also struggle to find direction while torn between what society views as a successful life and their own desires.

The crunch point comes when Hiroto (Hiroki Sato), a construction worker, and Futaba (Kaho Seto), who works in a florist’s, learn that their rundown apartment block is going to be demolished and they have six months to find somewhere else to live. While Futaba idly looks at wedding rings, she isn’t really sure how Hiroto views their relationship or if he’s even assuming they’ll finding somewhere new together. The financial strain of an unexpected move also has her wondering if she should give up her job in the florist’s, which she enjoys due to her love of flowers, and start looking for a regular company job but an attempt to talk about it with Hiroto only results in petulance born of male pride as he takes it as her complaining he doesn’t earn enough with his job as a casual labourer. 

Another source of friction is that Hiroto seems reluctant to meet Futaba’s family while refusing to introduce her to his hinting at longstanding childhood trauma stemming from a legacy of domestic abuse and a father who lost himself in drink. Even so, he’s drawn to an older man at work, Haruo, who soldiers on despite his decreasing physical capability. When he is unceremoniously fired, the Haruo takes his own life having lost his both his means of supporting himself and his sense of purpose. Haruo might remind him of father though Hiroto feels somewhat guilty that he didn’t do very much to help while he was alive and resentful towards his heartless boss and colleagues who did nothing more than make fun of him. 

This idea of people being disposable tools of corporate entities is further born out by the experiences of his hometown friend, Daigo (Masashi Yamada), who is feeling burned out by his dream job in the city largely thanks to a bullying boss and overbearing work culture. A friend who experienced something similar tells him she just quit her job and feels much better so if he doesn’t feel appreciated he should leave, but it’s not really that simple. Not only does he need a steady income to survive but there’s a degree of shame and trepidation in not following the conventional path, the same shame and trepidation that has Futaba worrying she’s being irresponsible in following her dream of opening a florist’s of her own rather than using her degree to get a better paid job and start saving for the next phase of adulthood while still uncertain if Hiroto is going to want to get married and settle down. 

Experiencing another crisis that forces him to confront his childhood trauma, Hiroto sighs that his future is shrouded in darkness and he wishes that it was all set out for him an ironic inversion of the crisis experienced by others his age that they resent being railroaded into a life of conventional success that in fact does not make them happy. In any case, he emerges with a little more clarity about the kind of future he might want no longer so frightened of commitment or suspicious of familial bonds. What the youngsters experience is a perhaps premature end to their youth symbolised by the literal tearing down of their world in the soon to be demolished apartment block that forces them out of their inertia and onto a path towards a more settled adulthood. But equally that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to abandon their dreams or live up to an ideal of conventional success if it’s not what they want but can begin to find other futures for themselves outside of the mainstream that are valid and satisfying. Tsunemachi follows them with a hazy detachment but captures something of the anxieties of contemporary youth still struggling to find accommodation with demands of living in a judgmental and uncertain society. 

Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Kon Ichikawa, 1948)

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For his second film at Shintoho, Kon Ichikawa had wanted to adapt a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that later inspired Rashomon, but was handed a standard melodrama to direct first. Ichikawa apparently did not think much of the novel the film was to be based on nor the script by Kennosuke Tateoka which he subsequently brushed up with the help of his new wife Natto Wada, and it’s not difficult to see why he might have felt he had an uphill battle. Melodrama is after all a genre that is founded on coincidence, though 365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Sambyaku-rokujugo ya) quickly strains credulity with the sheer number of unlikely events and surprise reappearances along with its rather strange take on the contemporary post-war society which is undoubtedly influenced by the demands of the Occupation censorship regime. 

Indeed, the setting itself seems reminiscent of 1930s cinema following the dashing hero Koroku, played by the equally dashing Ken Uehara, an architect who has walked away from his privileged upbringing as the son of a successful construction magnate. His problem is that he’s being aggressively courted by the haughty Ranko (Hideko Takamine), also the daughter of a successful but shady businessman, who to modern eyes is basically stalking him. Grinning with an evil glint in her eye, she tells her minion Tsugawa (Yuji Hori) that she’ll have seduced Koroku within 365 days which by melodrama standards seems to give her quite a lot of leeway.

Clueing us up to her villainy, Ranko is always seen wearing incredibly stylish Western outfits but otherwise behaves in a transgressively masculine fashion ordering her male employees about while set on the sexual conquest of Koroku who despises her for everything she is. It’s difficult not to see an inherent criticism of the new post-war woman and an anxiety regarding the power that comes with wealth being wielded by someone who is not a man. The contrast between Ranko and traditional femininity is rammed home by the fact that Teruko (Hisako Yamane), the daughter of the landlady in the house where Koroku finds new lodging after moving home to escape Ranko, is always dressed in kimono and otherwise naive and innocent. 

This positions Ranko, and her minion Tsugawa who is also in love with her, as the villains who are rebelling against the kind of earnestness expressed by Koroku and Teruko. From more humble origins, Tsugawa is deeply resentful of Kokoku’s class privilege and feels that he looks down on him which is one reason he seeks revenge by destroying his life along with his sexual jealously that Ranko pays him no attention yet is fixated on Kokoku perhaps precisely because he is entirely uninterested in her though it remains mystery why you’d want to be married to someone who strongly dislikes you. 

Yet for all his own earnestness, Koroku is almost betrayed by the capitalist father of whom he also seems to disapprove when he asks him to consent to an arranged marriage with Ranko to save his business. Meanwhile, it also transpires that Teruko’s father has been absent from her life because he two has a criminal past further tainting the legacy each of them bear. Ichikawa stages each evolution of their relationship at the same, noirish street corner that seems to exist as a kind of border between the illicit underworld that seeps out from Tsugawa’s bar into the post-war society, and the geniality represented by Teruko’s otherwise nice, middle-class home. 

It’s the this transgressive quality, of being caught between these two worlds, that starts to eat away at Koroku leaving him a broken and shabby man little better than a tramp. In a break with melodrama norms, though he is aware that he has led Teruko into Tsugawa’s trap he comes to believe that she has betrayed him while she clings fiercely to her love and in the end attempts to sacrifice it basically giving Koroku to Ranko whom she believes can better care for him in his now corrupted state. Though events become grim with a wedding that is staged like a funeral and takes place at a death bed, there is also the sense that something must come right that seems a little incongruous and perhaps a concession to the censors board as may be the coda implying that Ranko, despite having undergone a kind of redemption, will also have to pay for all her dodgy dealings. Though clearly hampered by the material, Ichikawa crafts some stunning images such as the final scene at Tsugawa’s bar along with a surprisingly energetic action sequence during which Koroku fights off burglars at Teruko’s home and wins her heart with his manliness. In any case despite the hints at redemption the implication remains that this is a world dark at its core in which not even the earnest can escape its creeping corruption. 

Faraway Family (彼方の家族, Taro Kawasaki & Eisuke Sakauchi, 2023)

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It may be a truism to say that you never really know what’s going on in other people’s lives, but even if a family looks superficially happy and gives the impression everything is going just perfectly for them that might not actually be the case. The title of Taro Kawasaki & Eisuke Sakauchi’s Faraway Family (彼方の家族, Kanata no Kazoku) has a double meaning in that in the Japanese title can be also read as “Kanata’s Family” which is the name of the hero and also a word meaning “somewhere in the distance” which is in fact how both of the boys feel their fathers to exist. 

Kanata may feel it more closely in that he lost his father in the 2011 tsunami and has never really dealt with the grief having moved to Yamagata with his mother. Kanata’s father also had quite a difficult relationship with his fisherman grandfather who was intent on railroading him to take over the boat and seemingly never had a good word for anyone yet his father lost his life after heading to the harbour to look for him explaining only that he was family. Now the only breadwinner in the family, his mother has to work to support them and is therefore often absent, leaving him money to buy dinner from a convenience store which he usually eats alone. 

Having become withdrawn and fearful of making new relationships that may end suddenly, Kanata also has the added stigma of being someone from Fukushima in the wake of the nuclear disaster. His new teacher, Yoshikazu, makes a well-meaning faux pas in telling Kanata to consider him a father figure yet as it turns out Yoshikazu is a fairly compromised one. On being introduced to his classmate Riku who is also Yoshikazu’s son he thinks he’s had his face rubbed in it with this picture of the perfect family.

But what he discovers is that Riku has many of the same problems as himself seeing as he also fears he does not really fit in his family and wonders if they’d be happier and better off if he weren’t in it. Unlike Riku, Kanata doesn’t seem to be overly burdened by parental expectation and despite the problems between his father and grandfather his early childhood seems to have been happy and filled with love and cheerfulness. His problem is more to do with what he’s lost and the resulting sense of absence it’s left behind as he finds himself eternally missing his father. 

For Riku meanwhile, it’s the connection itself which is painfully absent. The more he tries to connect with Yoshikazu the more it seems to backfire while Yoshikazu seems obsessed with the idea of his getting into Japan’s most prestigious university mostly for his own gratification as double proof of what a great teacher and father he is. Or else, to mask his own sense of inadequacy in that he would feel embarrassed professionally if his own son turned out not to be academically inclined. Riku’s family don’t celebrate birthdays and he can’t ever remember getting a present but when he decides to try and buy one for Yoshikazu it’s a reminder of a happier memory when he simply played with him as a loving father rather than a hard taskmaster driving him on to a vicarious goal as evidence of his controlling nature. 

Kanata seems to have had more than his share of tragedy in life and is painfully aware of the things just our of reach but also increasingly that not all of them are and if you’re not careful you can in fact be the one to push them away. Shooting in the icy snow of a Yamagata winter, Kawasaki and Sakauchi capture the frostiness of the boys’ emotional isolation but also the quickening warmth of their friendship as they bond over their shared loneliness in pining for an absent father. What Kanata learns is to embrace the things that seem somewhere far away for they do at least exist there, even if no longer present in a physical sense, and that the memory of them can be warm and comforting rather than painful or lonely. 

Faraway Family screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Kamikaze Guy (カミカゼ野郎　真昼の決斗, Kinji Fukasaku, 1966)

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The hero of Kinji Fukasaku’s Kamikaze Guy (カミカゼ野郎　真昼の決斗, Kamikaze Yaro: Mahiru no Ketto) is described as cheerful and with a spirited personality though unfortunately not very bright. A vehicle for rising star Chiba, the film was intended as the first in a series starring its bumbling hero, Ken Mitarai, though no other instalments were ever produced. In any case, it seems to echo the lighter side of Nikkatsu’s borderless action line along with Toho’s spy spoofs in its wrong man tale of wartime legacy and corporate duplicity. 

Often called “Mr. Toilet” because of the way his name is pronounced, Ken (Sonny Chiba) is a slightly sleazy private plane pilot who has pinups on the roof of the cockpit. According to the voiceover, there is no bottom to the depths of his crassness which is a sentiment later borne out by his attempt to pick up a woman on a ski slope by uttering the immortal lines “please don’t think I’m a creep, just hear me out.” However, events take a turn for the strange when the pair of them are witness to a murder. Ken valiantly tries to help, but is later brought in as a suspect himself, partly as the police are annoyed by his smugness. The woman, Koran (Bai Lan), turns out to be from Taiwan which is where Ken ends up flying only to discover that his cargo is the body of an old man he also encountered at the slopes. 

In keeping wth the growing internationalism of mid-1960s Japanese cinema, the film travels to Taiwan but does so in a rather complicated way as Ken is drawn into a plot concerning three men responsible for the death of a Japanese official shortly after the war killed because he wanted to return 200 billion yen’s worth of diamonds stolen from the local population. While on his travels, Ken runs into a woman who was trafficked to the island at the age of 15 and later cheated out of the money she’s saved to return. The film almost flirts with the awkward relationship between the two nations and Japan’s imperialist past but in the end does not quite engage with it save for the brief appearance of the indigenous community which seems to stand in for layers of historical and contemporary colonialism.

In any case, the murdered man was Japanese as were the two of the three currently being targeted in the assassination plot Ken is being framed for. Ken’s defining characteristic is his bumbling earnestness in which his determination to get to the bottom of the mystery only lands him in further trouble. At one point he even tries to stop the villain escaping by standing in front of the plane with his arms wide open as if it hadn’t really occurred to him that a man who has already killed a number of people is unlikely to be deterred by the thought of killing one more. Nevertheless, it provides the film with one of its more memorable and quite incredible sequences as Ken grabs on to the wing support as the plane is taking off and eventually climbs his way inside.

Chiba reportedly designed the action sequences himself and his martial arts skills are very definitely on display in the unusually well accomplished fight scenes while the film also contains a lengthy and expertly choreographed car chase albeit one occasionally interrupted by random bison and an indigenous parade. Perhaps because of this manly tone, there is an unfortunate strain of semi-ironic misogyny that runs through the film with frequent exclamations that women are too quick to jump to conclusions while Ken later seems slightly put out that Koran is “using her feminine wiles” to combat the bad guys. 

By the same token, there is something a little ironic and subversive in the film’s use of the term kamikaze, self-adopted by Ken to emblematise his devil may care nature while otherwise setting the action in a nation once colonised by Japan that holds a celebratory gala in Ken’s honour for his assistance in retrieving the gold and returning it to the Taiwanese people. Perhaps in another sense, it echoes a new willingness to make restitution with the past even if Ken bumbles his way into it and does so by accident taking on both the new and destructive capitalism of the post-war society and the toxic wartime legacy and freeing himself from them, literally a body flying in midair with no direction but his own.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)

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Whatever happens upstream affects those further down according to the headman of a small village faced with incursion from city dwellers hoping to turn their peaceful idyll into a tourist hotspot in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s eco drama Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない, Aku wa Sonzai Shinai). He reminds them that those at the top have a responsibility to those below, and it’s only because of this sense of mutual consideration that life is possible here. It’s an obvious metaphor for the contemporary society in which those with money and power have largely forgotten about those without, but then the film’s title also asks us a question. What is “evil”, does it exist or not, or is it merely in inextricable part of nature human and otherwise that balances out the good?

After a long tracking shot along the trees shot from below, Hamaguchi focuses on the figure of Takumi, a man at home in nature patiently sawing and cutting logs. He teams up with another man, Kazuo, to harvest water from a local stream we later realise is being used by an udon restaurant for a superior taste. Takumi shows him wild wasabi and explains how the locals use it, suggesting that Kazuo consider adding some to his dishes. Like him, Takumi’s daughter also seems to be at home in the forest, wandering off to walk home alone when Takumi inevitably forgets to pick her up from school.

Takumi describes himself as a “jack of all trades” or more to the point a local odd job man, but seems in many ways he’s one who keeps the balance. The problem they have now, is that a company from Tokyo has bought some land and is intent on stetting up a “glamping” resort in the village. A pair of agents turn up from the city to give a kind of question and answer session, but as one of the attendees later suggests it’s mainly to make themselves look good. Unable to answer most of the villagers’ quite reasonable questions all they can do is state they’ll take their opinions into account while offering flawed promises of financial gain and insistence that people from Tokyo will visit as if that were some kind of honour. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the villagers maybe happy as they are and aren’t interested in further material gain while understandably wary of the effects of the resort on the local area from increased traffic and pollution. The agents encounter unexpected resistance centring on the septic tank which has been penciled in for an area which would lead to the contamination of wells and groundwater while it’s also clear that the company are determined to cost cut with the agents blithely telling them that a little bit of sewage in your drinking water never harmed anyone and in any case it’s within the permitted amount. 

Others ask questions about fire risk and understaffing with the agents later asking Takumi to become the resort’s caretaker, insulting him with the implication that he’s some kind of layabout easily bought with a fat paycheque. He corrects them that he has a job and doesn’t need the money, though they persist with asking him to be a kind of advisor. Takahashi, a jaded manager, is soon captivated by the area and in particular Takumi’s manliness in his log splitting and mysterious demeanour but there’s something inevitably harsh and unforgiving about nature even if it’s man that has corrupted it. Gunshots are heard over the horizon, men hunting deer. Takumi and Hana walk past the carcass of one who bled out from a bullet wound and was presumably just left there dying for no real reason. Takumi tells the agents that their site is on a deer path, so they’d need high fences which might put the customers off but reflecting that wild deer aren’t usually “dangerous” unless they’re sick or have been shot. Takumi asks where the deer are supposed to go but gets only a shrug of the shoulders and “somewhere else” from Takahashi, but there are only so many other places, what if this is the last one? If you continue to displace things, there won’t be anywhere left for anyone.

Still, as Takumi says it’s not that villagers have already decided to resist the glamping project, only that they want their fair complaints to be addressed and are willing to engage with the process if only the agents would treat them with a little more respect. But that’s something thin on the ground from the execs in Tokyo who think they’re all a load of bumpkins easily bought off with promises of a better economic future. To Takumi it is really a matter of balance, something that should be maintained for one’s protection as much as anything else. The ominous score which frequently cuts out abruptly adds to an edge of unease and supernatural dread in the ancientness of the natural world even if as Takumi points out this isn’t their ancestral land. It’s a new village that originated in the immediate post-war era when returning soldiers were given land to farm. They are all to some degree outsiders, as perhaps are humans in this inhuman place, but also ones who’ve found a way to live in it that’s as much about respect for the land and others as it is about survival.

Evil Does Not Exist opens in UK cinemas of 5th April courtesy of Modern Films.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Tokarev (トカレフ, Junji Sakamoto, 1994)

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The discovery of a pistol concealed under a vending machine provokes a prolonged crisis of power and masculinity in Junji Sakamoto’s tense psychological drama, Tokarev (トカレフ). So named for the guns at its centre, the film roots itself in post-Bubble anxiety in the push and pull between two very different men mediated through the kidnapping of an innocent child who in the end pays a very heavy price for the anxieties and resentments that drive his parents’ generation.

That said, the kidnappers are actually very nice to little Takashi who looks strangely happy in the videotaped ransom note as the friendly voice of a youngish man encourages him to look towards the camera. They take him to an amusement park, buy him new shoes and ice cream, and even let him wave the gun around during the money drop but are it seems otherwise callously indifferent to his fate.

The boy’s father, Nishiumi (Takeshi Yamato), has just moved onto a danchi housing estate with his wife Ayako (Yumi Nishiyama). They seem very excited to start their new life, yet the danchi itself speaks of a post-war aspiration which now seems dated and largely absent in the contemporary society. Nishiumi drives the bus to the local kindergarten picking up the surprisingly large number of children from their block each morning. Meanwhile, their neighbour, Matsumura (Koichi Sato) seems irritated by their presence perhaps jealous of their happy family life as he returns home alone and angrily flips the cover over his motorbike before opening the door. 

On the morning in question, Matsumura has trouble kickstarting his bike yet Ayako seems strangely drawn to him perhaps attracted by a different and older kind of masculinity. Unlike her husband, Matsumura wears a suit to work everyday and carries a little salaryman-style purse yet he works a job that could be considered manual in a printing press where they produce newspapers. He later excitedly tells Ayako that he gets to read the news before anyone else, though his hands glide over notices of violent crimes including a shooting which may seem additionally exciting to him given that he is the man who discovered a gun under a vending machine in Christmas-set opening sequence. His cluttered home otherwise at odds with the sense of order he projects is full of old newspapers while he seems to listen to the same weather broadcast every day. 

The gun is later used by another man who fires it at Nishiumi before abducting Takashi from the kindergarten bus. It takes Nishiumi a few seconds to realise it’s Takashi who’s been taken, suddenly taking off at speed after him endangering the lives of the other kids. The sense of guilt and inadequacy slowly consumes him. “Takashi must be so disappointed,” he later laments to Ayako over the phone in his failure to live up to the socially defined codes of masculinity. His son was taken from him in front of his eyes yet he couldn’t do anything to save him. Matsumura meanwhile turns up near the crime scene having been shot in the shoulder claiming the kidnapper stole his bike. 

Perhaps it’s this uncanny proximity along with his odd expression and obvious effect on Ayako that leads Nishiumi to believe that Matsumura was somehow involved in the crime. In another instance of mid-90s technophobia, the clue is once again discovered via videotape as a guiltridden Nishiumi spots Matsumura in the crowd at his son’s sports day which is odd considering he has no children of his own and no reason to be there. The kidnapper also films the random drop on camcorder, black and white images capturing a crowded Shibuya presumably as some kind of insurance plan.

After being attacked and seriously injured, Nishiumi ends up in hospital where he ironically discovers a gun of his own stashed in the restroom by a visiting yakuza. As it had Matsumura, the gun gives him a new sense of power but also drives him into a frenzied obsession, dressing like a yakuza himself in a suit and dark glasses having alienated Ayako who eventually leaves him for Matsumura who has by this point usurped him as a man and patriarch, taking everything he ever had. No longer wishing to live, he embarks on a suicide mission to get his revenge on Matsumura. The pair of them essentially trade places, Matsumura now in check shirt and jeans while Nishiumi approaches in a suit each of them corrupted by the illusionary power of the gun. 

It later transpires that the kidnapper was also facing a crisis of masculinity in that his business was about to go bust, though Nishiumi was not a wealthy man or particularly good candidate for a ransom. The police, who are in fact completely useless, bungling their only opportunity to retrieve Takashi because they were caught off guard by the kidnapper giving him the gun, keep asking him if there’s anyone who might have held a grudge but as he points out there must have been thousands of incidents of petty annoyance that may have pushed someone over the edge dating all the way back to his childhood. The battle he finds himself in is one of vengeance to reclaim his wounded sense of masculinity while Matsumura in turn is determined to defend the new life he’s bought for himself or perhaps stolen from Nishiumi as a happy family man. Sakamoto keeps the tension high through the near wordless closing sequence in which the two men square off against each other with the intention of meeting their endgame each victims of the pervading sense of futility of the post-Bubble era.

Performing Kaoru’s Funeral (カオルの葬式, Noriko Yuasa, 2024)

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According to an undertaker in Noriko Yuasa’s darkly comic drama Performing Kaoru’s Funeral (カオルの葬式, Kaoru no Ososhiki) death is a kind of natural disaster. Despite the sometimes farcical going ons at this particular funeral, he does indeed have point in the sense of inevitable tragedy that the colours events as a dejected middle-aged man attempts to clarify his memories while overseeing the funeral of a woman he was once married to but evidently had not seen in many years.

To this extent, as the title says, Jun is “performing” Kaoru’s funeral though perhaps it’s true enough that there’s always an degree of performance in involved. As Kaoru’s young daughter, also named Kaoru, says, no one here believes in god or Buddha and this ritualised mourning process doesn’t seem to be helping her process her grief. From time to time, Yuasa cuts back to a Bruegel-esque image of a painting of hell complete with demons staring pots with people in boiling water suggesting that this too is a kind of purgatorial hellscape.

Suddenly tasked with MCing his former wife’s funeral Jun takes it with good grace if also a little confusion. Guests mainly seem to be using it as an opportunity to vent their dissatisfaction or settle old grievances. The atmosphere is strange, somehow fraught and otherworldly while the other guests seem to treat Jun as an interloper never really considering that he may be grieving too. The ritualised act of performing the funeral causes him to remember his married life along with the woman who seems to have remained an enigma to him and may have done so to everyone. 

Once an aspiring actor, Jun is now a defeated figure employed as a driver for girls working at a Soapland. Before receiving the call about the funeral he’s beaten up by a pair of gangsters after intervening when one of them tried to assault the girl he was driving. Presented in a boxy square, Jun’s flashback memories have an unreal quality as if his marriage was a kind of fairytale or a dream he was woken from too soon. Kaoru’s decision to make him the chief mourner at her funeral may in a sense have been ironic, a final acknowledgement of the role he played in her life but also grants him a valuable opportunity to set the past to rest and perhaps begin to move on. 

For some of the other guests, however, that doesn’t quite seem to be the case. Some lie about their relationship with Kaoru or else cause unexpected trouble in venting a petty grievance. A rival screenwriter turns up to get drunk and make catty remarks, while a middle-aged man also uses the occasion to lay into his daughter-in-law with a lengthy misogynistic rant about his unmanly son’s inability to manage his wife. Little Kaoru seems largely left on her own, expected to carry out these rituals while grieving for her mother with no real support. A small subplot revolves around the potential candidates for her father, but none of them, bar perhaps Indonesian restaurant owner Wayan and Jun himself who claims she cannot be his pays much attention to her.

After opening with a grim scene of Kaoru on the slab, much the action is accompained by the urgent sound of something ticking as if marking out the passage of time while lending a sense of urgency to something that is no longer really urgent. Brought together by her deaths, the guests each have their own relationship with the deceased and like Jun and little Kaoru perhaps begin to process their grief and move step forward though in other ways also the opposite in one’s near literal inability to let go. The girl Jun had been escorting found an abandoned urn on the train and took it home with a kind of perverse delight musing on the reasons someone might leave their urn behind. In a way, that’s what Jun is trying to do, let his past drift away, Kaoru somehow setting him free to start living his life again after he sees her off. As the screenwriter said every script has to have a moment of catharsis and Yuasa’s tragicomic tale does indeed have its share of melancholy poignancy but ends on a bittersweet note of thank you and farewell as Jun and little Kaoru sail off into a new future having laid the past to rest.

Performing Kaoru’s Funeral screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Yakuza Hooligans (893 愚連隊, Sadao Nakajima, 1966)

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“The world has changed,” an old school street thug is repeatedly reminded after his release from prison into a new Japan amid the tides of rising prosperity. An early effort from Sadao Nakajima, Yakuza Hooligans (893 愚連隊, 893 Gurentai) situates itself in cultural and generational abyss among those who find themselves locked out of the new society and unable to escape the immediate post-war era in part perhaps because they may not really want to.

At least it seems that way for the central trio of “hooligans” who later explain to their sometime mentor that they aren’t doing petty crime because of a lack of other options but out of devilment and a childish rebellion against a world they feel doesn’t accept them. As the film opens, they’re running a petty scam luring queuing passengers into unlicensed cabs for which they are almost arrested, stiffing the cabbie that helps them escape and then conning a takoyaki vendor out of a free lunch. Several times they’re criticised for “bullying the weak,” most obviously in their sideline seducing women and forcing them into sex work or blackmailing men who sleep with them. 

They are, however, fairly weak themselves. They like to describe themselves as a “democratic” institution in which everyone is equal and everything is shared fairly but despite supposedly having no boss they’re bossed around by almost everyone and when challenged by actual yakuza quickly back down. A generation older, failed kamikaze Sugi is released from prison after spending 15 years behind bars for killing a Chinese man as part of a petty crime gang formed in the immediate chaos after the war. Unlike his former associate Kurokawa, Sugi too claims that he doesn’t see the point in having a boss but like the younger men flounders unable to see a place for himself in the new society.

Sugi doesn’t approve of the more immoral sides of their business, particularly the rape and trafficking of women but proves just how out of touch he is when he asks the guys why they can’t just swipe some rice or clothing. In the immediate post-war period, rice and kimono were the only things which held their value but in a newly consumerist Japan they’re in plentiful supply and in fact worth relatively little. While he was inside, his former girlfriend married someone else and had a child, burning the tattoo she once had of his name on her arm clean away. She tells him that she’s sorry, but she’s happy and she doesn’t want anything to disrupt the life she has now. Falling for a middle-aged woman unhappy in her marriage and subsequently forced into sex work by the gang, he dreams of a happy family life and ultimately risks all on a confrontation with his old yakuza pal Kurokawa.

The film seems to suggest that the writing’s on the wall for men like Kurokawa too. His old school world of regimented, authoritarian gangsterdom doesn’t fit in the new Japan anymore than Sugi’s corrupted post-war idealism. A subplot revolving around Ken, a mixed-race member of the gang who hates the way they treat women because his mother was raped by a US serviceman positions the Occupation as another source of corruption leaving nothing behind itself other than moral decline and lasting trauma. But as Nobuko later says as long as you’re alive you have to go on searching for something and if one place is the same as another then you might as well move. 

The hooligans, however, seem stuck in the past. They can’t stand up for themselves or mount any real resistance to their circumstances, continuing to “bully the weak” in an attempt to mask their own weakness until racing headlong towards a confrontation with the yakuza along a bridge which quite literally hasn’t been finished yet symbolising their mutual inability to progress into the new society. Shooting with a heavy dose of irony enhanced by the whimsical jazz score, Nakajima captures a sense of contemporary Kyoto as an alienating environment caught between the ancient and the modern in which men like Sugi and the hooligans are permanently displaced yet lack the desire to escape because the newly consumerist society has little to offer them. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tsujiura Renbo (辻占恋慕, Daisuke Ono, 2021)

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Is there a point at which you should accept your artistic dreams won’t come true, cut your losses, and try to transition into a more conventional life? That’s the dilemma the heroes of Daisuke Ono’s Tsujiura Renbo (辻占恋慕) find themselves contending with while wondering if it’s better to compromise your artistic integrity and surrender to the realities of the contemporary entertainment industry or resign yourself to the idea of your art becoming merely a side gig rather than a full-time occupation. 

The dilemma is all the more acute for Shinta (Daisuke Ono) because he’s recently turned 30 and is experiencing a moment of existential crisis. The band he’s been in since college has never really got anywhere, and this particular evening his guitarist, Naoya, hasn’t even bothered to turn up. Luckily for him, a sullen young female folksinger, Emi (Saori), offers to accompany him for just the one track so that he can still try and rustle up some interest in a few CDs but it’s clear during their set that Emi has real star power effortlessly outshining him vocalising on his own song. Shinta thinks the gig is up, eventually deciding his efforts might be better placed in helping Emi receive the recognition she deserves becoming her manager after spending a weird night in her apartment which is also the office of her record label which has only one other artist and is essentially the last hurrah of an ancient retiree. 

Part of Emi’s problem is that she’s an old school folksy singer-songwriter with intense Meiko Kaji energy. Even those who support her worry her music’s too old-fashioned for a chart-obsessed industry while her tsundere personality is distinctly at odds with the traditional ways in which female artists are marketed in what is still an incredibly sexist environment. Emi had complained that the club at which she first met Shinta was populated largely by slightly creepy middle-aged men there to see the main act, underground idol star Azuki (Rena Kato) who specialises in upbeat yet bland pop and makes the majority of her money through meet and greet sessions with her top fans who are perhaps sometimes dangerously obsessed with her star persona. These kinds of fans aren’t generally interested in folk music, but even so Emi is repeatedly advised to go down the same path of selling handshakes and autographs to ticket buyers more interested in the fan experience than hearing anything she has to say.

To that extent, it’s odd that neither Shinta nor anyone considers harnessing her tsundere energy to hook a different kind of audience that might be attracted to her defiance rather than the bland cuteness represented by Azuki. Azuki meanwhile may be cynical but perhaps she’s also sensible, explaining to Shinta that after hearing he and the others earnestly discussing music she decided it was better to go in a different direction realising she’d soon age out of the underground idol demographic in which the average career might last only a few months, deciding to turn her idol persona into a marketable brand and more or less ignoring the musical part of her act altogether. Shinta begins to wonder if he’s been marketing her wrong, that he shouldn’t have tried to push Emi towards the mainstream but focus on her unique talent as an old school live act. 

Then again, each 30 years old and already exhausting their budget perhaps it’s simply too late to move beyond the live house circuit. A visit from a colleague of Emi’s at the callcentre where she works to make ends meet, herself an aspiring actress, warns him that Emi may be at her limit but unable to quit in part in fear of letting him down even as their relationship is constantly eroded by the pressures of trying to make their musical dream come true. She has real talent, but doing what it would take to become successful might kill it and her, a music critic from a big paper bluntly telling Shinta that though he can see her newer album is more “commercial” that’s only made it “bland” robbing it of everything that once made it interesting. If playing to crowds of weird old men who’ve only come because Azuki told them to is as good as it gets, maybe it’s best to accept defeat rather than watch Emi tear herself apart. As it turns out the reason Naoya never turned up to the gig was that he won big on pachinko and realised he had much more chance of making a life for himself on that than he ever had with music. Maybe it doesn’t work out in the end and all you have is “nostalgic love” for a period in time, but that might not be so bad in and of itself and the music will always be there for you whether anyone’s listening or not.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius (サトラレ, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2001)

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What would life be like if your every thought were audible for miles? Adapted from the manga by Makoto Sato, Katsuyuki Motohiro’s Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius (サトラレ, Satorare) considers how ironically isolating such a talent may turn out to be as the sufferer finds themselves withdrawing from others in embarrassment while wider society begins to resent being unable to tune out of their every inane thought or avoid being hurt by hearing something no one would ever say out loud even if they thought it privately. 

The “Committee for the Preservation of the Specially Gifted” is dedicated to protecting the so-called “Transparents” whose thoughts are audible for a 10m radius though they have no control or even idea that it is happening. They’ve started an extensive public information campaign to reduce the stigma held against them because as they claim Transparents are a valuable natural resource mainly as they all have super high IQ and are at the forefront of technological advancement. Then again this extensive campaign seems like overkill as there are only currently seven confirmed Transparents on record, but in a minor twist the campaign is necessary because it’s essential that the Transparents never find out that their thoughts are public, the first apparently having taken their own life because of the intense embarrassment of trying to live without any kind of privacy. 

This is the first ethical problem with the Transparent program which is curiously contradictory in its approach. The government could easily have said that Kenichi (Masanobu Ando), the sole survivor of a plane crash at three years old plucked from the wreckage when rescuers heard his internal monologue begging for help, had died and raised him in a lab, but instead they choose to return him to his grandmother in a designated Transparent town where they provide him with the illusion of a “normal” life while simultaneously micromanaging his existence. Their problem now is that he’s qualified as a doctor and wants to practice, but clinical medicine is obviously an occupation which requires discretion. Patients overhearing his “real” thoughts might not be helpful to their recovery, while he can hardly claim patient doctor confidentially when he’s likely to leak private medical details simply in the course of his work. Meanwhile, it tuns out that he’s already invented a revolutionary cure for athlete’s foot which is another reason why the council want to manipulate him into shifting towards research rather than clinical practice. 

That’s why they’ve dispatched military psychologist Yoko (Kyoka Suzuki) who specialises in Transparents hoping that she can find a way to bend him to their will, but gradually she begins to come to a new understanding of what his life is like even while he has no idea everyone knows what he’s thinking. For example, no one wants to date a Transparent because they don’t want the intimate details of their love lives broadcast all over town, while the perfectly ordinary thoughts which should definitely stay in his head on catching sight of crush Megumi (Rina Uchiyama) can’t help but make her feel uncomfortable. The entire town is forced to pretend that they can’t hear him think, which seems somewhat unfair, leaving him at a disadvantage and more often at not at a loss as to why someone might seem hurt or upset by him when didn’t even say anything. Meanwhile, much of Yoko’s role lies in gently manipulating him, the entire committee decamping to a summer festival in a nearby town so they can let him down gently by leading him to believe Megumi already has a steady boyfriend who is kind to children and the elderly so he’s forced to be happy for her that’s she’s found such a great guy and can give up on his romantic aspirations. 

The tone is in general admirably progressive in that it ultimately argues for a greater sense of acceptance for all minorities, but it’s difficult to square the positive message with the ways the Transparents are also being uncritically manipulated, forced to live a simulacrum of a life in an engineered small-town Japan which grateful to have them only for the massive subsidies they receive for local development in return for making sure the Transparents are kept in the dark about their condition so that the committee can exploit their genius as they plan to do with Kenichi after getting him to the research institution. Even so what they discover is that Kenichi knew what his genius was and only through letting him follow his dreams can they truly unlock it, while the committee is forced to reckon with the various ways they’ve dehumanised him, the chairman eventually referring to him as a person as opposed #7 as he’d always called him before. Somewhat contradictory and more than a little uncomfortable in its implications, Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius is presented as heartwarming drama and it does indeed warm the heart with this its messages of equality and acceptance not to mention the right to follow one’s dreams whatever they may be but never really reckons with its central thesis in which the authorities pat themselves on the back for being kind and doing the right thing while simultaneously exploiting those they claim to care for without their knowledge or consent.