Category: Japan

The Asadas! (浅田家！, Ryota Nakano, 2020)

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There’s a kind of irony at the centre of Ryota Nakano’s The Asadas! (浅田家！,Asada-ke!) in that its photographer hero makes a name for himself photographing his family yet at times neglects them or appears curiously insensitive, perhaps even selfish in the pursuit of his dreams. Inspired by the life of photographer Masashi Asada, the film is at once a celebration of the family and an advocation for the tangibility of a photograph as a repository of memory that can bring comfort even in the absence of its subject.

The first part of the film is narrated from the perspective of Masashi’s (Kazunari Ninomiya) much more conventional older brother Yukihiro (Satoshi Tsumabuki) who is generally exasperated by and a little resentful of the family’s indulgence of Masashi, a seeming free spirit who acts on impulse and gives little thought to the consequences of his actions. People frequently describe both Masashi and his father Akira (Mitsuru Hirata) as “not normal,” and there is something unconventional in their family setup with Akira a househusband in a small town in the 1980s while his wife Junko (Jun Fubuki) supports the family with her career as a nurse. It’s Akira who first gives Masashi a camera and his dream of becoming a photographer which he eventually achieves through taking amusing pictures of his family in various scenes casting them as firemen, racing drivers, or even gangsters. 

Masashi attempts to get the photos published as a book, but is quickly dismissed and told that no one wants to buy his personal family photo album. Though the publisher may have a point that in general people value photos of their own family but not those of others, the family photo itself is treated as a triviality as if it had no real worth. The same could be said of Masashi’s work, that some do not take it seriously because the subject is his own family. Yet Masashi finds new value in it in his ability to capture the essence of a moment in family life through a staged photograph such as that he designs for the family of a little boy who is dying of a brain tumour.

In the back of his book, eventually published by an eccentric woman who runs a small press and decides to take a loss because she found the photos so funny, Masashi pledges to travel anywhere to take similar photos for other families which of course means he is often separated from his own whom he then rarely photographs much to his father’s disappointment. After leaving for university, he had barely contacted them for two years while after travelling to the zone of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami he abruptly drops out of contact with his long suffering girlfriend Wakana (Haru Kuroki) after becoming immersed in the task of cleaning up the orphaned photos found among the wreckage. 

Of course, there are those who object to his work thinking that there are more important things to do while so many people are still missing, but as he discovers recovering the photos gives people a sense of comfort and healing as if they were getting back a little bit of the past that had been taken from them and most particularly if the people in the photographs are no longer here. A little girl who’s lost her father is alarmed and resentful that she can find no photos of him, realising that he was rarely in the ones they took as a family and wondering if that meant he didn’t really love them hinting at an ironic sense of parental absence in that parents often take the photos of their children so do not appear themselves but still leave their imprint in a sense of absence in which every photograph also contains the invisible presence of the photographer.

And then sometimes the reverse is true. A grandmother comes looking for pictures of her grandchildren, but ironically finds pictures only of herself. The triviality with which the family photo was regarded seems almost offensive for something that can offer such comfort and warmth in a time of profound grief as a tangible link to a past that will never return. Masashi makes his family’s unrealised dreams come true through his photos, bringing them joy if also a little anxiety in a creating a perfect record of their unconventional family while Nakano does something similar capturing of the essence of a happy family life filled with equal parts laughter and tears.

The Asadas! screens Feb. 24 as part of Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Yoko (658km、陽子の旅, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, 2023)

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Sometimes home is the hardest place to go. At least that’s how it is for the eponymous Yoko (658km、陽子の旅, 658km, Yoko no Tabi) in Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s emotional road movie in which a defeated middle-aged woman is jolted out of her self-imposed inertia on hearing of the sudden death of the father she had not seen in over 20 years. As much about a moment of mid-life reevaluation as one woman’s gradual return to the world through a process of self-acceptance, the film displays a boundless empathy not to mention a sense of warmth out of keeping with a snowbound winter in northern Japan. 

At 42, Yoko (Rinko Kikuchi) lives alone in a one room apartment that she seemingly never leaves. Ironically enough, she works as a customer service assistant operating a remote chat box in which she encourages the customer to try turning it off and on again but otherwise offers little real support. When she accidentally breaks her phone, he first thought is to try contacting the online consumer helpline only to realise the irony of her situation and think better of it. In a moment of cosmic coincidence she receives a visit from her cousin, Shigeru (Pistol Takehara), who explains that her sister Rie has been trying to call but obviously couldn’t get through because of the broken phone. Yoko’s father has passed away suddenly. Shigeru and his family are making the long drive from Tokyo to Aomori and they’ve been instructed to bring Yoko with them for the funeral the day after next. 

We can tell that Yoko is no longer used to interacting with other people. Her voice is almost inaudible and her words tumble out in a half-confused jumble. Shigeru seems sympathetic and we can interpret that she’s been this way a long time, if not all of her life. He asks her if she has clothes for the funeral and is unsurprised when she gives no answer, assuring her they can sort it out when they get there while trying to cajole her downstairs and into the car where his wife and kids are waiting. The kids are, predictably, incredibly noisy and a little insensitive while the mother tries to get some sleep and Shigeru sings a folksong that was a favourite of her father’s. His spectre (Joe Odagiri), not so much a ghost as a manifestation of her memory silently, haunts her throughout the journey reminding of her of her unresolved shame and the reasons she had avoided contact with him for the last 20 years. 

These moments are full of painful melancholy but also an underlying sense of dread as if Yoko were being stalked by her own self-loathing projected onto the figure of father. After becoming separated from Shigeru at a service station and assuming she’s been abandoned with no phone and only loose change, she decides to hitchhike to Aomori and in effect travels backward meeting echoes of herself as she goes. Her first driver is a woman of about her own age (Asuka Kurosawa) in Tokyo for a job interview who reflects her buried cynicism, remarking that she resents the people she sees at service stations who to her at least seem far too happy. On learning that Yoko has no children and never married, she chuckles that she couldn’t imagine a life without out them hinting at another life Yoko might have led and perhaps quietly yearns for in her solitude. 

Yoko answers the woman with only grunts and a shake of the head, unable to communicate and in effect too shy to ask for help from passing strangers. Through her journey she gradually recovers the ability to speak, her words eventually pouring out of her in a voluntary monologue to a stranger on whose kindness she has become dependent. But in a girl she meets at the next rest stop she sees only her teenage self, the girl answering that it’s too hard to explain when questioned about why she’s hitchhiking alone in the middle of the night. When she gives her her scarf, it’s like a gift from her younger self, a small moment of embrace and support. Something similar happens as she approaches the area affected by the 2011 tsunami and meets a kindly older couple who represent her parents as she might have wished them to be rather than as they were. While the man gives her some fatherly advice, not unkindly, the woman (Jun Fubuki) gives her a pair of sheepskin boots in another gift of warmth that further proves to her that the world is full of kindness even if not all of the people who gave her rides were nice.

There maybe something in the fact that Yoko has to travel through the disaster zone in order to emerge from it, journeying towards the site of her trauma and beginning to overcome it as she comes to accept her father’s death and that is simply too late for many things though crucially not for all. What she comes to realise is, as her first driver told her, everyone has their reasons and she wasn’t the only one carrying a heavy burden. She only made it as far as she did because of the kindness of strangers and those, like Shigeru, who are willing to wait for her to come in from the cold. Rinko Kikuchi’s extraordinarily nuanced performance along with the snowbound vistas and melancholy score conjure a poignant atmosphere but one oddly buoyed with warmth in which the world can be a kind place or least as long as we can be kind to ourselves. 

Yoko screens Feb. 22 as part of Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Kinema Junpo Announces 97th Best 10 (2023)

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Prestigious cinema magazine Kinema Junpo has released its always anticipated “Best 10” list for films released in 2023, the 97th edition. Junji Sakamoto’s Okiku and the World takes the top spot, while the director also picks up a screenplay award though Best Director went to Wim Wenders for Perfect Days.

Best 10

1. Okiku and the World (せかいのおきく, Junji Sakamoto)

A samurai’s daughter falls for a lowly manure man in a city on the brink of change in Junji Sakamoto’s touching Edo-era dramedy. Review.

2. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

Tokyo-set drama from Wim Wenders following the simple life of a middle-aged man who cleans toilets for a living.

3. Shadow of Fire (ほかげ, Shinya Tsukamoto)

Haunting drama from Shinya Tsukamoto following a young boy who finds himself surrounded by the ghosts and shadows of the post-war era.

4. September 1923 (福田村事件, Tatsuya Mori)

Drama depicting the pogroms against Koreans which took place after the 1923 Kanto earthquake directed by Tatsuya Mori who is best known for his documentary work such as A1 and A2 which focussed on the everyday lives of members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

5. The Moon (月, Yuya Ishii)

Controversial drama from Yuya Ishii loosely inspired by the 2016 Sagamihara knife attack starring Rie Miyazawa as a formerly successful writer who begins working at a care facility for the severely disabled.

6. A Spoiling Rain (花腐し, Haruhiko Arai)

Literary adaptation from Haruhiko Arai following a failed pink film director who is forced by his landlord to inform a neighbour, a similarly troubled screenwriter, that he’s being evicted only to sit and have a few drinks with him during which they share tales of romantic disappointment.

7. Monster (怪物, Hirokazu Koreeda)

Latest film from Hirokazu Koreeda starring Sakura Ando as a mother who confronts a teacher after noticing changes in her son’s behaviour.

8. Godzilla Minus One (ゴジラ-1.0, Takashi Yamazaki)

Bombastic and hugely entertaining entry into the long-running series from Takashi Yamazaki set in the immediate post-war era which has however courted controversy thanks to its nationalistic overtones.

9. The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか, Hayao Miyazaki)

A young man reeling from grief amid the firebombing of Tokyo enters a strange fantasy world after moving to the country in a surreal adventure from Hayao Miyazaki. Review.

10. Picture of Spring (春画先生, Akihiko Shiota)

Warmhearted comedy from Akihiko Shiota in which a young waitress develops a fascination with an eccentric middle-aged man who researches shunga, or pornographic artwork from the Edo era.

Best 10 International

  1. Tar
  2. Killers of the Flower Moon
  3. Fallen Leaves
  4. Eo
  5. The Fabelmans
  6. The Banshees of Inisherin
  7. Decision to Leave
  8. Empire of Light
  9. Everything Everywhere All at Once
  10. Women Talking

Best 10 Documentaries

1. Men with Movie Cameras – Shooting the Great Kanto Earthquake (キャメラを持った男たち ―関東大震災を撮る―, Minoru Inoue)

2. Ikiru: Okawa Shogakko Tsunami Saiban wo Tatakatta Hitotachi (「生きる」大川小学校 津波裁判を闘った人たち, Kazuhiro Terada)

3.* Hama no Don (ハマのドン, Fumie Matsubara)

3.* Maruki Iri, Maruki Toshi: Okinawa Sen no Zu Zen 14 Bu (丸木位里・丸木俊 沖縄戦の図 全14部, Atsunori Kawamura)

5. Maelstrom (マエルストロム, Mizuko Yamaoka)

6. Woodblock-and-Stencil Sarasa: The Textile Art of Suzuta Shigeto (木版摺更紗－鈴田滋人のわざ－)

7. With Each Passing Breath (絶唱浪曲ストーリー, Atiqa Kawakami)

8. The Day of the State Funeral (国葬の日, Arata Oshima)

9. Care wo Tsumuide (ケアを紡いで, Koichi Omiya)

10. Shunga (春の画 ＳＨＵＮＧＡ, Junko Hirata)

*Third place is a tie.

Individual Awards

Best Director: Wim Wenders (Perfect Days)

Best Screenplay: Junji Sakamoto (Okiku and the World)

Best Director (international): Todd Field (Tar)

Best Actress: Shuri (Shadow of Fire)

Best Actor: Koji Yakusho (Perfect Days, Familia, Father of the Milky Way Railroad)

Best Supporting Actress: Fumi Nikaido (The Moon)

Best Supporting Actor: Hayato Isomura (The Moon, (Ab)Normal Desire, The Dry Spell, Hard Days, Ripples, Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Destiny, Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Decisive Battle)

Best Newcomer (actress): Aina The End (Kyrie)

Best Newcomer (actor): Oga Tsukao (Shadow of Fire)

Readers’ Choice Best Director: Toichiro Ruto (G-Men)

Readers’ Choice Best Director (international): Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon)

Readers’ Choice Award: Saburo Kawamoto (Eiga wo Mireba Wakaru Koto)

Source: Kinema Junpo official website.

Tokyo Sonata (トウキョウソナタ, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)

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Orphaned salarymen are the soulless ghosts haunting an increasingly empty city in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s eerie tale of urban anxiety Tokyo Sonata (トウキョウソナタ). Undermining the certainty of the traditional family, Kurosawa paints it as a simulacrum dependent on each member playing their respective role blindly or otherwise, though in this case the integrity of the family unit is shaken by an economic intervention in which the accepted rules of the society have been upended with a vindictiveness that seems inexplicably unfair. 

This is the bargain of the salaryman dream. A man like Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) now aged 46 came of age at the tail end of an era of economic prosperity. He was brought up in an atmosphere of jobs for life in which the corporate family was almost more “real” than the emotional which is one reason why it comes as such a shock when his boss effectively divorces him. He’s found someone new, planning to outsource Sasaki’s entire department to China while less than kindly explaining that as he has no other skills he of no more use to the company. Sasaki immediately clears his desk in anger, walking home early with a pair of carrier bags then, after meeting his son in the street, attempting to climb in through an upstairs window to avoid alerting his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), to the fact he’s home early.

Sasaki is unable to tell her that he’s lost his job in part because of the acute embarrassment it would cause him. Somewhat dazed and confused, he’s become one of many disenfranchised salarymen who survived the 15 years of economic stagnation only to have the rug pulled out from under them. Being a salaryman was in a way his whole identity and without it he doesn’t know who he is, which is one reason he puts on a suit every day and goes to sit in the park surrounded by other similarly dressed men with briefcases who now seem to haunt the city like crows ominously dotting the horizon. In a repeated motif, Kurosawa shows us people trapped in kafkaesque queuing situations shuffling around buildings while prevented from moving forward but forced to keep pace with the increasingly glacial environment. At the moment an old school friend he runs into, Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda), seems to give up he is swept into a great parade of the suited and hopeless while Sasaki hovers on its edges. 

It’s this threat to Sasaki’s masculine pride which is largely founded on his economic ability to support a family that kickstarts a chain reaction in his home even he becoming increasingly violent and authoritarian in an effort to overcome the sense of humiliation and powerlessness he feels after being made “redundant”. His younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), tells him he wants to learn the piano but Sasaki irritably shuts him down either because he’s now worried about the money or simply sees it as a frivolous waste of time. Later when Megumi asks him why he won’t he change his mind he insists that he has to stick to his original decision otherwise it would undermine his patriarchal authority as a father. 

But this “authority” was perhaps already largely illusionary given that an intense work schedule meant he was rarely home to do much parenting. After finding out Kenji spent his lunch money on piano lessons behind his back he ironically shouts at him for lying and keeping secrets even though this is obviously what he himself has been doing in keeping up the illusion of his identity as a conventional salaryman. His older son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), was keeping secrets too his being his desire to join the US military believing that Japan no longer has a future for him in an atmosphere of stagnation not only economic but emotional and spiritual. Takashi tells his mother she should leave Sasaki, but to her question of who would play the role of mother replies that it makes no difference simultaneously encouraging her to reclaim an individual identity and perhaps robbing her of one just as Sasaki lost his in being shorn of his salaryman credentials. 

Lying on the sofa one evening she raises her arms and poignantly asks someone to lift her up but Sasaki has already gone to bed without even looking at her. Her life as a housewife is thankless and emotionally unfulfilling. Donuts she spent ages making go uneaten while her husband and sons brood on their own problems alone. At a car dealership, the salesman shows her a people carrier explaining that it’s perfect for family camping trips while she gravitates towards a red convertible, mesmerised by the way the roof can just disappear as if it were literally freeing her of her stultifying existence. On showing Takashi the shiny new driving license she’s just got as a symbol of her desire for independence, he scoffs that she’ll never use it but she counters him that it’s for “ID” which it is in more ways than one.

The family is imploded, the illusions of a conventional middle-class life upturned as Sasaki and Megumi each ask themselves if there’s a way to start again and escape their sense of middle-aged futility and disappointment. Cracking under the weight of conventionality, the foundations begin to fracture but the family nevertheless finds itself returning if with greater degrees of clarity and perhaps with less inclination to play the play the roles assigned to them rather than those they might wish to play as embodied by Kenji’s moving performance at the piano capturing all of the chaos and confusion of the world around him but finding in it also harmony and a gentle breeze that feels almost as if the city itself were breathing once again.

Tokyo Sonata screens Feb. 18 as part of Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

International trailer (English subtitles)

Hoyaman (さよなら ほやマン, Teruaki Shoji, 2023)

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According to Hoyaman, a kind of superhero in the guise of a mutated sea squirt, the sea squirts’ lifecycle involves swimming around like tadpoles after hatching from an egg and then finding a nice rock to sit on at which point they lose their brains. This is what the hero of Teruaki Shoji’s quirky island comedy Hoyaman (さよなら ほやマン, Sayonara Hoyaman) is becoming afraid of, worried he’s about to lose his brain forever stuck in the home he inherited from his parents but also afraid to leave its safety to venture forth and explore some other rocks before it’s too late.

He’s jolted out of his sense of inertia by a mysterious woman, Mahiru (Kumi Kureshiro), who suddenly arrives and tries to buy his house off him though of course Akira (Afro) is not willing to sell despite being so heavily in debt he’s about to lose his fishing boat (and therefore his means of supporting himself) and he and his brother Shigeru (Kodai Kurosaki) are subsisting on a single pot of instant ramen a day. The house itself is like a kind of rock pool where the brothers are trapped in a protracted adolescence having lost their parents in the 2011 tsunami, thereafter floundering around unable to move on with their lives. As their bodies were never found, Akira hasn’t even got round to registering his parents’ deaths or dealt with any of the practical matters surrounding their living arrangements but now realises that he’ll have to something to secure a financial future for himself and Shigeru who seems to have some kind of learning difficulties and is unable to work.

That’s one reason he decides to accept the deposit from Miharu, a manga artist fleeing her life in Tokyo feeling all washed up as she too drifts onto the shore looking for a good rock to sit on. They are all looking for a kind of escape but unsure where to to find it, Akira wondering if it’s time to leave the island just as Miharu arrives. The old woman next door, Haruko (Yoneko Matsukane), who acts like a kind of surrogate mother figure to the boys, confesses that she would have liked to try living off the island and was resentful when their father mentioned the possibility of leaving. She encourages Akira to swim out into deeper waters but he continues to struggle with himself consumed by the trauma of the earthquake, his guilt, and complicated feelings about the responsibility of looking after Shigeru who likely would not be able to adjust to life outside of the island or remain behind on his own.

Madcap schemes ensue including an unlikely bid to become YouTube stars by resurrecting a mascot character created by their father to promote the island, Hoyaman. Miharu tries to explain to them that like everything else in the village they’re ten years behind the times, but the boys are naively excited about their prospects while simultaneously trying to recapture the past in the same way Miharu may be in admitting that she based her manga on her own younger brothers of whom Akira and Shigeru remind her. Well meaning gestures eventually backfire, but also lead to a kind clarity that allows each of them to realise who they are and where they want to be or at least what kind of rock they want to be sitting on when it’s time to jettison their brains. 

Even so, it’s not all rainbows on the island as Akira discovers when his bid for YouTube success turns sour and the villagers turn against him for embarrassing them on national scale while Miharu also has her fair share of haters along with a troubled past she’s struggling to overcome. What they rediscover is a sense of community and solidarity among those who wash up on the island whether by virtue of birth or some other happy accident. Meeting his trauma head-on, Akira is able to find an accommodation with his guilt and loss but also a way forward that might not necessarily be the one most would expect as does Miharu though buoyed by her serendipitous connection with the zany brothers, nice old lady, and the gentle rhythms of an island life.

Hoyaman screens Feb. 18 as part of Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Japan Society NY & ACA Cinema Project Present Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

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Japan Society New York and ACA Cinema Project will present Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux from February 15 to 24, a series focussing on the changing nature of the family in Japanese society.

February 15, 7pm: Still Walking

Family divisions, secrets, and prejudices are brought to the surface as a family gathers for the memorial service for their eldest son who was killed trying to save a child from drowning in Koreeda’s classic family drama. Review.

February 16, 7pm: Tsugaru Lacquer Girl

A young woman’s desire to take over her family’s traditional lacquerware business is frustrated by outdated social codes and a narrow definition of the traditional all while the art of lacquerware itself faces extinction in Keiko Tsuruoka’s gentle drama. Review

February 18, 4pm: Hoyaman

Island-set comedy featuring ramen, superheroes and tsunamis in which two brothers encounter a mysterious artist.

February 18, 7pm: Tokyo Sonata

Kiyoshi Kuroawa’s tale of urban hopelessness in which a family faces separate and parallel extential crises as a stereotypical salaryman is unceremoniously made redundant.

February 22, 7pm: Yoko (Screening at IFC Center)

Moving roadtrip drama from Kazuyoshi Kumakiri starring Rinko Kikuchi as an isolated middle-aged woman who begins to rediscover herself while hitchhiking to her estranged father’s funeral.

February 23, 7pm: Her Love Boils Bathwater

Introduced by filmmaker Ryota Nakano and followed by a Q&A and reception

Poignant maternal drama in which a mother receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and secretly begins trying to repair her family and prepare it for a world without her all while saving the family bathhouse. Review.

February 24, 4pm: A Long Goodbye

Touching drama in which a family attempt to cope with their father’s Alzheimer’s as he, a former headmaster, slowly loses the ability to read. Review.

February 24, 7pm: The Asadas

Introduced by filmmaker Ryota Nakano and followed by a Talk Session. 

Drama inspired by the life of photographer Masashi Asada who made a name for himself taking amusing photos of his family before getting involved with the relief effort after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami helping other families recover the photographs and precious memories they had lost.

Classics

February 17, 4pm: Muddy River

2K restoration

Quietly devastating coming-of-age tale set in the early 1950s in which a little boy befriends a pair of children living on a ramshackle barge. Review.

February 17, 7pm: Tokyo Twilight

35mm Presentation.

Ozu’s darkest drama follows the fortunes of a pair of sisters abandoned by their mother, one of whom contends with an abusive marriage while the other encounters an unexpected pregnancy. Review.

Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux runs Feb. 15 to 24 at Japan Society New York (with the exception of Yoko which screens at ICF Center). Full details for all the films along with ticketing links are available via the official website and you can also keep up with all the latest details by following the festival’s official Facebook page and X (formerly Twitter) account.

The Last Dance (大病人, Juzo Itami, 1993)

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A self-involved film director gets a lesson in what it is to live when he discovers that he has terminal cancer in a lighthearted melodrama from Juzo Itami, The Last Dance (大病人, Daibyonin). Itami was apparently inspired by his own stay in hospital after being attacked by yakuza offended by his previous film Minbo and like his debut The Funeral the film has a few questions to ask about the nature of death along with the functioning of the medical system. 

That’s partly because film director Buhei Mukai (Rentaro Mikuni) is not initially told of his diagnosis. His well-meaning doctor, Ogata (Masahiko Tsugawa) a old university friend of his wife, elects to tell him only that he has a stomach ulcer in keeping with an old-fashioned policy that worries patients may lose hope and give up too easily on discovering the extent of their illness. Buhei meanwhile continues to obsess about his condition, convinced it must be cancer and that his wife, Mariko (Nobuko Miyamoto), and the medical staff are lying to him, at one point pretending to be his own uncle in order to tease the truth out of Ogata over the phone and attempting suicide when he accidentally implies that Buhei may not have long left. 

His distress is compounded by the irony that in the film he was working on when he became ill he was starring as a composer with advanced cancer whose wife has also been diagnosed with a more aggressive form of the disease. Whatever we might think about Buhei, it’s fair to say that the film’s sexual politics have not aged well. Not only was he having an affair with the actress playing his wife, but continues to flirt inappropriately with the medical staff and at one point even tries to force himself on his wife who was in the process of leaving him when he was first diagnosed. His lechery seems primed to appeal to men of a similar age while hinting at his virility and desire for life, but is nevertheless crass and often uncomfortable. Nevertheless, as Mariko says he’s like a child inside cheekily joking with the doctors about his drinking and smoking habits while running away from anything unpleasant and trying to get out of having to undergo treatment. 

Itami had often remarked on the weaknesses of Japanese men who “can’t stand loneliness, can’t make decisions alone, can’t face anyone who disagrees with them and can’t accept responsibility for their mistakes,” Buhei seemingly possessing all four. In part regretting her decision to keep the seriousness of his illness from him, Mariko reflects that in the end all they did was leave Buhei alone in his fear and anxiety as the only one who didn’t know the truth, engineering a kind of conspiracy as they cheerfully told him to “soldier on” knowing there was no hope. Yet during his time in the hospital, Buhei is also confronted by the ethical dilemmas of medical treatment on witnessing doctors desperately try to resuscitate a man who was miserable, in pain, bedridden, and unable to communicate, just waiting for the end. As even his grieving wife calls out to the doctors to let him go, Buhei wonders if it’s right to preserve life at all costs especially when the patient has not been given a choice in his treatment and may not have been informed that they have no possibility of recovery. 

Coming to a new realisation he challenges Ogata’s conviction that death is his enemy, telling him that he should see it less as defeat than acceptance reflecting on the irony that he never felt so alive as when dying. Whimsical if occasionally maudlin, Itami throws in a surrealist dream sequence in which Buhei approaches the other side and comes to realise that death might not be so frightening after all even as he watches himself from above in an out of body experience witnessing the accidental violence inflicted on his body by those trying to save it. In some senses, Buhei is fairly unredeemed, winking at his indifferent mistress even on his death bed, but is in others humbled as he looks back on his life with its regrets and unfulfilled promises, repairing his relationship with his long suffering wife while admitting that under different circumstances he and Ogata might have become good friends. Offering a sometimes critical view of medical practice and ethics, Itami’s poetic meditation on what it is to die loses none of his ironic humour even in its unfolding tragedy. 

The Wolves (狼, Kaneto Shindo, 1955)

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Post-war desperation drives a collection of otherwise honest men and women towards a criminal act that for all its politeness they are ill-equipped to live with in Kaneto Shindo’s biting social drama The Wolves (狼, Okami). “Wolves” is what the criminals are branded, but the title hints more at the wolfish society which threatens to swallow them whole. After all, it’s eat or be eaten in this dog eat dog world, at least according to a cynical insurance salesman hellbent on exploiting those without means. 

Each of the five “criminals” is an employee at Toyo Insurance where they’re immediately pitted against each other, reminded that in order to qualify for a full-time position they need to meet their quotas for six months. The orientation meeting is cultilke in its intensity, the boss insisting that only in insurance can you become a self-made man while recounting his own epiphany as to the worthiness of his profession. They are told that the only two things they need are “faith and honesty”, and then “faith and pursuasion”, while encouraged to think of their work as an act of “worship”, “for the salvation of everyone”. 

Yet they’re also told to exploit their friends and family by pressuring them into taking out life insurance policies in order to help them meet their quotas. As one man points out, friends and relatives of the poor are likely to be poor themselves, but these are exactly the kind of people they’re expected to target. They’re told there’s no point going after the weathly because they’re already insured, but there’s something doubly insidious in trying to coax desperate people who can’t quite afford to feed themselves into paying out money they don’t have on the promise of protecting their families from ruin. One man even asks if the policy covers suicide and is told it does if you pay in for a year, sighing that he doesn’t want to wait that long.

“Suicide or robbery, choose one,” one of the salespeople reflects after failing to make their quota once again. They each have reasons to be desperate, all of them already excluded from the mainstream society and uncertain how they will find work if the job falls through. Akiko (Nobuko Otowa) is a war widow with a young son who is being bullied at school because of his cleft palate for which he needs an expensive operation. She’s already tried working as a bar hostess but is quiet by nature and found little success with it. Fujibayashi (Sanae Takasugi) is widowed too with two children and five months behind rent for a dingy flat in a bomb damaged slum where the landlord is about to turn off her electric. Harajima (Jun Hamamura) used to work in a bank but was fired for joining a union and is trapped in a toxic marriage to woman looking for material comfort he can’t offer. Mikawa (Taiji Tonoyama) too is resented by his wife, a former dancer, having lost his factory job to a workplace injury while the ageing Yoshikawa (Ichiro Sugai) was once a famous screenwriter but as he explains people in the film industry turn cold when you’re not hot stuff any more. 

Their unlikely descent into crime has its own kind of inevitability in the crushing impossibility of their lives. They may rationalise that what they’re doing is no different from the insurance company that exploits the vulnerable for its own gain, thinking that if they can just get a little ahead they’d be alright while feeling as if robbery and suicide are the only choices left to them and at the end of the day they want to survive. Perhaps you could call them “wolves” for that, but they’re the kind of wolves that give the guards from the cash van they robbed their train fare home after bowing profusely in apology. The real wolves are those like Toyo who think nothing of devouring the weakness of others, promising the poor the future they can’t afford while draining what little they have left out of them. As the film opens, Akiko looks down at a bug writhing in the dirt attacked by ants from all sides and perhaps recognises herself in that image as the sun beats down oppressively on both of them. Breaking into expressionistic storms and unsubtly driving past a US airbase to make clear the source of the decline, Shindo paints a bleak picture of the post-war world as a land of venal wolves which makes criminals of us all. 

Undercurrent (アンダーカレント, Rikiya Imaizumi, 2023)

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Part way through Rikiya Imaizumi’s adaptation of the Testuyua Toyoda manga Undercurrent (アンダーカレント) a detective asks his client what she thinks it means to “understand” someone. Of course, she doesn’t really have an answer, and the film seems to suggest there isn’t one because we are forever strangers to ourselves let alone anyone else. We do things without knowing why or that somehow surprise us, while the actions of others can an also be be worryingly opaque. But then perhaps you don’t really need to “know” someone in order to “understand” them and as someone else later says perhaps it’s true enough that most people don’t really want the truth but a comforting illusion. 

But then Kanae’s (Yoko Maki) illusions aren’t exactly comforting. Her husband of four years Satoru (Eita Nagayama) suddenly disappeared during a work trip a year previously and has not been heard from since. She turns the television off when the news announces details of a decomposing body discovered near a set of electrical pylons, but on another level she’s sure that Satoru is alive and chose to leave her for reasons she can’t understand. Kanae tells a friend that what pains her most is thinking that in the end she wasn’t a person Satoru felt he could share his worries with so she was powerless to help him. Then again, there’s something in Kanae that is equally closed off, a little distant and otherworldly as if she were also putting up a front to keep her true self submerged.

The detective (Lily Franky), whose name is “Yamasaki” yet allows people call him “Yamazaki” because it’s easier for them, says of Satoru that his “cheerful,” ever smiling nature may also have been a kind of masking designed to dissuade people from looking any deeper. Someone else admits that they lied mostly to fit in, be what others wanted them to be, only to be caught out by the gulf between their genuine feelings and and the ever expanding web of their lies. Caught in a kind of suspended animation uncertain if Satoru will ever return and if and how she should continue with her life, Kanae ends up taking in a new assistant at her family bathhouse. Hori (Arata Iura) is the polar opposite of the way her husband is described, silent, soulful and somehow sad. We might be suspicious of him, his arrival seems too coincidental and the way he looks at some children running past in the town perhaps worrying. Yet how can we judge based only on his silence knowing nothing else of his history? Nevertheless, he may understand Kanae much better than anyone would suspect and may be the comforting presence from her recurring nightmares.

In her dreams, she’s plunged into water with a pair of hands around her neck. Unknowingly, Hori asks her if she’s ever really wanted to die and she can’t answer him even if it seems to us that the dreams reflect her desire for death, to be submerged in a sea of forgetfulness. Yet we later learn they come to have another meaning reflecting her long buried trauma and the reason for her own listlessness. These are the undercurrents that run silently through her, waves of guilt and grief that obscure all else. Disappearances have happened around her all life and seem only to increase, another bath house owner seemingly disappearing after a fire having promised to sell her his boiler. Yet through her experiences, she comes to fear them less reflecting that anyone could leave at any moment and that’s alright, as Hori had said nothing’s really forever. 

Even so, she regrets that there couldn’t have been more emotional honesty from the beginning then perhaps no one would need to disappear without a word. Confessions are made and the air is cleared. Someone had said that no one wanted the truth, but it seems Kanae has chosen it as perhaps symbolised in her decision to call Yamasaki by his actual name rather than the one he allows people to use because it’s too much trouble to correct them. Aside from his multiple names, Yamasaki is a strange man who holds meetings in karaoke boxes and theme parks though perhaps because he simply thinks Kanae could use a little cheering up. In more ways than one, it’s the ones left behind who are left in the dark, but they may be able to find their way out of it with a little more light and reflection.

Screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Home Sweet Home (我が家は樂し, Noboru Nakamura, 1951)

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There must have been a lot of families like the Uemuras in the Japan of 1951. As film’s title implies, their home is a happy one and though they may not have much they make the most what they have and are cheerful and loving towards each other. Still, the world stores up trouble for them perhaps because they are so very defiant of their circumstances. In many ways a classic shomingeki, Home Sweet Home (我が家は樂し, Waga Ya wa Tanoshi) was the film that put Noboru Nakamura on the map and finds Japan at a kind of crossroads edging past post-war privation towards a broadly consumerist society.

We can get a sense of that in the constant needs of four children in the Uemura family, patriarch Kosaku (Chishu Ryu) picking up his young son Kazuo (Katsumasa Okamoto) after baseball on his way home and noticing that his mitt is almost worn through only to get there and spot his daughter’s boots are getting pretty thin too. It’s clear they struggle for money despite Kosaku’s steady job for which he is about to receive a 25-year good service commendation as wife Namiko (Isuzu Yamada) supplements the family income by taking in sewing at home while we later find out that she’s already sold most of her kimono to help make ends meet and is considering selling her wedding ring to pay for middle daughter Nobuko’s (Keiko Kishi) school trip to Kyoto.

But her hard-nosed sister Kayo (Mutsuko Sakura) tells her that secondhand kimono have lost their value with so many new ones now available. In the immediate post-war era, rice and kimono were the only things that had held their value and so selling one could bring in a lot of money quickly. Conversely, after receiving a sizeable bonus along with his commendation, Kosaku and Namiko visit a department store which has a large range of affordable clothing for sale though the kimono fabric Kosaku picks out for Namiko is still fairly expensive so she instinctively puts it back insisting that they buy the presents they promised the children first. 

That was probably a good move, seeing as the rest of the money is stolen from them on their way home to a congratulations party the children are busy setting up. Kosaku asks why someone would rob people like them, honest, hardworking types who don’t have much to begin with but as Namiko sensibly points out pickpockets don’t really think like that and how would they know anyway. The subtext is that times are still hard for a lot of people even if there are now more exciting, definitely non-essential things appearing on shelves for people with disposable income to buy and a new kimono, though out of fashion, is no longer so out of reach for the ordinary housewife. 

The loss of the money might seem as if it should place a wedge between husband and wife, but bar a moment of disappointment cured by the realisation that oldest daughter Tomoko (Hideko Takamine) has been considerate enough to place hot water bottles in their futons, they resolve to muddle through together and in any case they’re no worse off than they were before. Tomoko herself is conflicted, feeling as if as a young woman in her early 20s she should give up her dreams of becoming a painter and get a job to support the family but Namiko always tells her not to. She encourages each of her children to follow their dreams, perhaps a sign of a new post-war liberation, telling her sister that she’d happily sell all her kimono so that Tomoko could go on painting. Later we discover that she also dreamed of becoming an artist and that though Kosaku had encouraged her to keep it up, a housewife’s day is never done and there was simply no time left for herself. Painting is just another thing she sacrificed for her family and Namiko seems to be determined that Tomoko won’t have to do the same not that she particularly regrets her decision.

Tomoko only really comes to understand her mother’s sacrifices on noticing that the cupboards really are bare, she’s sold everything that could be sold and pawned her ring though the colleague that owned the house they were renting has encountered some financial difficulties of his own and going to to sell to the grumpy old man who bought the house across the way. The Uemuras are such obviously good people that it feels so unfair that so much bad luck has come their way all at once though it is their goodness that eventually saves them when the old man is touched by seeing youngest daughter Mitsuko (Kazuko Fukui) playing with his dog. He later comes to admire Tomoko’s painting of his garden though he’d put a fence up to stop her peering in. The scars of the post-war era are visible in the damage to Uemura’s front wall which would have blocked the way but now perhaps enables them to become good neighbours after all. Though the film may lack some of the visual flair present in Nakamura’s later work, it more than makes up for it with genuine sentiment and the implication that in the end the world is basically good and rewards those who are the same even if it sometimes tests their resilience.